Review: 2 Great Mac Utilities; 1 Free, 1 Almost Free.

There are some Mac utilities that’ll be around forever because they fill a need that no other utility really can. For example, Drag Thing traces roots back to Mac OS 9 and is the premier Mac OS X launcher.

I can’t image working on a Mac every day and not using Drag Thing. I’m not reviewing Drag Thing, though—two others are important solutions for the few chinks in my Mac’s offense.

Friday I came across a brand new utility for Mac OS X, specifically for the iSight camera and iChat AV. I was amazed.

Once you see it, if you’re using iSight and iChat, you’ll have to have this because it does a number of tricks that Mac OS X doesn’t do, iChat doesn’t do, and this fits in so well you won’t worry about looking at other solutions.

What? You didn’t know you even had a problem with iSight or iChat?

Don’t get me wrong, there’s not much to complain about with the iSight camera and how it works with iChat. I’ve been an AIM (AL Instant Messenger) user from the beginning and this was exactly what the doctor ordered to make AIM complete, and an excellent web camera for the Mac; complete with excellent microphone for sound input.

As much as I like iChat and the iSight camera, there was one set of functions that OS X doesn’t perform well, and you couldn’t get much out of with iChat.

Video controls.

iChat doesn’t do much for Mac video controls. That’s a problem because the iSight camera isn’t all that great in low light situations; like my Mac office. There’s one light here, one small window behind the desk, and just not much light.

Yes, iSight worked OK and there’s few complaints about the ease of use of iChat, but I always thought iSight could use something to help out in low light (I’m selfish like that).

Along comes Ecamm Network and a great add on utility called iGlasses. It’s for your iSight camera and fits in iChat AV. Literally. This is the best $8.00 add on I’ve ever come across for the Mac.

What’s iGlasses do for iChat and the iSight camera?

Well, if you’re using iSight and you’d like the camera image to be a bit brighter, then iGlasses is what iSight needs to look better. First, iGlasses gives you direct control over the iSight camera for settings you wished you had, may not have known about, but will want once you see the effects.

With iGlasses installed, you can leave your iSight camera as it is. Mine has always been a bit dark because light was minimum in my office.

iGlasses also gives you settings for Extra Bright (more video gain), Super Bright (for very low light situations), Enhanced (more saturated colors), Black and White (duh), Sepia (nice artsy effect), Crazy Colors (probably just because they could).

That’s not all. There’s also a Night Vision effect. This doesn’t really work in a totally dark room, but in low light situations makes the image turn green like with the night vision goggles used by troops in Irag.

Get this. There’s also a Macro Focus function on iGlasses which lets your iSight camera focus so well you can see the hair in your nose and the true blacks of your nose blackheads when viewing close up.

Is that cool, or what?

Amazingly, there’s more. You can manually change the iSight’s brightness, Exposure, Focus, Saturation, Temperature, Hue, Shutter, White Balance and more. The demo version is fully operational so you won’t have to shell out any money to try out iGlasses. Click Here to see the details and download the demo version. You’ll be impressed.

Now, just to balance things we’ll swing from the nearly free iGlasses utility to a must-have utility that is free. If you’re a Mac designer, page layout artists, web page developer, do newsletters or anything with text layout, you know what Lorem Ipsum is.

It’s “greeking” for the publishing crowd.

On the Mac, the best greeking tool is Mac Lorem. Lorem Ipsum is the “greek” or “latin” text used to generate fake text in a page layout. It goes where the text for an article or newsletter or column of copy will eventually go.

What’s the ouput from Mac Lorem look like?

Pretty slick, huh? Open Mac Lorem, click on the Generate button, and you’ll get a whole page of latin text just ready to drop into your body copy or page layout. What if Greek or Latin isn’t what you need? How about this?

MacLorm works on both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. It’s been a favorite of mine for many years going back to PageMaker days, now Adobe’s InDesign, and of course, on web page development, too. Best of all, Mac Lorem is free. Click Here for the details and the download link.