Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

What's Adobe Lightroom? Well it's Adobe's version of Aperature... which is like iPhoto and Photoshop all rolled into one clean program.

In short, it's a gorgeous application that lets you organize and edit your photos, create awesome slideshows, prints, or webpages to show off your photos. This video will show you what Lightroom is and the quality of photos you can make and edit.

Click here for some cool video tips on how to get started and use some of the more advanced features.

Evernote

This is a new way of keeping everything you need t remember organized and easily searchable. I won't do Evernote justice, so watch the short video to learn about what it really does.

VMware Fusion

If you own an Intel powered Mac you probably know about Boot camp and Parallels, but VMware Fusion is in a whole new league of awesomeness! This is what you see when you first open Fusion.

Oh, you see a few distros of Linux up there you say? Yeah, Fusion can handle any OS you throw at it... 32 or 64 bit! That includes any distribution of Linux, Windows 3.1 to Vista plus server editions, Solaris, Novell NetWare, Free BSD, and pretty much any other OS that can run on an Intel processor.

With VMware Fusion you can enable Unity, which lets you run Windows apps right on your Mac desktop right along side your Mac apps. You can then minimize them to the dock, use them with Spaces and Exposé. You can actually save programs to your dock just like normal Mac apps and when yo want to open them you just click on it like a regular application and it opens on your desktop just like normal. Above you can see my desktop running the Windows version of Firefox and Minesweeper right alongside with Apple Mail, Adium, and iTunes.

You should really check it out, there's a free demo on the VMware site, and I found my copy for $39 on Amazon.

Hulu

Don't you wish YouTube was higher quality? Not just the content it provides, but the whole media service itself as well? Take a gander at Hulu, a new video service that has high quality tv shows and some HD quality movies. The list of shows they offer is still growing but they offer whole seasons of a good handful of shows you most likely watch, oh yeah... it's all free too.

Some tv shows come with commercials, but they are 30 seconds or less, so you're back to your show in no time. Plus the ads that I have seen are usually not too bad, I've seen only Chevrolet and Saturn commercials, both cleaver ads that show how economically sound their hybrids are. definitely no "as seen on tv" ads here!

With a nice clean slick player, Hulu really has done it right. I have moused over the video so the controls are shown in the screen shot above, but normally you would just see the video playing in a nice black gradient surrounding, or you can view in fullscreen with nothing but your video on the screen. It's pretty awesome, go check it out for yourself!

Twitter

What are you doing? That's the question. The whole idea behind Twitter is that you can say what your doing and if someone wants to know, they can take a look. Kind of like away messages in AIM, except for your whole life. The guys over at Commoncraft have put together a really good video explaining "Twitter in Plain English."

If you're on a Mac check out either the full featured awesome Twitterific ($15), or the barebones, stripped down, widget app, Twitgit (free!) and you can update your Twitter feed in seconds just as if you were updating your aim status, it's that easy.

Sofa Control

Sofa Control ($14.90) (or use the key in iSerial) lets you control everything on your mac with your Apple remote. Keynote, Preview, iPhoto, VLC, Quicktime, DVD Player, Finder, Mail, you can even control the mouse with your remote! Plus over 60 more applications. When you start it up for the first time Sofa Control shows you how you can use it with a very interactive presentation using your remote right off the bat.

This app is really awesome and the only thing I wish they would add is support for more applications.

Above is what this what you see overlaying the desktop when you hold the menu button for 2 seconds. You get a global menu that gives you access to a whole bunch of the Finder native options. (i.e. dashboard, exposé, front row, screensaver, sleep timer, shut down, restart, also you can open any application or file).

Remote Pairing

I got my new MacBook Pro a few days ago! It's blazing fast like you wouldn't believe. So I'm getting ready to go to bed and I go to turn the volume up on my computer with the remote and i heard my roommate's computer respond as well... not cool.

So I knew that I could pair my computer to my remote so I tried doing what Apple says, hold the menu button and next/fast forward for 5 seconds in front of your IR sensor... nothing. I try it again... nothing. finally I found out that if you hit menu and select for 5 seconds it works great! Apparently, Apple doesn't know all there is about their own products though, a little weird.

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