A significant attraction for me in blogging is the ‘community’ that it creates. I am never going to be ‘up there’ with the young bloggers – I am not going to be that attractive to your average teenage blog reader, I actually don’t want to be as I find a lot of the stuff that interests them remarkably shallow and insipid, and I am perfectly happy with the slightly more mature (mentally and/or physically) reader that I attract.

Doesn’t everybody need two movie viewers? A full-blown movie manager is exactly what the doctor ordered for organizing your precious home movies, clips downloaded from the web, and so on. But then, there are times when you just want to have a quick look at a movie — without having to import it into your movie manager’s database first and worrying about how to get rid of it afterwards.

Guess what? You can have both in one application.

Another one from the archives this week. Partly because I was so busy last week I hardly left my desk never mind the apartment, but also because it was so windy, hot, humid and dusty all weekend that there was no opportunity to go out and take new photographs – I tried last night but the wind meant even a tripod was blowing all over the place.

A couple of days ago Sandra reviewed Budget. This time she took a look at Budget Workbook ($14.95), a simple but useful little application also from Snowmint Creative Solutions.

“Track your expenses to see where you are spending your money. View reports that show you your expenses over time, by category, or against your expense limits”.

Not too much to say about this one. It does exactly as it says it will, and is very straightforward to use. Screen display options are Transactions List, Summary Amounts (shown below) with daily, monthly etc. options or Reports.

TVMini Express provides a quick and simple solution to get digital TV straight on your Mac.

TVMini Express (£34) is another great product from Miglia. It is certainly the current “thing” to be able to view, record, and edit TV on your Mac and this is a very simple, cheap and effective way of getting digital terrestrial TV onto your Mac.

Following on from her review of Budget Planner in June, I have asked Sandra to review another financial package from Snowmint Creative Solutions.

Budget ($29.95) is a different way to keep track of your money and ensure you don´t overspend, based on the traditional ‘envelope’ model of allocating funds. It includes Budget Planner for longer term budget planning.

MailSteward Pro ($99.95)

“MailSteward Pro will automatically select all of your Apple Mail app email accounts to be archived, and create an empty MySQL database named “myemaildb”. So all you have to do is click on the archive button, and MailSteward Pro will begin copying your email into the database.”

I have been a fan and user of Mail Steward since I first reviewed it back in March 2006. I am a backup junkie and use it all the time, and have found it useful when moving data from one Mac to another, especially when I have only wanted to move certain mailboxes.

I have been suffering from water retention recently. It took me a while to work it out primarily as I had put the aching down to the increased amount of running that I have been doing now that I am training again.

Symptoms

I was impressed with iPhoto Library Manager ($19.95) from the moment that I first started using it, but that admiration went up a notch today when they announced that it was already iPhoto 08 compatible.

My Position

In what seems to be a never ending task I am once again in the middle of moving my photographs around. This time I want to have them all in one central place, which means that I have a number of separate iPhoto libraries that I want to consolidate into one main library.

A very brief and personal note to ‘announce’ that I have now made my first venture into the world of video casting.

Don’t worry – nothing to do with Macs, or even technology. Not even to do with Moreno!!! This is a video cast that I am establishing to ’support’ the Almerimar Life site that I run. It is very low tech (at the moment) and is just a way of sharing some information about life here in Almerimar visually.

Following on from the post last week on the Miglia TVMax+ I wanted to point out a couple of very ‘Mac like’ adverts that they have produced and are available on their site.

No idea demonstrates really well the benefits of the hardware encoder over the software encoder.

Late gives the same message, in a briefer way and possibly slightly more humorous.

Both are well worth a watch, and both get the message of ease of use and time saving over really well.

At the risk of upsetting the purists I will always argue that sometimes a photograph that captures the moment exactly as you saw it at the time is all that matters. we can strive for perfection all we want, but in many cases the raw material is often the best.

I spent yesterday afternoon feeling old as I watched the rugby beach tournament, and the evening proving I was old by drinking with them until the (very) early hours of the morning! I wont bore you with the sorry details but you can read more about them and see some pictures and a video over on Almerimar Life.