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Visage Lab – A Portable Beauty Laboratory for facial photos on iPhone

While browsing through the App Store, you can find plenty of photo editing apps. Though they allow editing photos with multiple tools, filters and effects, not many of them are able to retouch portraits. Welcome an app that lets you easily improve facial photos - Visage Lab.

Visage Lab is designed for both iPhone and iPad. It allows to remove pimples and wrinkles, outline the eyes and whiten the teeth in seconds with all operations made automatically. After installing Visage Lab on your device you will get a portable beauty laboratory, that will help you enhance your portrait photos any place, any time.

Visage Lab has several advantages over the alternatives, such as fully automatic face detection and enhancement and high quality retouch. While other photo editors usually perform only partial face retouching, Visage Lab offers a full-package approach to image enhancement. Another distinctive advantage is that makeup made with Visage Lab gives your portrait a natural look, so that you can never tell a photo has been edited.

The Many Uses of the iPad in Traditional and Online Schools

Credits: Johan Larsson

We already know that there are hundreds and hundreds of free applications for Mac OS X that have changed the way computing happens, but sometimes technology is used in unexpected ways. For example, the iPad in teaching environments, things become much more interesting and counterintuitive.

This post by Estelle Shumann shows how the use of iPads is revolutionizing education the world over. She writes for a website about online schools, and maintains much information about people interested in studying computers in a way that can help them innovate and develop new spaces in the world of technology.

Note and Compute

We often have to deal with calculations. But for most of us they do not contain complex mathematical formulas, sines, or cosines: what amount to bill a client, how many panels to buy for remodeling of an apartment, how much money can I put away for a future purchase, how much others owe me taking into account their previous payments – here are most of the questions and issues with which we have to face on a daily basis. And the question of comfort does not lie in how many complex mathematical operations we can do, but in how can we conveniently store, redo and share our calculations.

What if and why not offering my client one more service of mine, and why not try buying less of the building materials this time? We want to see better what options we have. Often, we agree to the first reasonable option without much thinking only because we do not have a kind of tool that would allow us to quickly and easily apply the changes we want to make and get the final result. On the other hand, often we have to go back to the calculations in order to add something to them or modify them, whether that’s credit card payments, an estimate of expenses for the next month, or budget planning.

5 Amazing Children's Books Apps for the iPad

The iPad is proving to be a big hit with kids. They already love the iPhone but they love the iPad even more because its bigger. A fast becoming popular category is the Children's books. With the iPad's gorgeous screen, audio capabilities and that great touch input allowing interactivity, it's not difficult to see why. Here's a list of some of the best iPad children's Books Apps that are available:

Aesop's Fables Audiobook

A beautiful rendition of 20 classic all-time favorite fables that teach morals. Next, think of spinning the wheel of fortune. Before reading any stories, children have to spin the wheel that makes selection of fable story fun and exciting. Readers are also rewarded with simple spot-the-difference games after reading fables. It also has both pre-recorded and recording audio functions in different languages. With intuitive and fun elements, children will grow to love this reading experience.

link to iTunes

30 Appealing and Excellent Digital Art Wallpapers for iPad

The wait is finally here. The product that created so much hype, likes as well as dislikes from many has finally arrived at the US stores and soon it would be a worldwide phenomenon. However, the controvesial topic of the iPad would barely cease even after it has been launched.

As the iPad falls onto our clutches, it's inevitable that we can't wait to customized it to our own style. A change in the wallpaper design iwould be a great start.

Here we have gathered 30 appealing and excellent digital artworks for iPad wall papers. You might be able to find something of your liking if you are a fan of illustration and fractal art and not forgetting, an Apple fan. An excellent wall paper design certainly adds more asesthetic value to the slick and amazing touch technology.

Scare Tactics by Rob Sheridan

A Hearty Collection of Valentine Wallpapers

Perhaps we haven't notice the reason why but the the heart is often associated with the notion of love. In ancient times, the heart was believed to be the origin of emotions. Giving your heart to someone could mean that you are giving away everything completely to that person. Be it myth or truth, most people see the heart as a symbol of love.

Although the heart shape looks nowhere near the actual heart, the concept of heart and its shape or symbol has been notable for its emblem of feelings and emotions. Many designers have applied this well perceived symbol into their works to illustrate their artistic expressions of romance and love. Different yet impressive styles of expressions are born, portraying a wide range of emotions coming from the similar sincerity.

Cute Hearty Valentine

As the love bud forms, the process is often sweet, adorable and innocent. The following wallpaper designs are bound to bring a smile to the both of you as they remind us how sweet love could be.

First Love

Tweaks for the Dock

Tweaking the interface of my Mac has long become part of activity. It's a lot of fun in the process of it. However, you should always remember to backup your files before starting the tweak, in case you accidentally make your Mac explode because of it (I'm exaggerating here).

Left all the worries behind and have fun with the tweaks!

100+ Beautiful Nature Wallpapers

In this article, we’d like to showcase you a list of 100+ Beautiful Nature Wallpapers to decorate your desktop. Previously we have also compiled some beautiful wallpapers; if you like to collect wallpapers, you may want to look at some of these posts:

Let's proceed to wallpapers collection in this article.

50+ Mac Applications with Great Interface

Having used Mac for quite some time, I discover that I deeply fall in love with smooth and sleek interface offered by most of Mac built-in applications.

And the good news is, there are many third-party applications out there developed with more or less the same design standard as those built-in Mac apps. More than fifty sample screenshots of beautiful Mac applications are ready to amaze you after the jump.

Mac Applications for Tagging Files

Often, we have plenty of important working stuffs stored on our Mac. Without proper management on those files, it will be difficult for us to search and get back to our previous work files.

One way to manage our files is by grouping files. There are some worth mention Mac File Tagging Applications that can help us grouping, categorizing, and managing our precious files using tags.

Custom Exposé Glows for Download

In our previous article: Daily Trick 47. Tweak Exposé Glow, we have brought forward the option to change your Exposé glowing effect. After few minutes playing around with the image sprite, I have come up with these various sprites.

In this article, I'd like to share the sprite with you. You can refer to the previous daily trick for the step by step guide on how to change the effect.

Inspired by Artless Processes - Customize Snow Leopard Exposé Glow.

Screenshots and download link provided after the jump.

Mac Application Updaters

Sometimes, it's difficult to search and update to the latest Mac applications. This may hinder some people in using their Macs. In order to reduce the hassle searching for required applications, we can use application updaters, which will do the information gathering for us.

Some application updaters can be seen after the jump.

Daily Trick 47. Tweak Exposé Glow

For Snow Leopard Users

If you have noticed, whenever you press F9 key to activate Exposé, you will see a rather different Exposé from Mac OS X Leopard. And upon mouse over on one of the item, you can see blue glowing effect.

Today, we are going to bring you to tweak on the glow color to your liking.

New Design. The White UsingMac

After several months of black-theme UsingMac, we've decided to transform into white-theme design. Perhaps, some of you might feel surprised by this sudden change, but we hope that you feel comfortable with our new design.

Why Do We Choose White?

Having browsed through most of the websites that contain guide or information, rarely can we see them using white-on-black layout. That's when we think of changing into white-on-black layout.

What Are The Changes We Made?

If you have visited our site before, you would notice that the look-and-feel of several places have been tweaked, for example: mini highlights on the top now is incorporated with simple round button, you can browse through those highlights by clicking on the button.

Besides that change, we have also made changes to

Logo → Now with simple text instead of image, for faster loading
Search Bar → Located at right most of our navigation bar
Sidebar → More appealing hover effect is added for better navigation
Comment Box → It has been enlarged and now accept line break

And the biggest change would be the change from Black to White.

What Do You Think?

We believe that we are still far from perfect. It's really appreciated if you can give us any constructive feedback or comment on this new design. Not only for giving feedback, you can also try out our new comment box.

Hope you enjoy this new experience with UsingMac.

Categories: Misc
Tags: Design, New, White

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Fave Mac App 3. Path Finder 5

Path Finder is an award-winning file browser and management application for Mac OS X. This is achieved by adding on more useful features to the familiar user interface of Finder.

There are several features that I like to use while using Path Finder:

Multiple Tabs Browsing
Sometimes we might need to open multiple Finder window to drag-drop or browse around directories. Using Path Finder, we can combine all these opened windows into just a single window with multiple tabs.
Temporary Stack
Although the drag-drop technique has become my habit in boosting my productivity in handling files. Path Finder enhances this experience by adding temporary stack where we can have a temporary place for drag-drop process.
Dual Pane File Browsing
Often, we need to view different folders side by side. And the good news is, Path Finder provides the dual pane browsing ability for us. This feature of Path Finder is just too good to be missed.
Quick Preview
By default, if we want to show information of certain item on Finder, we will reveal the Get Info pane by hitting keystrokes Cmd-Opt-I.
However in Path Finder, we can just toggle on Preview Mode and we can have all important information the item has.
Recent Applications
Path Finder can also help us keeping track of up to 50 recent applications.

Even though it's quite pricey for an application, I still recommend using Path Finder. Path Finder really helps a lot in enhancing your Mac experience. For your information, there is 30-day trial provided for this application.

Screenshots are provided after the jump.

Homepage | Download Link: Leopard ↓ - Snow Leopard ↓ | License: $39.95

Poll. Your Favorite Mac Desktop

This article is intended to give exposure to other contestants that have submitted their works. The screenshots of their submissions are listed below. And you can cast vote on any that you like (you can choose more than one) at the end of this article.

Let's vote for your favorite Mac Desktop and support the one that you like!
Hint. You can use keystrokes Cmd-[↓] to quickly scroll down to end of page.

Tweak Screencapture Behavior

Normally, we will use keystrokes Cmd-Shift-3 or Cmd-Shift-4 to take snapshot with Mac default screencapture utility. And new in Snow Leopard, we will end up having a PNG image file automatically stored inside our Desktop folder with the name Screen shot … .

Those behaviors mentioned above are the default ones. We can easily change those with simple command lines.

Daily Trick 46. Fast Exposé Shortcut

Whenever you want to open the Exposé view of an application, usually mac users will advice you on using Hot Corner. However, we have a new trick here for you.

Open 'Application Switcher' with Cmd-Tab
Press Tabs until the app you want to perform Exposé to is selected
Hit the arrow key [↓] or [↑] and the Exposé for that app will appear

It's fast, quick, and totally free of mouse actions.
But unfortunately, this trick only works in Snow Leopard.

Categories: Daily Tricks
Tags: Expose, Shortcut

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The Winners of UsingMac Contest 1

After long consideration and development time to put up all submissions into our new gallery, finally we can announce to our readers the winners of this contest.

Fave Mac App 2. Adium

Adium is an application that lets you chat with your friends across many chat networks easily at the same time. With Adium, you can connect to Yahoo!, MSN, GTalk, and many others with just one single chat client.

Adding to its value, Adium also provides us with interface to Twitter and Facebook. And if you can't past a single moment without chit-chat with friends, Adium suits you most.

Homepage | Download Link ↓ | License Type: Freeware

Categories: Applications
Tags: Adium, Application

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Daily Trick 45. Quick Manage Mail

Throughout the whole time of using Mac, often we will spend time on checking and managing our mail. I personally like the default mail application for Mac: Mail.app.

In this trick, I am going to share with you some keyboard shortcuts that come in handy when we're going to manage our mailboxes, quick navigate mailbox, and handle message.

Daily Trick 44. Quick Exponential Math (10.6)

I believe we all know that we can use Spotlight to do quick calculation, where we can do quick addition, substraction, and other simple mathematical operations right from within of the Spotlight window.

In Leopard, you can just type in pow(a,b) to find the value of a^b (e.g. 3^4 = 81). However, you can do it even faster with Snow Leopard by just typing a^b.

Note that you can always use key combination Cmd-Space to call up Spotlight box.

Categories: Daily Tricks
Tags: Calculator, Daily Trick, Exponential

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Daily Trick 43. Batch Resize Images (10.6)

Although the steps needed to do batch resize images on Snow Leopard are more or less similar to those batch resize steps for Mac OS X Leopard, there is a simple workaround needed to perform batch open and resize images on Snow Leopard.

Daily Trick 42. Quick Terminal Command

If you're fans of single-liner for UNIX command, you can always use this quick Terminal command line execution trick to save the steps for executing Terminal command.

Here are the steps:

Ctrl-Click on Terminal icon sitting on your Dock
From the pop-up menu, choose New Command…
Type the command line you want to execute on the appearing window pane
And click on Run button for command line execution

With this trick, I am sure you can start to tweak around with simple command line, e.g. command line for New List View.

Categories: Daily Tricks
Tags: Command, Daily Trick, Terminal

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UsingMac Contest 1. Deadline Reminder

Just to remind you all that the end of this month will be the deadline for UsingMac Contest. If you haven't participated in the contest, make sure to submit the screenshot of What's on Your Mac Screen and stand a chance to win fabulous prizes.

Categories: Special Event
Tags: Contest, Reminder

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Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users