Tools, techniques and research for public affairs reporting.

SwiftRiver is a platform that helps people make sense of a lot of information in a short amount of time.

Filter & Verify Real-Time Data
In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels like Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds.

Cloak is a service for your Mac, iPhone, and iPad that keeps you safe from prying eyes on public wi-fi.

Back-Up
OpenPhoto is the digital equivalent of shoe-boxes filled with photos. Except they're backed up to make sure you never lose them.

Portability
Whatever you want to do or wherever you want to go, your photos are free to go with you.

Free and Open Source
OpenPhoto is an open source project and will always remain free. Find us on Github.

Managing windows on Mac OS X can be frustrating, requiring precision control of your mouse or trackpad for clicking, dragging, pushing and pulling your windows to the size and position you desire. Even with all this work, it’s very difficult to get windows exactly where you want them, so most of the time windows are left scattered all over the screen. The solution? Divvy.

Divvy is an entirely new way of managing your workspace. It allows you to quickly and efficiently "divvy up" your screen into exact portions.

With Divvy, it’s as simple as a single click and drag in the Divvy interface and your window will be resized and moved to a relative portion of the screen. If that seems like too much work, you can go ahead and create as many different shortcuts as you'd like that resize and move your windows.

Divvy is designed to be quick, simple and elegant. We want it to stay out of your way as much as possible while providing the most powerful window management available today.

Take a look at the screencast over there to the right to get a better idea of what we're talking about, then go ahead and download the demo to try it out for yourself. Or you could buy it right away. That's fine too.

Who are you, what do you do, etc…?

I’m Duncan Davidson and I am a photographer, writer, and recovering software developer. Possibly my most recognizable affiliation is as the main stage photographer for TED. I’ve been exploring video and learning all I can, including bridging between stills and motion with a lot of time-lapse work, such as my recent Tribute in Light project. Finally, I’m a partner in Luma Labs which makes some awesome camera slings.

What is your current setup?

My desktop is an eight-core, early-2008 Mac Pro with 14GB of RAM, an upgraded ATI 4870 video card, an SSD boot drive in the bottom DVD drive bay, and 24TB of online storage across several arrays, both internal and external.

My primary display is a late-2008 24″ LED Cinema display. Tunes are pumped out through a set of old school USB Harman Kardon SoundSticks. Input is handed using an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard and Magic Trackpad and a Wacom Intous 4 tablet. For voice input, I use an Audio Technica AT2050 microphone hooked up to an Apogee One, and I monitor on a pair of Audio Technica ATH-M40fs headphones.

Document scanning is handed with a Fujitsu SnapScan. Photographs are scanned with an Epson v500 flatbed scanner. Most of my print needs are handled by an Epson 3880 printer, but for bigger jobs I also have a 24″ HP Z3200.

My primary laptop unless I’m in the throes of heavy photo or video work is a mid-2011, 13″ MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. I went with the i5 instead of the i7 in the hope of getting the maximum battery life possible.

My secondary laptop which I pull out when I need to use FireWire drives on the road or when I know that the GPU will come in handy is a late-2008, 15″ MacBook Pro that I’ve upgraded to 4GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. This laptop is almost effectively retired, but not quite.

An iPhone 4 keeps me connected most of the time. A first generation iPad is what you’ll find me using on the couch or in seat 6A when I’m traveling.

Why this rig?

A desktop-plus-portable strategy is the only one that can satisfy my need for power, speed, and storage at home while also keeping things as light as possible for when I’m traveling fast. If I could go with a simpler setup, I would in a heartbeat. So far, however, the trend has been that my storage needs are ramping up quickly over time and dealing with over a TB a year of new data is the big challenge.

On the other hand, nothing beats being able to throw my MacBook Air and a Fuji X100 into a small bag and head out the door for a day or a weekend.

What software do you use and for what do you use it?

I manage my photographs using a combination of Aperture, Lightroom and Bridge. Aperture is taking over my primary catalog needs from Lightroom. I use Bridge when I need to scour through the archives of photographs that aren’t in my active catalog.

When I need more in the way of photo editing tools than I get from Aperture, I use Photoshop. When I need less, I use Acorn and sometimes even Preview.

For video, I use Final Cut Pro X and love it. I also use Compressor and After Effects for various tasks, including stitching together still frames into video clips.

When I’m in code mode, I use BBEdit or Xcode depending on the task at hand. For straight ahead writing—including all of my blog entries as well as the writing that currently isn’t seeing the light of day—I’ve become a huge fan of iA Writer.

To get things done, I use OmniFocus. At least I try. Sometimes I do better than others. Keeping all of my non-media data in sync between machines in handled by Dropbox. 1Password is essential for passwords. Mail, iCal, Safari, Numbers, and Pages are all open on my computer right now.

How does this setup help you do your best creative work?

For the most part, it lets me do what I need to do in the kinds of environments I like to be in.

At home, I’ve arranged my desk so that when I’m working on my desktop, I can look up across my living room and out my huge living room windows across downtown Portland. Watching the weather go by is therapeutic to me. The MacBook Air lets me work in cafés near home and as well as anywhere in the world. It’s even useful for the kinds of light photo editing I do on the road.

How would your ideal setup look and function?

I’m pretty close to my ideal right now. If I could change anything, I’d have a view of midtown Manhattan out my window from 25 floors up and I’d have a 15″ MacBook Pro that wasn’t much heavier than my current Air but which did have a GPU. The former is a pipe dream right now. The latter might happen any month now. Hopefully.

I used to use two screens on my desktop, and I might consider do so again. However, I’ve found that using one screen increases my ability to glance up and look outside my window. A second screen cuts that down quite a bit. As well, I’ve discovered that parking my laptop on one side lets me keep various websites or other reference material in easy view while I work on the desktop.

Finally, a closer-to-ideal setup would include a data solution for my media files that was a bit less maintenance intensive. I think the best I’ll be able to do in the near future is consolidate my various hard drive arrays into two Promise Thunderbolt R6 arrays when I upgrade my desktop machine. That jump will probably happen sometime in the next six months.

More Sweet Setups

Duncan’s setup is just one in a series of sweet Mac Setups.

A new Site Specific Browser. Looks interesting...

LR/Enfuse is a Lightroom plugin that allows you to blend multiple exposures together directly from within Lightroom by using the open source Enfuse application.

nvALT 2 is a fork of the original Notational Velocity with some additional features and interface modifications, including MultiMarkdown functionality.

During the day, computer screens look good—they're designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun.

F.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

It's even possible that you're staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.

Using Hype, you can create beautiful HTML5 web content. Animations and interactive content made with Hype work on desktops, smartphones and iPads.

This open-source application maps the information that your iPhone is recording about your movements. It doesn't record anything itself, it only displays files that are already hidden on your computer.

An iOS like OS X application for quickly applying presets to photos. Nice feature: you can edit applied effects, and new presets are available for download from the Flare website.

Share the stuff you like: Facebook, Twitter, blogging, emailing - now built right in! Go read the announcement on the Vienna blog! Click here for the English-Only version.

Alfred is a productivity application for Mac OS X, which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web. Whether it's maps, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, you can feed your web addiction quicker than ever before.

* Increase your productivity by launching apps with shortcuts
* Instant access to web searches, bookmarks & more
* Browse and play music from your iTunes library quickly
* Perform actions – copy, move & email files & folders
* Ward off RSI – skip using the mouse with easy shortcuts

Looking for ways to augment Safari 5? These extensions are the most useful we’ve found

Welcome to OmniOutliner 3, an amazingly flexible program for creating, collecting, and organizing information. Use OmniOutliner's document structure to brainstorm new ideas, drill out specifics, and line up the steps needed to get everything done. It's more than just an outlining tool—you've got multiple columns, smart checkboxes, customizable popup lists, and an über-innovative styles system at your disposal. Use OmniOutliner to draft to-do lists, create agendas, manage tasks, track expenses, take notes, plan events, write screenplays . . . and just about anything else you can think of.

Do you access your email in a browser? Then you'll love Notify. Notify is an awesome email notifier for Mac OS X. It fits seamlessly into your menubar, only vying for your attention when you have new mail. Notify supports mutliple accounts, including Gmail/Google Apps, MobileMe, and Rackspace Email.

Browser Chooser is a small tool acting as the default browser allowing you to choose what browser to open the link in. It gives you the flexibility to choose what browser to use for any given task.

Yammer is great. So is Mac OS X. Wouldn't it be even greater if there was a native Yammer client for Mac OS X? Well now there is!

Introducing Gabble, the first (and only) Yammer desktop client

TwoUp allows you to quickly position a window to fill exactly half the screen (splitscreen) via the menu bar or configurable system-wide shortcuts (hotkeys). Similar to "tiled windows" functionality available on other operating systems.

NOTATIONAL VELOCITY is an application that stores and retrieves notes. It is an attempt to loosen the mental blockages to recording information and to scrape away the tartar of convention that handicaps its retrieval. The solution is by nature nonconformist.

A simple, beautiful and powerful notes app. The nice user interface lets you focus on the important things - taking notes. And it syncs with Simplenote webapp!

Freedom is an application that disables networking on an Apple computer for up to eight hours at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create. At the end of your selected offline period, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal. Freedom enforces freedom; a reboot is the only circumvention of the Freedom time limit you specify. The hassle of rebooting means you're less likely to cheat, and you'll enjoy enhanced productivity.

Two months ago I mentioned that I was considering a switch from Quicksilver to LaunchBar. The motivation for the change was Alcor’s discouraging comments about Quicksilver’s future—and future stability—in this interview. I’ve now been using LaunchBar exclusively for the past couple of months and have never even been tempted to go back.

Cocktail is an award winning general purpose utility for Mac OS X. It is a smooth and powerful digital toolset with a variety of practical features that simplifies the use of advanced UNIX functions and helps Mac users around the world to get the most out of their computers. Cocktail is installed at more than 200 000 computers world wide. The largest part being private individuals, but Cocktail can also be found at large international companies (Puma, Sony), educational institutions (Harvard University, University of Texas) or newspapers (The New York Times, Business Week). The application serves up a scrumptious mix of maintenance tools and interface tweaks, all accessible via a comprehensive graphical interface. Most of Cocktail's major features are arranged in five basic categories. In addition, a Pilot lets you clean, repair and optimize your system with one click of the button.

Skim is a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X. It is designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF, but is also great for viewing any PDF file.

VoodooPad is a place to write down your notes and thoughts. Plant ideas, images, lists and anything else you need to keep track of and VoodooPad will grow with you, without getting in the way. You can even drag and drop folders, images, applications, or URLs into VoodooPad — they're linked up just like on the web. And with powerful search, nothing will be lost or out of reach. Do you ever have a bit of information that you're not sure where to file? Put it in VoodooPad, it won't mind. Because the more you put into it, the more useful VoodooPad becomes.

Download any video from Youtube using this tool, an convert it to a iPod or PC video format. The Pro version also works with other sites.

I'm thinking about buying a Mac. I've done a lot of Googling about what the Mac equivalents are for Windows programs, but I want to know the opposite. What are some unique, interesting, or innovative Mac programs that have no real equivalent on Windows? Are there any that are so awesome that they're worth switching to Apple?

Monolingual is a program for removing unnecessary language resources from Mac OS X, in order to reclaim several hundred megabytes of disk space. It requires at least Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Panther) and also works on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

DSLR Camera Remote is the next-generation cable release for your Canon EOS DSLR or Nikon DSLR camera. Just connect your camera to a WiFi enabled computer and the DSLR Camera Remote software enables you to use your Apple iPhone or iPod touch to wirelessly adjust cameras settings, fire the shutter, review images, even get a live viewfinder preview. DSLR Camera Remote is a must-have for remote shooting applications like high or low angles, self portraits and children.

FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, an audio format similar to MP3, but lossless, meaning that audio is compressed in FLAC without any loss in quality. This is similar to how Zip works, except with FLAC you will get much better compression because it is designed specifically for audio, and you can play back compressed FLAC files in your favorite player (or your car or home stereo, see supported devices) just like you would an MP3 file. FLAC stands out as the fastest and most widely supported lossless audio codec, and the only one that at once is non-proprietary, is unencumbered by patents, has an open-source reference implementation, has a well documented format and API, and has several other independent implementations.

Path Finder is a standalone application that leverages what you already know about working with your files. It takes the Finder's familiar interface and adds numerous powerful features and interface innovations to help anyone be more productive on Mac OS X.

MercuryMover reduces the friction you feel when you use your Mac. With MercuryMover, you can move and resize windows on your Mac from the keyboard, positioning them precisely where you want. By shunning the slow and imprecise mouse, MercuryMover empowers you to work faster and play more.

If you’re like most people these days, you’ve probably got a lot of music on your computer — whether from your own CD library, or downloaded from Amazon, iTunes, or (ahem) elsewhere. But if the only thing you’re doing with your music collection is listening to it, you’re missing out. There are a large number of web applications devoted to helping you get more from the music you already have.

Helicon Focus is a program that creates one completely focused image from several partially focused images by combining the focused areas. The program is designed for macrophotography, microphotography and hyperfocal landscape photography to cope with the shallow depth-of-field problem.

ExpanDrive acts just like a USB drive plugged into your Mac. Open, edit, and save files to remote computers from within your favorite programs—even when they are on a server half a world away. ExpanDrive enhances every single application on your computer by transparently connecting it to remote data.

Computing and communicating through the Web makes it virtually impossible to leave the past behind. College Facebook posts or pictures can resurface during a job interview; a lost or stolen laptop can expose personal photos or messages; or a legal investigation can subpoena the entire contents of a home or work computer, uncovering incriminating or just embarrassing details from the past.

KeePass, the free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager.

Brushes is a natural media painting application designed from scratch for the iPhone and iPod touch. Featuring an advanced color picker, several realistic brushes, extreme zooming, and a simple yet deep interface, it is a powerful tool for creating original artwork on your mobile device.

Breaking new ground in hand-held music technology, Loopy is a sophisticated loop-based musical scratchpad and performance instrument. It’s also an easy to use, beautiful yet powerful recording studio. No musical ability required!

AutoStitch iPhone is the first automatic image stitcher for the iPhone. This application unleashes the power of your iPhone's camera to create wide-angle views and panoramas with any arrangment of photos.

Read the latest news from your favorite sites and blogs on your iPhone or iPod Touch, even when you’re offline. Simply use your free Google Reader account to subscribe to websites you’d like to keep track of. Byline will automatically bring you new content, putting thousands of RSS and Atom feeds at your fingertips. Stay in sync When you read an item, it stays read. The same goes for the items you star: Byline will let Google Reader know the next time you have an internet connection.

Powerful script management utility. Instant access to your scripts, by keyboard shortcut or menubar.

With Boxee now available for Windows, nearly any computer can push streaming and downloaded content onto a TV. Here are five tips and tricks that add content and convenience to the social media center, for newcomers and veteran users alike.

Forget the default browser, Choosy opens links in the right browser. When you click on a link Choosy will do the right thing, whether that's something simple (like using whatever browser is already running) or something complex (like prompting you to pick a browser, but only when you hold down the shift key and click on a link to google.com).

Perch is a really little content management system for when you (or your clients) need to edit content without the hassle of setting up a big CMS.

New electricity meters being rolled out to millions of homes and businesses are riddled with security bugs that could bring down the power grid, according to a security researcher who plans to demonstrate several attacks at a security conference next month.

OpenTTD is an Open Source clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe

We've featured countless apps or all sorts over the years, but if you just want a quick look at the best free downloads for your Mac, this post's for you. This is the 2009 Lifehacker Pack for Mac OS X.

Versie 0.2 van de Uitzending Gemist plug-in, Ik ben de afgelopen (twee) weken weer wat bezig geweest met de plug-in. Onder andere zie je nu informatie over het programma wat je wilt gaan kijken en je ziet thumbnails (helaas niet bij het populair vandaag en top 50 gedeelte, omdat die informatie vanaf deze pagina's niet makkelijk te bereiken is, dit komt misschien later nog).

I designed this workflow to be a little more intuitive and versatile than one-size-fits-all preset approach. Since I occasionally shoot in different file formats, I needed presets that could adapt to both a RAW and JPG workflow. The workflow itself is a two-step process 1) Correcting and enhancing the quality and tonality of the images, and 2) making color adjustments. The two categories of presets I developed (Basic Presets and Color Presets) can be mixed and matched in a number of ways, and since the settings of each type of preset are exclusive to their function, you'll never have to worry about Basic Presets or Color Presets overriding each other. Basic Presets only affect White Balance, Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Brightness, Contrast, Tone Curve, and Vignette settings. And Color Presets only affect Hue, Saturation, Luminance, Grayscale Mix, and Split Tone settings.

DragThing is the original dock designed to tidy up your Macintosh desktop. It puts all your documents, folders, and applications just a single click away. Highly flexible, it allows multiple docks, each customised to suit your exact needs.

CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog.

Replaces the purple and green default style of Toodledo.com with a custom style loosely based round Mac OS X and also Google Docs. Please feel free to change this in any way, and please let me know if you improve it.

Sideline is an Adobe® AIR™ desktop application built with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). It allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest. Sideline is an open source application released under the BSD license.

Entrepreneur Mark Gorton wants to do for people what he already helped do for files: move them from here to there in the most efficient way possible using open-source tools.

If you’ve just got yourself a new Mac and totally clueless what to install, this article is for you. If you are looking for alternatives for some applications you are currently using in your Mac, the following list might come in handy too. This week, we’d like to showcase you a list of useful yet free applications you can install for your Mac. Full list after jump.

Shutter is a feature-rich screenshot program. You can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website - apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window.

SlideShowPro for Lightroom installs as a "web engine" for Adobe Lightroom. You simply drag a folder to an existing location on your computer, launch Lightroom, and the engine is available in the application's "Web module" workspace. Click on "Web" in the top nav, select SlideShowPro as your gallery template, and you're off.

TextExpander saves you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently-used text strings and images.

Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?

This Screen Ruler is a great tool that allows you to accurately measure anything on your screen. This is especially useful when measuring graphics, web page browser sizes or whatever. Screen Ruler can display Pixels, Inches, Picas or Centimeters.

OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. MetaCarta developed the initial version of OpenLayers and gave it to the public to further the use of geographic information of all kinds. OpenLayers is completely free, Open Source JavaScript, released under a BSD-style License.