Type of Article: MacTech Reviews

By ‘Doctor Dave’ Greenbaum

Whether you are listening to dance, jazz, or disco, you won’t be hearing the blues with the Miccus BluBridge headphones (http://www.miccus.com/products/blubridge-auto-talk). This headphone/hands-free combo rocks!  I am amazed at the quality of sound and ease of use coming from these unassuming headphones.

By Marcus Geduld

Holomatrix is an US$99 After Effects plug-in that does one thing well: it gives footage that produces ghost-like, scan line, holodeck, and “help me Obi-Wan Kenobi” looks. Holomatrix runs on After Effects on both Mac OS X (10.5.8 and higher) and Windows.

It’s an unusual plug-in because it’s not listed in the Effects menu. Instead, it’s applied by choosing Window>Holomatrix, which then applies a bunch of complex presets to the selected layer — presets that use many effects and expressions, and that involve multiple levels of precomposing.

I have 2,732 songs in my iTunes library — and that number grows every day. What’s more, some of the songs and albums are pretty obscure stuff. That’s why I find TuneUp from TuneUp Media (http://www.tuneupmedia.com/index.php) a very useful product.

It’s a plug-in for iTunes that analyzes your iTunes library to tell you how clean or dirty it is. And by that I’m not referring to those songs with explicit lyrics. No, “dirty” tunes in TuneUp parlance are “mislabeled” tunes. In other words, those vague Track 01, Track 02, etc. items you probably have in your song collection.

Applian Technologies and Jaksta showcased Jaksta for Mac OS X (10.5 and higher) at last week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco. It lets you download and convert online streaming audio and video for personal use and is — as far as I can tell — the first program designed specifically for the Mac that can do this.



At last week’s Macworld Expo, a company called LensPens (http://www.lenspens.com) introduced new iPad and MacBook screen cleaners that the company promised would do the best job ever in cleaning your Apple products’ screens.


I was skeptical, but I gave the LensPens iPad product — known as the SideKick — a try. And I have to admit: they’re right.