Track your finances easily and quickly. Tracking one’s finances can be a lot like cleaning the house, you really want it to get done, but sometimes you just dread doing it. Just like cleaning the house can be more enjoyable with good cleaning supplies and tools, tracking your money can be much easier if you have the appropriate software application to assist you.

Introducing iBank 2, an intuitive full-featured personal and small business financial manager. iBank 2 is designed to manage bank accounts, credit cards and investments, analyze income and expenses with live updating charts, and plan your financial future with budgeting and forecasting. Wrapped in a beautiful Aqua interface, iBank 2 is a robust financial application able to meet the needs of the casual spender to online day-trader.

Features:

Smart Accounts
Track transactions for a given category, amount or date.

Smart Import Rules
Set rules so that bank transactions are imported in your own words.

Importing
Robust import engine for OFX, QFX, QIF and CSV files. Manage import settings on a per-account level.

Charts
Quickly analyze expenses and income with live updating charts.

Account Types
Set up an account in iBank for each of your real-life accounts, including checking, savings, credit cards, investment and even liability and asset accounts.

Currencies
Support for multiple currencies, easily download exchange rates.

Budgets
Create budgets to plan your finances. Check how well you are sticking to your budgets with the Budget Monitor.

Scheduled Transactions
Have iBank automatically enter planned or repeating transactions so that you don’t have to.

Forecast Balances
Project account balances into the future based on pending scheduled transactions and/or historical balances.

Check Printing
Print checks using customizable templates.

Core Data
Lightning fast searches and saving powered by a robust database.

Automator
Pre-bundled automator actions…automate your workflow.

Statements and Reconciliation
Reconcile with your bank’s statements and browse statement history.

Portfolio
Track investments and download stock quotes.

iCal Integration
Track scheduled transactions in iCal.

.Mac Integration
Keep your data safe, automatically backup to .Mac.

Roxio Toast Titanium has long been the de facto standard when it comes to burning DVDs and CDs on a Mac. It’s packed with features which allow you not only to record disks but also perform backups, edit video and audio and manage your TiVo recorded TV shows.

Once up and running, you’ll notice that version 8 sports an improved, clearer user interface. The side panel contains all the simplest functions for choosing which type of disk you want to burn, including Data, music, VCD, DivX, Video_TS, or just plain DVD… the program now also supports Blu-Ray Disks. Simply select the disk type, drag and drop the files you want on the disk and hit the big red button! If you want to create your own DVD with menus and other features, Toast titanium has several templates to help you along, or you can create your own custom menus.

In terms of new features, the most significant addition to Toast Titanium 8 is support for TiVo and EyeTV, two types of Personal Video Recorder which have gained huge popularity in North America over recent years. Toast can now automatically connect to your TiVo and copy shows and movies across to your Mac, ready to watch there, convert for a portable device or burn to disk.

Another interesting feature of Toast Titanium 8 is Data Recovery, a new tool which tries to rescue data from a damaged (i.e. scratched) optical disk. Though not 100% effective, the program works hard to rescue as much data as possible, meaning that data which was previously lost for good can now potentially be rescued.

As usual, Toast Titanium has some slight problems concerning inter-compatibility with older versions and with software from other manufacturers. While we didn’t find these particularly vexing, it should be noted that some users have complained about opening Toast 7 data projects.

In all, Toast Titanium 8 is a complete utility for working with optical disk formats, whether you’re burning, recovering or backing-up data. With the addition of TiVo support, Toast Titanium really is becoming an essential application for any Mac.

Review by Tom Clarke

MacBreakZ is a sophisticated Personal Ergonomic Assistant designed to promote healthy and productive computer use. Computer-related health problems ranging from eyestrain, headaches, neck and backache to more serious Repetitive Strain Injuries (RSI), including carpal tunnel syndrome, writer’s cramp, tendonitis, etc. are the result of inappropriate computer use. MacBreakZ offers a unique way of acquiring ergonomic skills that can safe you a lot of discomfort and shield you from serious health and career-threatening disorders.

Long awaited by the Mac crowd, the beauty that is Pixelmator is finally out. This intuitive and sleek image editor can be seen as a slimmed down version of Photoshop. It integrates layers and filters perfectly and gives you all the essential tools of a good image editor: brushes, magic wand, objects, text, gradients and fills. The multi-windowed interface makes it very easy to edit. Every time you select a different tool, you’ll notice that the “Tool” window at the bottom left will change to show the settings for that tool. Similarly, depending on the selected tool, the “brush” window on the right will offer different settings.

It’s recommended that you have a Core Image supported graphics card when you use Pixelmator, and you’ll understand why after experiencing the smooth transitions and flowing movements of the different elements of the application. The dark, slightly transparent look of the interface also sets it apart from other image editors.

Pixelmator is an excellent image editor in a gorgeous interface. It may not offer Photoshop shortcuts, nor all of the effects you can find in Adobe’s image editing app, but Pixelmator looks great, is very intuitive and has pretty much all the effects and filters you’d need.

Review by Cyril Roger

PicLens delivers an immersive, full-screen experience for viewing images on the web. If you have an online photo account and if you use iPhoto and Safari, or if you enjoy photography, his is the program for you.

Currently Supported Sites:

• Flickr
• Photobucket
• Facebook
• Google Image Search
• Yahoo Image Search
• Ask.com Image Search

The free PicLens plug-in enables you to:

• View photos in full screen with a single click
• Glide between photos from within full screen mode
• Play a slideshow of image search results and photo albums
• Browse online photos with your Apple® remote

Application Switcher Menu (ASM) is a preference pane that offers a clear view of all your applications. Accessible as a drop down menu from your menu bar it can show any application in a few clicks. You’ll be able to customize the preference pane, adding separators, choosing how the icon appears or selection whether the application, the icon or both appear.

One of the most appreciated features of ASM is the Classic Window Behavior, which brings all windows of an active application forward. We suggest using this when you have many programs and folders open and need to focus on one in particular. Single Application Mode is great to hide every application except the one you’re working on.

In all, ASM is a good tool to reach applications you use frequently and act on them. While you can also place favorite applications in your Dock, ASM gives you more possibilities to organize and manage them on your desktop.

ASM is a customizable tool to switch between applications on your desktop.

Review by Cyril Roger

The initial reason for the development of Shimo was the lousy software-implementation of the Cisco-VPN-Client for MacOS. Shimo wants to do it the MacOS-way: That means to reduce the interface to the important features and integrate it right into the user-interface of the OS. Thus the interaction with this piece of software is absolutely intuitive and self explanatory. Try it out and you will see what we are speaking of…

Features:

• Full Cisco compatibility
• Growl support + notifications
• Saves passwords in your keychain
• Automatic (re-)connect on wakeup, network-changes, etc
• Global shortcuts for fast connect/disconnect

FreeMind is a premier free mind-mapping software written in Java. The recent development has hopefully turned it into high productivity tool. We are proud that the operation and navigation of FreeMind is faster than that of MindManager because of one-click "fold / unfold" and "follow link" operations.

So you want to write a completely new metaphysics? Why don’t you use FreeMind? You have a tool at hand that remarkably resembles the tray slips of Robert Pirsig, described in his sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance called Lila. Do you want to refactor your essays in a similar way you would refactor software? Or do you want to keep personal knowledge base, which is easy to manage? Why don’t you try FreeMind? Do you want to prioritize, know where you are, where you’ve been and where you are heading, as Stephen Covey would advise you? Have you tried FreeMind to keep track of all the things that are needed for that?

The fully featured HTML Editor and web authoring software, WebDesign gives you full control over your web site code, design and structure allowing you to develop fast, effective and the most compatible web sites possible. Providing support for HTML, XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, PHP, Javascript, ASP, XML, VBScript and more, WebDesign comes ready to work with all your web site documents. WebDesign includes everything you need from writing your web page, making sure it works ok in all web browsers and then getting it online with the FREE web hosting included.

TuneBar is an easy to use application that allows you to access iTunes through any application on your computer. It is designed around the idea that it will take up only the minimal amount of screen space by sliding underneath the menu bar when not in use. This controller gives you access to the most fundamental features of iTunes such as Play/Pause, Back Track, Next Track, Volume and more from with in any running application on your computer.