Beta Beat

Review: Dreamweaver CS4 beta

Adobe Dreamweaver, for better or for worse, is probably the most mature integrated development environment for website building for the Mac. Professionals might be supplied with Dreamweaver through their company’s site-license; beginners might get Dreamweaver on the recommendation of a friend.Hard-core coders have their favorite text editors and IDEs. This review is not for them. To be clear, I use Coda and TextMate almost exclusively for web development. This review is for people who use Dreamweaver primarily as a WYSIWYG HTML editor (as much as that makes me cringe). But that’s what Dreamweaver does best.

The public beta of Dreamweaver CS4 dropped on Tuesday, and I’m going to show you what’s new and different about Dreamweaver CS4, and if it’s worth the upgrade.

Weavin’ your dreams, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry

Popularity: 10% [?]

Delicious Library 2 beta on the streets

In a Memorial Day treat for users, Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster announced via a tweet earlier this evening that a beta of Delicious Library 2 is now available for download and purchase. We’ve been waiting eagerly for DL2 for quite a while now, along with everyone else.

Interestingly, on first launch of the new beta you’re presented with the dialog on the right. Apparently DL2’s scrolling and display performance relies on fixes delivered in Mac OS X 10.5.3 — that is, fixes you can’t get yet in an OS build that hasn’t shipped. Patience is a virtue, I suppose.

Popularity: 7% [?]

24-Hour Evernote beta invitation

Your response to last week’s post about Evernote was amazing, with over 250 people requesting beta invitations and jamming my email inbox. Evernote has followed up with a 24-hour open invitation just for TUAW readers. There’s also a new 1.1.0a build of the beta that resolves a crashing bug.

Hurry over to this link:

http://www.evernote.com/Registration.action?code=tu4w7

before 2 PM ET on May 20th to get your very own invitation!

Popularity: 7% [?]

IntelliScreen for iPhone

Really cool stuff today over at ModMyiPhone. The new IntelliScreen software customizes your “Slide to Unlock” screen allowing you to load widgets onto that otherwise unusued space. Options include listing calendar events, mail subjects, SMS messages, weather reports and RSS news feeds.

One note though about beta releases: We love them for the inspiration and early access. We hate them for causing possible endless reboot sequences. This release may cause fatal rebooting errors so proceed with care.

Thanks, Jonathan.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Evernote Mac 1.1

The beta just got bettah!

recently featured an interview with Phil Libin, the CEO of Evernote, who stated that the ultimate goal of the application is to be a “universal human memory extension.” I’ve been using Evernote for over a month now and love it — I’ve sucked all of my business cards into Evernote with my iSight or iPhone camera, and use the program instead of a card file. Evernote’s text recognition simplifies tagging the cards, and I can use either the Mac app, the web client, or my iPhone to look through my database. Evernote’s unique focus on images makes it quite different from other information managers like Together or Yojimbo.

The update has some great new features based on customer feedback:

• PDF support – Evernote can now store PDFs and you can print into Evernote from any Mac application. Image-recognition isn’t working for PDFs at this time, but they’re working on it.
• Encryption – Included in the last release, but not announced, encryption works with the Mac or Windows clients only, not with the web client.
• Spotlight integration — Evernote “memories” are now searchable, and you can create Finder “smart folders” that include Evernote content.
• Mixed View Mode — In addition to List and Thumbnail view, Evernote 1.1 has a Mixed view that shows small thumbnails with metadata for each note.
• Vertical Preview Pane — In Mixed and Thumbnail modes, provides a big preview pane with live search results.

Want to give Evernote a try? I have 19 Evernote invitations for the first 19 commenters who ask for one politely.

Update: All of the invitations were swallowed up quickly by a group of very polite readers! Thanks for your comments and have fun with Evernote!

Update 2: Thanks to Evernote, I have a huge number of invitations available for TUAW readers. Leave a comment and try out Evernote.

Popularity: 8% [?]