DoubleTake. A recent MacWorld article (Software Treats, August 2007) put me onto the excellent DoubleTake, a shareware program that enables the stitching together of multi-shot panorama photographs. I’ve accumulated quite a number of these over the years, but never had the patience for manual assembly. DoubleTake takes away most of the grief: It is extremely easy to use, with direct drag and drop from the Finder or iPhoto (or who knows else), live previews of changes in scale, orientation and exposure (among others – but no independent colour adjustments that I can see), and the ability to save into a number of formats. Its matching is remarkably accurate in most instances, and if it misjudges, then all you have to do is drag the added photograph into rough alignment and let the software refine. I’ve now put together 2 – 7 photograph panoramas, most in well under fifteen minutes. I’m putting them on a separate page, in the form of iframes to allow for scrolling of the wider pans.

Skim. Courtesy of MacResearch, I discovered Skim, which satisfied a yearning for something that would let me annotate PDFs on screen in the same way Adobe Acrobat does (which I don’t have on Mac). The program is freeware, and under active development (having reached v 0.6.1). It has replaced Preview as my default PDF reader.

PDFLab. I take full advantage of the ‘Print to PDF’ functionality in OS X to reduce the amount of paper I print out. Periodically I would go in search of a means of assembling multiple PDFs into one file, encounter intimidating strings of command-line instructions which would induce me to back away slowly, and resolve that I could live with numbering them sequentially and sticking them in one folder until I had the hour I would need to work out and document the methods described. MacWorld to the rescue again, by introducing me to PDFLab. Again, it really is as simple as dragging and dropping, or clicking add, setting files in order, hitting the appropriate button, and typing in a filename. I’m sure it’s invoking all the command-line magic, but it certainly didn’t take me an hour to produce my first PDF!