Need to grab something from you Mac, TextSnipe it

Mac's have come with a screenshot utility for quite a while (surprisingly called Screenshot), it's pretty useful and allows capturing the complete screen, a window or a (selectable) area. It can do this as an image or even a video.

While active it takes screen focus so you are unable to interact with the screen, so there's a nice feature allowing a grab in 5 or 10 seconds so setup the grab area, interact with whatever's needed and then screenshot will grab an image (this works well for grabbing drop down menus and other such things).

 The above image is a screen grab of the dropdown menu of TextSniper.app, While Screenshot grabs an image or video, TextSniper grabs the content of the highlighted area and saves it to the clipboard.

Grab the screen around some text (that text can be on an image, PDF document or anything) and whatever is there will be text in the clipboard. Just open your favourite editor and paste and it's all there. It will also do the same for a QRcode, again just bound the QRcode on screen and the contents are saved in the clipboard (useful for reading things like the UK NHS Covid QRcode - your phone will just say it's unidentified content), this will also decode barcodes as well as QRcodes.

TextSniper will also grab stuff from a connected iPhone or iPad (needs to be connected by USB or WiFi) and then you can take a photo, scan documents or add a sketch.

If Text to Speech is clicked, then when text is captured as well as being copied to the clipboard it will be read (playback speed is selected in Preferences).

This may be one of the most useful utilities out there, it can be purchased directly from the TextSniper.app for $6.99 or from the Apple Mac Store though the price goes up to $9.99 (and may vary with local pricing). Highly recommended.

Artrage 4 hits the streets

Artrage has released version 4 of its painting program, available for both Apple's MacOS X and Microsoft's Windows 8.

If it's run on on a Surface Pro tablet it makes full use of the touch capabilities and of course it fully uses pen systems on non-touch systems.

The package is easy to use (even for a non artist) and it doesn't take much time to get used to the various controls and painting techniques such as smearing and blending of oil paints and watercolours that flow into each other.

There's also nice features such as stencils (which can be painted on, but the paint only applies to the empty spaces on the stencil) and stickers that are just stuck onto a painting.

A nice feature is tracing where an image is loaded as the background - but not as part of the image being painted - and then it can be traced. When it's saved, it's only the tracing and not the original image, though the same process could be achieved using layers.

Artrage also fully supports Wacom features available with some of their stylus' such as Pressure, Tilt, Barrel Rotation, and the Airbrush Wheel.

It's available for $49.90 from the Artrage Store. There is also a version available for Apple's iPhone/iPad.

Apple release their tablet or is it a sanitary pad

Apple has released their long rumoured tablet (well announced it anyway, it's not actually available for a couple of months in WiFi only versions or 3 months for the 3G version) and it's actually called the iPad.

It comes with an Apple designed 1GHz CPU called the A4 (using the skills of the chip design company Apple bought recently) which is ARM based. Apple don't specify how much memory (RAM) it comes with, but storage comes in 16/32/64 GB of Flash.

The screen is a very crisp 9.7" LED backlit IPS display which is of course (multi) touch sensitive. Battery life is 10 hours of use and it comes with a 30pin dock connector. WiFi is 802.11n.

Unfortunately the iPad is more like a big iPhone rather than a MacBook and uses the iPhone OS. Developers need to download the new iPhone SDK version 3.2 to take advantage of the new features and directly support the iPad (it will run existing iPhone/iPod Touch apps out the box). It syncs with a PC/Mac using iTunes just like an ipod Touch.

Apple have released a version of iWork for the iPad that's compatible with the Mac versions but optimised for a touch screen. iWork actually means Numbers, Pages and Keynote and the iPad versions cost $9.99 each available from the App store.

The iPad itself costs $499 for the 16GB, $599 for the 32GB and $699 for the 64GB. 3GB versions come in at $130 more (which is $629, $729 and $829 respectively). There's not yet any European pricing or availability.

As a suped-up iPhone/iPid Touch, the iPad also doesn't have multitasking capability (yet) and there's also no on-board camera though these can be added as accessories through the dock (a Keyboard/iPad dock will be available on launch). Once nice feature is the iBook store which allows iPad users to download books, papers and magazines. The eBook element of the iPad has been done nicely so tapping the right of the screen flips the page forward - this might actually be the killer app, though you could also buy a Kindle (who now also allow writing apps) or a Nook.