Journal: News & Comment

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Still Life is a Mac OS X application that lets you take still photos and create compelling pan-and-zoom and transition effects with them. It's a bit similar to Apple's "Ken Burns Effect" in iPhoto and iMovie, but you have far more control. The gallery shows you some examples.

I like programs like this one, that strive to do one thing very well. As Sebastien, who told me about it, said, "You can do this sort of stuff in [Adobe] After Effects, but it's a pain in the butt."

Not to mention that After Effects costs nearly 30 times as much money.

In a similar vein, the new table tool in the Nisus Writer Express 2.0 word processor is brilliant. It's visual, Mac-like, fast, and it works, much better than Microsoft Word's pencil-like table-drawing tool.

UPDATE: Other elegant tools: webkit2png (full-length browser window screenshots, even if they're longer than your screen, from the command line), Pyramid (mind-mapping/charting—see review). Plus, how about this cool idea of tattooing images of extinct species on your body?

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