Freecall VoIP calls in Mac OS

For those of you that use VoIP software for calls (international or not) I must say that I’ve been using my Frecall account with Express Talk for Mac, and it’s working nicely. I was using Freecall over Windows because they only provide a Windows softphone. But now that I found the alternative, I’ll avoid the rebooting every time I needed to make a VoIP call.

As I said here before, I use Frecall because it’s the cheapest I’ve found for my necessities. But you can always try Voipbuster – brother of Freecall – or other. There is Gizmo Project that supports all major OSs as I remember. And then you have also Jajah, which is supposed to be the “easiest” as it does not need us to install any software, we just need your web browser to sign for an account and to start communication phone-to-phone (initiated over the web). Still, Jajah price for my international calls are higher than Frecall.

Anyway, returning to The Express Talk softphone, I can say it is free, it has a Mac version and we can configure 6 different lines – this means we can have accounts in 6 different SIP providers.

If we want to configure our Freecall (or Voipbuster) account we just need to open the application Preferences panel, then click on Lines, and use our username and password with sip.voiparound.com (or sip.voipbuster.com) as our server.

Hope this information is helpful for anyone. Let me know.

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Some fun on my Mac (and another PS)

Lately, I spend a lot of time at home, playing with my little “earthquake”, cooking, cleaning and of course, surfing the web.

When my child and me have some computer time, I love to take pictures with PhotoBooth. As our photo camera died some months ago, and as we need to buy more important things for house now, we don’t have a device for my loved photography activity. But with the built-in iSight camera and PhotoBooth, we can have some fun taking pictures (yes, must be in front of computer), that can be complete normal, but then you have maybe 10 effects to take your picture: mirror, x-ray, sepia, pop, and more. And the “3, 2, 1, shot” makes you feel like your inside and actual “photo booth”.

Then today I found FunBooth. Don’t ask me how because I can’t remember what I was doing when it came in my way. Well, as you can read in the name of this application, it’s about fun pictures, because it let you “disguise” or create a personality for your picture. Trial version, but price is as little as €7.31.

And I love card games, tetris and cross-words. And I found for me, Cubes (tetris-like) and Freesolitaire from GrassGames.com, they’re not too stylish about looks but they’re fine to play. I also like Otis from Wonder Warp Software. And this tetromino and very good looking app called Quinn from simonhaertel.de.

PS: Remember when I said that I keep Windows because of three applications and one of them called Freecall, for VoIP calls? Well, I just found that I can use my Freecall service (account) in any SIP softphone for Mac OS!!! I tried X-Lite from CounterPath, but didn’t like it’s visual. And I tried ExpressTalk for Mac from nchsoftware.com and works fine, and also it’s visual is easier and more Mac style. I’m so happy I can make my calls without rebooting in a different OS!!!

My little girl and my Mac (and a PS)

I’m the proud mom of an pretty and intelligent little girl 19 months old. She’s used to the computer since birth, because I communicate with my family in Peru via webcam and she loves the keyboard.

Well, the thing is, that sometimes I leave the mac to go anywhere in the apartment and my lovely and informatic girl takes my seat and starts hitting the keys. So I went out there to search for something to entertain her. And I found some nice applications for mac.

Giggles Computer Funtime for Baby (for Mac and Windows, english and spanish) has three different themes: shapes, animals, and numbers & letters. There’s Baby Banger but it’s not universal since version 1.2.1 is from 2003. Also, there’s MiniKidsGames that freeware at sourceforge.net (if you like, yo can make a donation). And last but not least, there’s Baby Shield (only english).

UPDATE 29/Feb/2008: I found AlphaBaby. Lots of fun. There's also Baby Safe, has a 15-day-trial and cost $20. In Pure Mac : Kids you can find a list with more software for kids.

PS: the new iMacs are already out, as well as iLife ’08 that is €79 and includes iPhoto, iWeb, iMovie, iDVD and Garage Band. Also “.mac” has been upgraded with 10 times more space and lots of nice features integrated with iLife. For what I saw, iWeb ’08 is more powerful and rocks.

There’s always more on the web....

Looking around to know when iWeb 2.0 will be released (because I’m pretty curious about all the capabilities they are talking about and I’m waiting for this before I finally decide between iWeb and Sandvox), when I found more information on what else you can for now use for iWeb. As for create “multi-sites” there is iWebSites.

Also found another web creation application called Blog.Mac at Largemouth Software, and for what I read it may serve to publish to .mac and not mac sites, although I found the appearance of all the sample sites quite boring.

There’s one open-source multi-platform application (not mac intel ready, though) called Nvu. If you are interested in something between MS Frontpage or Adobe Dreamweaver, take your chance. I must say it’s not the friendly iWeb kind application, and you may need HTML and that kind of knowledge.

Looking around for more

I’m always curious so I kept looking around for more. I found that there’s an script called iWeb Optimiz(o)r that converts all png to jpg and, in a very big site means a significant reduction of the size of image files and time to load when viewing the pages.

And I found that you can have 5 more SV designs if you subscribe for the newsletter, there are two companies that sell a few SV designs, and that you can tweak designs with the SVDesignMiner (20 days demo, €11).

I must say that the SVDesignMiner lets you change most of the things that makes part of a design like the images that you can edit with any image editor, but for some things you must know a bit of HTML and more complicated stuff like CSS. But if you know how to edit images, you can make your own design based in any of the provided templates.

And the same team that created the SVDesignMiner had created the RVThemeMiner before. They also have one application called Camaleon, to change themes and templates for other webcreation stuff. You can check it out in To The Point Software.

And then you still have three more programs to try. They are Flux (€36), Goldfish (€30), Freeway Express (€69) and Freeway Pro (€195). So choices are a lot.

Rapidweaver and Sandvox tests

Yesterday I tried the Realmac software Rapidweaver (RW) and the Karelia Sandvox (SV) for website and webpages creation.

I started with RW demo, only 3 pages to publish (you can publish to –mac or to FTP and more). It’s a nice application, easy –but not as easy as I thought-, has a lot of themes and they’re quite easy to customize. I found nice the side bar but after creating a blog page and a photo album page, I got a bit disorientated as I couldn’t find the way to show the same sidebar from the homepage in these ones. I also find that you need a lot of add-ons, snippets and plug-ins for things like inserting boxes for raw HTML code (like the adsense or the counter code). For me, it was a bit difficult to re-create my iWeb site in short time, one day spent but the result was not satisfactory. To have a collection of photo albums you need Collage. To add buttons you need the Blocks. And for integrated sitemap creation you may need Loghound Sitemap.

So I move on to test SV. I must say it was pretty easy to use and re-create the iWeb site in about 4 hours. Themes, here called Designs, look nice and some look very professional. After choosing a design you can’t customize it as in the other applications but I didn’t care, I found them well built so for me, they don’t require more personalization. For professional web designers this is a minus. Anyway, I loved the features. The collections have the blog and the photo blog and also the photo albums. You have the text pages and more pages to insert. The pagelets, these are very nice features for the sidebar. And if you want to add raw HTML and some advanced features like integrated Google Analytics and Webmasters, you can go Pro. Take in account that the demo version only let you publish the homepage (to .mac and FTP or other).

All of this makes you think about Money. Using a demo made you able to use most of the add-ons for free (for a while), but when you calculate the cost of things together you have at least: RW € 38.04; YourHead (3rd party) applications Blocks € 18.20 and Collage € 7.26; and Loghound (3rd party) Sitemap € 7.73. Total amount €63,50. And you have some more that you’ll find nice, like Accordion or Lockdown, adding some €18 more.

As for SV, you can have it for approximately € 36. And if you need the Pro features, get it for € 58 approx.

So for me, I think I will enroll the list of Sandvox users, that’s if the next iWeb does not meet my spectations (it’s supossedly to come out with the next iLife more or less at the same time as Mac OS Leopard)