Isolator is a rather simple Freeware application that helps you gaining focus through covering everything on your screen except for the task at hand. This allows to concentrate on what you’re doing instead of repeated distractions by means of IM, Twitter, Mail or others.

If you’re in the market for a easy-to-use website creation software, you should head over to TUAW, as they’ve post a review of the new RapidWeaver 4. I’ve had version 3 courtesy of MacHeist 1 and liked it alot. Judging by the review over at TUAW, RapidWeaver 4 seems to be a great enhancement to a already incredible software.

The Blender Foundation just released the newest Version of the popular and very powerful open source 3d Modeller “Blender 3D”. The work on their second open source movie “Big Buck Bunny” has resulted in a new version with a greatly improved feature set. There’s a new “Hair and Fur” System, with astonishing capabilities, a completely rewritten Particle system, Cloth Simulation, improved Render Baking, Approximate Ambient Occlusion (awesome speed & quality), raytraced soft shaows, and much much more. So if you’re into 3D, or just want to experiment with it, you should definately try Blender, since it’s not only free but also very competetive. 

In order to create stunning HDR Pictures, one needs a tool which allows to combine pictures of different exposures into one composition. This is possible with Photoshop or Gimp but way more difficult than achieving the same effect with a dedicated software. The standard tool for this task is Photomatix Pro. However, with Hydra there’s a new contender, and it supports integration in Apple Aperture (although still in beta). So if you’re interested in creating stunning HDR Pictures, you might hop over to www.creaceed.com/hydra and see if it’s the right tool for you. Hydra costs $59.95

There’s one thing about Spotlight that seems to bug everyone who can in the one or other way falls into the category of ‘Pro’ or ‘Above normale’ users. It’s the fact that the actual Spotlight interface is rather limitless if it comes to tracking down a specific file fast. There’s so much meta-information connected with each file that additional search criteria like for example ‘Type of the file’, ‘Modification Date’, ‘Size of the File’ could really help in identifying the wanted file quickly. Sadly, most of this comfort is only available via the normal ‘Finder Search’ Dialog, and even there it’s rather awkward to use.

Enter HoudahSpot, a new Application from Houdah Software, which serves just the purpose of enhacing the Spotlight-Interface. I just tried it and I’ve to admit that I’m pleasantly surprised, the interface is quite easy to understand, and offers some nice features like for example a meta-inspector or a preview-pane for the result-list. HoudahSpot allows to set up quite complex queries through a simple interface, where complex queries refers to cascaded And/Not/Or logical conditions (example: (if a and not (b or (c and d) ) ) ). They offer a free demo which is limited to 30 queries, so if you think that you could benefit from an enhanced Spotlight-Interface (thus leading to even faster search results) you should really try this application.

NOTE: If you’re seeing this on June 16, 2006 head over to MacZOT, you might be able to get a Free copy of HoudahSpot