Here is a summary of some recent highlights in the software world of Mac.

Bumpercar 2.0: Bumper has a minor upgrade this week, in itself not worth writing up. However, this reminded me to put a plug in for Bumpercar. I consider it an essential program if you have kids in your house. The way I use it is I have a logon on my iMac for the kids, and when goes into the kids user account Bumpercar launches automatically. You can define settings by your kids ages, I'm still on the "preschool" setting which is wonderful.

BumperCar: the Mac OS X Web browser just for kids. Offering unparalleled content-control and customization features, BumperCar is the most powerful Web browser for concerned educators and parents on the Macintosh.

ffmpegX 0.0.9x: ffmpegX is what I lovingly refer to as my video toolbox. It is a great tool for converting video. The author of ffmpegX, Major, has done a very commendable job in both offering a great deal of controls and settings in the program while keeping it easy to use and navigate through. I do have a short list of suggestions on how to improve and make this an even better video utility, but it's pretty darned useful as is. By the way, this is about the fastest encoder I've run across.


Microsoft Messenger 6: I have a several contacts who use Messenger exclusively, and it's a pretty good IM, especially on Windows. This marks the introduction of Messenger as a Universal Binary on the Mac. While Messenger now has ties to Microsoft Live there doesn't seem to be many changes to the actual GUI. An item of particular interest though, I was scouring a blog post on Microsoft today which talked about this new release of Messenger, and it sounds like AV is likely to be introduced on the Mac version of Messenger sooner than later. It will be really great to be able to have AV chats to Windows Messenger users. Now how about that UB version of Remote Desktop...


Apple's iTunes 7.0.1: While I have had no issue with the recently introduced iTunes 7 myself, I'm particularly troubled that Apple released this new version of iTunes and so many people seem to be having troubles with it. My hopes is that this is not a trend, and that Apple releases more applications without thoroughly debugging them. There is a large software company in Redmond Washington which has already perfected this habit, let's not infringe on them when it comes to releasing software that isn't ready for public consumption.

Apple's Aperture 1.5: Not more than a few months ago the Apple Rumormill was positive that Apple was disbanding the Aperture team and getting ready to abandon the application. Overall it has received very high marks from indepth reviews. As a newcomer to this space it seems to me that Apple has done a fantastic job in a short amount of time. I use and very much enjoy iPhoto, but I would dearly love have the money to buy Aperture, and the training to use it effectively. Most likely I'll wait for iPhoto'ture... aka iPhoto7, or maybe iPhoto8 or 9... etc. Editing images is an area where I think iPhoto needs improvement, and in using the industry standard IPTC tags, both items Aperture does of course.

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