At the risk of sounding like a complete CenterStage fanboy, I want to point you to the new Demo PDF booklet that they have put together.

Stylish! Beautiful! I'm getting really anxious to see CenterStage hit 1.0 because I love the look and feel of what this team is doing.

Consider how poorly documented most software is, they guys are doing it right. And CenterStage can also be run on an AppleTV, which is exactly how I would run it. On a side note, lets hope that a remote with an alpha/numeric keypad comes out for the AppleTV, entering text is otherwise very cumbersome. From the online Demo, and this Demo PDF I have to say that I am extremely excited to see how CenterStage is developing. I'm just praying for a kickass DVR integration to round out the offering.

From TUAW. very interesting that the DRM free iTunes tracks contain the purchasers name in them! DRM may be gone, but there are some traces in the songs. I'm sure this can be stripped out somehow, but the data is there from iTunes.

Sure, you can now download music from the iTunes store without DRM but that doesn't mean you should just willy nilly start sharing that music with your friends. For one thing, it's illegal. For another, your account information is embedded into that m4a music file. Don't believe me? Try this yourself.

1. Launch Terminal. You'll need to be comfortable at the command line to perform this check.

2. Navigate to one of your iTunes plus downloads. If you have a US iTunes account, you can download the iTunes plus "Ooh La" single of the week.

3. Use the UNIX "strings" command to look at the text in your data and grep to search for your name. e.g.
strings 01\ Ooh\ La.m4a | grep name
Alternatively, open all the strings in TextEdit:
strings 01\ Ooh\ La.m4a | open -f.

Bottom line: DRM-free doesn't mean that Apple suddenly supports piracy.

I'm a fan of media (music, movies / videos / TV), and interested in better ways to consume my media. Before AppleTV there was very little in terms of a "Mac Media Center", and I argue that without a fully functioning DVR and better codec support that the AppleTV doesn't go very far in satisfying this need.

CenterStage is an aggressive Mac Media Center project that I've briefly mentioned before. The team is coming close to releasing a new alpha so the excitement and tension mounts (I'm teasing.) But honestly, this looks like a really promising interface. There is a new demo of CenterStage released, I'm hosting a copy of it on my site for your viewing pleasure, and to help offload a little traffic from them. Do watch the interface if you are interested in this space at all, CenterStage is quickly become a really impressive interface - I think it far exceeds the AppleTV interface. While the TV function isn't ready for demonstrations, it will have TV functions via the Elgato EyeTV Hybrid device. I'm not sure how it will integrate into CenterStage as far as the GUI and DVR abilities, but it's a start. For me to be seriously interested it's going to have to be a far better DVR than the EyeTV Hybrid can offer.

My fingers crossed, this is shaping up nicely.

You can check out the demo video here.



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I am a big fan of RapidWeaver, I use it for both MacSeven and my personal website. RapidWeaver (RW) allows to very quickly and easily build an entire website yet it is not a GUI design like iWeb. With RW you enter all of your information more in a form like environment, choose your theme, hit publish and presto it's done. There are GUI pages, and a great add-on called Blocks, but for blogging and photo type pages the stock RW style of entry is great and very efficient.

Ok, that was a 2 second reason why I like RW. Now for what bothered me this past week.

I have paid for RW, I think it was 3.2 when I bought it. A couple of days ago RW 3.6 came out and it has some really nice upgrades that I'm happy to see. It turns out that RW 3.6 is a $25 upgrade unless you have purchased 3.51 in which case it is a free upgrade. In general I don't like when there is a cost to upgrade unless it's a full version up grade, e.g.: 3.6 in my opinion should be a free upgrade from any 3.x version, and 4.0 should be a paid upgrade. You may or may not agree with my feeling on this, and that's fine - it's just my opinion. I actually paid the $25 to upgrade, I'm not thrilled about it, but I want to take advantage of the upgrades to I'm paying the price - after all in the scheme of things, $25 isn't too big of an amount to get me all worked up.

Here's what really bothers me about the $25 upgrade for RW 3.6. In recent months and weeks RealMacSoftware (makers of RW) have had RW on sale at places like MacUpdate Promo and MacZot, they have also given away a lot of free versions of 3.5. Then lo and behold it turns out to move up from 3.5 to 3.6 there is a $25 upgrade fee. Certainly somebody who got a free version of 3.5 can continue to use it, they are not forced to upgrade. But it smells sleazy to me to tempt people with discounted versions of 3.5 and even free versions to then tell them that they have to pay to upgrade to the next dot release.

I still like RW, I support the company, but I really question recent events / promotions of RW. I feel like they lured people in and then slapped them with an upgrade fee, and it doesn't sit well with me.




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iTunes TV shows cost to much for you? Quality too low? Ok with the illegal act of downloading TV shows via BitTorrent? Then TVShows is for you!

TVShows is a helper application for the Mac that automatically grabs your shows for you, in Tivo speak, it's a season pass that works via bittorrent. TVShows doesn't do the actual downloading, it hands off the task to your preferred BitTorrent client. There is some intelligence to TVShows in regards to what it is supposed to download, and what is available - it will loosen the restrictions if it doesn't find exactly what you want (quality settings) in a reasonable time, and it will download the next best alternative. I've tried it out and it works really well. Wait, I mean, people have told me that it works better than they expected.

If, like me, you have epileptic seizures at even the thought of having to watch commercials, then this is even sweeter because the torrent rips of TV shows on the net have all of the commercials stripped out already.

All popular (and many not so popular) series are listed, you go through and select which ones you want to snag, and set your criteria and off it goes and does its thing. No more checking and rechecking to see if a show is available for download, TVShows snags it as soon as it's available. TVShows also tracks which show you've most recently downloaded and only grabs new material.

I don't have an AppleTV but think it would be cool if there were an option to feed this into iTunes for your aTV automatically.



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I recently did a post regarding transfer speeds of FireWire 400, USB2, and gigabit Ethernet. The application I searched out and found to help me with the timing is a really helpful stopwatch application, Timer by Apimac.

The program is very easy to use, self explanatory. There are three main functions, Stopwatch timer, Countdown timer, and an alarm clock. Hard to not recommend this, and at the price of Free, you have nothing to lose.

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I appreciate useful and well designed widgets. Here are two great ones from Interdimension. They are free, donations accepted.

Interdimension has 6 widgets in total at this time, check out their website for details on them all. I'm going to show two of them, my favorites.

GAS WIDGET

I always pay attention to gas prices, especially now that gas is at astronomical prices. This Gas Price widget shows you the cheapest gas stations in your area.

File Shredder

Some times you want to securely delete a file so that it can't be recovered, maybe it's that digital pay stub with your pay information, or that incriminating picture... Regardless what it is, File Shredder Widget is a super simple and effective way to securely delete a file.

Click the image below for a move showing it in action.

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I've been on my iMac at home for almost a year and a half (after switching from the dark, evil, Windows XP world.)

Just this past week I realized that when I drag a URL from Camino's addressbar onto my desktop, that the resulting file is a Webloc file. On a Windows machine it would produce a URL file.

I realized when I send a URL file in an email to a friend and they said "what the hell is this Webloc file?"

Of course you can always paste a URL into an email or document, but there are times when you want or need a file. Luckily there is a great little utility, WeblocMaker, to convert URL files on your mac, you can put in the URL and a title and it will create it, or you can drop a Webloc file onto it, and it will read the URL.



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I follow the Mac Media Interface apps, CenterStage is one that shows a lot of promise, though it is still early in it's development. But a fresh release is due very soon.

Here's the info:

We are almost there. Almost ready to provide you with the most stable and usable version of CenterStage to date. Almost ready to show you what the future look of this project will be.

The animation above gives a brief glimpse into one of the more exciting things we are preparing to preview and I hope you will be pleasantly surprised soon. All of us on the project are bubbling over with excitement which has spilled over onto the forums on occasion.

For those of you who download and check the Nightly Builds religously you will have seen that CenterStage is taking some giant strides in getting the 'core' features of the application in place. That work is nearly there and we are in the process of finalising, wrapping things up and getting things primed for release. It will be a giant leap beyond our last public release and we can get things in place and plan for the Beta!

Once you have played around with the soon to be released 0.6.2 Alpha (Requested documentation included!), you will also have the opportunity to browse around the site and finally learn the direction this project is going...with plenty of visual material to feast on.

Months of work are coming together, it should be very exciting and we hope you will be as excited as we are...

David McLeod (Mucx)


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Streamer provides the ability to listen to Internet Radio through your AppleTV. It works by acting as a wrapper for MPlayer (the popular Unix media player). Additional functionality has been planned, and will be introduced in new versions.

This is still in beta, but an encouraging new development for the AppleTV nonetheless.

Streamer


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The current version of iTunes, 7.1.1, has been cracked by the creators of QTFairUse6. QTFairUse6 allows for you to strip your iTMS-purchased songs of their nasty DRM. Currently, the software is only for Windows, so us Mac OS X users will have to wait until someone makes a version for us. Chances are Apple has already been informed and iTunes 7.1.2 is in the works as an update. So if you hate DRM and want to be a pirate, download QTFairUse6 and get strippin’. Official Site/Downloads

From CrunchGear


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I've got a ton of Joost invites available.

You can check out my 5 minute look at Joost here.

Send me an email and give me your:

First Name
Last Name
Email

(I need that info to send the Joost Invite)


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I just recently started using Mozy, and I can tell you that from my experiences with it so far, it's fantastic!

Mozy has clients for either Mac or Windows. The Windows version is further along in development and it currently more advanced, but the Mac version is fully functioning and definitely worth using today.

For the price of $0.00 per month (yeah, free) you get a 2GB account. For $4.95 per month you get an unlimited account - fantastic deal.

Mozy is designed to be a backup system, not just web storage. You define what you want to backup, and when, and it takes care of the rest. With a 2GB account you'll probably need to pick and choose so that you don't go over the storage limit. It works really well.

If you think you can benefit from it, absolutely give it a try, and I'd appreciate it if you sign up with Mozy from this link, the referral will give both of us 256 megs storage over the standard 2GB.

Thanks!

Here are some screenshots:

MENU BAR ICON

STATUS WINDOW




CONFIGURATION SCREEN





Don't wait, sign up for a free account today.

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What fantastic news, SUN is dedicating some resources to the effort of bringing a native port of OpenOffice.org to the Mac. Many of us use Microsoft Office 2004, other of us use NeoOffice, OpenOffice is available on the Mac but only via X11. The efforts to bring a Mac port of OOo to the Mac has been underway and now Sun Microsystems is putting some muscle to this movement.

Read about here on the GullFOSS blog. These guys are already jumping right in, here is a weekly status report. The Mac Port team of OOo just recently published a timeline, hopefully they will revise it soon with the new additions to the team helping out.

The developers had already planned to have a presence at WWDC and have a beta available before year end (an Alpha available before June) hopefully we'll see that timeline met or beat with this additional help. And maybe even more a robust offering than otherwise.

Great news.

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My iMac 20" (Core Duo Intel Mac) has Firewire 400 ports, and USB ports. No Firewire 800 or eSATA ports.

While the theoretical limits of eSATA are extremely high, in reality it's faster than Firewire 800, anywhere from the same speed to about 35% faster depending on what test you look at. I was wondering how my interfaces compare for speed so I did a little test.

My home network includes my iMac and a Windows XP Media Center 2005 computer. These two computers are connected via (2) 100' ethernet cables and a NetGear gigabit router.

I wanted to see how fast my Firewire 400 external drives compared to saving files over the gigabit ethernet network to my Media Center computer. I also ran my external drives in USB2 mode just out of curiosity, I don't ever run my externals via the USB2 interface, I only did this for a comparison.

There is a certain amount of overhead in moving files, so I ran the speed tests on a single large file, and then next test was on thousands of small files.

Here are the results of the single 3.83GB file transfer:

The gigabit ethernet connected drive actually tied my external Firewire 400 external drive to the second. This rather surprised me, I just assumed a locally connected harddrive would be much faster than what is essentially a NAS drive connected via gigabit ethernet. While the Gigabit and Firewire 400 drives each took 165 seconds to complete the transfer, the USB 2 connection took 280 seconds. In other terms, the Gigabit and Firewire 400 connections moved the data at an effective 23.77 megabytes per second, while the USB 2 connection moved the data at an effective 14.00 megabytes per second.


The next test was moving 3,114 jpg files which was 2.21GB:

This time the Firewire 400 drive took a slight advantage over the gigabit ethernet connected drive, and the USB 2 drive still lagged considerably.
The Firewire 400 drive moved data at 19.67 MB per second.
The Gigabit ethernet drive moved data at 18.55 MB per second.
The USB 2 drive moved data at 11.61 MB per second.


You can see there was a lot of overhead in moving thousands of files versus a single file, here's how the three interfaces transfer speeds were reduced with the overhead of more files to deal with instead of 1 large file:

Transfer rate slowed down by:
Firewire 400 17%
Gigabit 22%
USB 2 17%
The external drive slowed down by the same percentage regardless of being connected via Firewire 400 or USB 2, the gigabit connection suffered a little worse with the overhead, but still turned in very respectable transfer rates and nearly equaled the Firewire 400 connection.

This tells me that if you like a clean and quite setup, a NAS box or Ubuntu file server in your closet, connected to your Mac via gigabit ethernet will offer you very respectable transfer speeds. Firewire 800 and eSATA are even faster, and the gigabit wouldn't compete with them, but many of us don't have those as an option anyway.



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Jump on this before they shut it down. RapidWeaver for free!

Details here.

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I recently posted about a great utility to convert MKV files to XviD AVI's.

The program has now reached 1.0 status. It's a really convenient tool for getting MKV into a more usable format.

Given that this program exists, I must not be the only one that hates MKV.

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Flip4Mac I'm sure you know, is THE way to play WMV on your Mac.

A new Beta was released, you can grab it here.

Updates / Additions:
-Added support for Windows Media 9 Advanced playback.
-Added support for reclaiming file types assumed by other applications.
-Improved ASX handling.
-Improved support for MPEG 4 playback.
-Resolved some issues related to 2pass VBR encoding.
-Resolved manual activation issue.
-Resolved Helix streaming server playback issue.
-Resolved Save as and Save As QuickTime Movie issue on OS 10.3.9/QT 7.1.2 systems.
-Resolved potential for crash when playing back files that have been deliberately modified/damaged.
-Improved support for installation using Apple Remote Desktop

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The new release of Handbrake finally came out the other day. MediaFork soon will be a forgotten memory, the great news is that Handbrake moves forward.

Visit Handbrake's website.

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Check out Previous posts on MacSeven.com

MacSeven Posts from April 2007

MacSeven Posts from March 2007

MacSeven Posts from February 2007

MacSeven Posts from January 2007

MacSeven Posts from December 2006

MacSeven Posts from November 2006

MacSeven Posts from October 2006

MacSeven Posts from September 2006

MacSeven Posts from August 2006