Auction sniping is the process of watching a timed online auction (such as on eBay), and placing a winning bid at the last possible moment (often seconds before the end of the auction), giving the other bidders no time to outbid the sniper. Some bidders do this manually, and others use software designed for the purpose. A bid sniper is a person or software agent who performs auction sniping.

When it comes to eBay I sell far more often than I buy. Recently I was bidding on an electric automatic antenna for my car, and I was outbid with mear seconds to go before the end of the auction. I was sniped! This prompted me to look into applications to help do this myself from my Mac. There are several pay software packages out there but fortunately their is also a nice donation application to do this, JBidwatcher. In fact it is a multi-platform application, but I only tried out the Mac version.

Just tonight I had an auction to try it out on, and it performed flawlessly, outbiding my nearest competitor with seconds to go before the end of the auction.

The software is so simple and easy to setup that it doesn’t require my assistance in retelling how I set it up. I will say that while the GUI is not hideous, it certainly isn’t a pretty Mac application that we’ve become so spoiled with as of late. It has a look and feel of an old web browser with newer icons to me.

If you purchase goods from eBay this is most definitely worth your time.

I'm really enjoying the new interface on my AppleTV. I rented a movie last night to see how fast it downloaded and it was quick. I got to 2% downloaded in about a minute and a popup appeared saying that it was able to begin playback. This was an SD movie not HD, I'll test HD soon enough.

Aside from buying HD content on your AppleTV with AC3/Dolby Digital soundtracks, how else can you get great 5.1 audio on to your AppleTV?

Well there are two ways already. VisualHub has been updated to 1.31 which is able to include AC3 5.1 audio into the AppleTV files that it creates. I would assume this is mainly used for people who are downloading illegal MKV's off the internet and converting them for viewing on their AppleTV.

If you have a DVD collection that you've been waiting to convert for your AppleTV, and preserve the 5.1 audio, HandBrake now has some beta releases that can do just that!
WARNING: This is a beta build from the HandBrake SVN, and should be used for testing only - not production use.

Select your ISO or DVD source, then on the "Audio & SubTitles" tab, select Codecs: AVC/H.264 Video / AC3 Audio.

By the way, I highly recommend that you use Constant Quality with a setting of 66 instead of specifying a bitrate and either single or double pass settings.

NOTE: you will need to change the extension to M4V in order to play the files (or just save them to M4V in Handbrake instead of the MP4 default.)

You can download the beta build of HandBrake here.

MetaX seems to be tagging these files just fine, the cover art and other text info shows up for me great!

Recently a report came out showing Parallel's faster than Fusion running Windows XP by 17%, but keep in mind that Fusion can utilize both CPU's while Parallel's only uses one. My guess is that the benchmarks they used don't fully take this into account.

Nonetheless, many of us use and very much like Fusion. And right now (in the USA) you can pick it up on the cheap.

Fusion for only $32.49 after rebates from Buy.com.

Third Party Applications on the iPhone

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers’ hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once—provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones—this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.

Steve

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch. [Oct 17, 2007]

I did my first Keynote presentation the other day, then came the fateful moment... How was I going to play this on the Windows based Dell at school.

It turns out that Keynote does a bang up job of exporting a Keynote presentation to a Quicktime movie. The cool thing is that it acts much like it would playing it back in Keynote, you advance and back through the slides, all the effects how and everything. It's really pretty awesome. The only real downfall is that the files are much larger because it's a movie, and you can't quickly back up or go forward multiple slides.

If you want to check it out, here's a link to the Keynote Presentation that I did, I exported it to a small 320x240 size to keep it small, 7 megs. open the file and it'll start in Quicktime (Mac or Windows) hit enter or click on the screen to start it, you can keep clicking or use the right arrow key to advance, left arrow key to reverse.

HandBrake 0.9.1: Released!
"Mistakes? We don't make mistakes."
We're chagrined to announce the public release of HandBrake 0.9.1. Why chagrined? Because 0.9.0 wasn't as stable as it should have been, something 0.9.1 rectifies.
Download it now.
This minor update squashes a number of glaring bugs. Most notably, HandBrake will no longer hang at the end of encoding MKV files with chapter markers. This means the Animation, Bedlam, Constant Quality Rate, Deux Six Quatre, Film, and Television presets are now usable.
Additional improvements:

• Impressive performance enhancements
• Significant interface prettification (Mac more than Win)
• Color subtitles now show up in color
• Changing dimensions in Picture Settings no longer causes a crash (Mac)
• Forced subtitle support
• More robust exception handling (Win)
• Closing the main window no longer causes HandBrake to crash (Mac)
• Using "Slow" deinterlacing no longer doubles the chapter count.
• MPEG Stream support is now case-insensitive (.VOB as well as .vob, etc) and more compatible
• No more error messages sent to standard out instead of standard error
• Bigger buffer for the activity log (Mac)
• Proper display of fading subtitles
• On-completion options to shutdown, suspend, etc (Win)
• "Same as source FPS" now works correctly when the end-credits of a progressive film are interlaced.
• Add-to-queue fixed (Win)
• Target size fixed for the umpteenth time (Mac)

...and assorted other changes.
As always, for the complete list of changes, see the Trac.

Mahjong involves skill, strategy, and calculation, as well as a certain degree of luck. Depending on the variation which is played, luck can be anything from a minor to a dominant factor in success. In Asia, mahjong is also popular as gambling or computer games.

The object of the game is to build complete suits - or melds - usually of threes, from either 13 or 16 tiles. The first person to achieve this goal wins the game. The winning tile completes the player's set of either 14 or 17 tiles.

Mahjong games can be fun, unfortunately most of them are not free.

MyMahj is well rated over at MacUpdate, and is... Free!

I learned how IBM got behind LINUX in a big way when I read the book Wikinomics, which was a good but not great book in my opinion.

It looks like IBM is now getting into backing open source movements again as it starts to lend it's muscle, might, and money to the OpenOffice group.

This is fantastic news, and comes on the heals of the OpenDocument Format winning out over Microsoft. It certainly looks like the Open community is gaining ground in the Office environment. I for one am damn glad to see this happen.

More details on this news story available here from Yahoo.

Could Adobe be making the important first move into the world of online video and image applications, much the same way Google Doc's has for office type applications?

Adobe has confirmed that they are working on Photoshop Express, a free online edition of Photoshop. No this isn't full blown Photoshop, but is most likely going to be powerful enough for many users. Adobe has already got Premiere Express, but Photoshop Express is likely to be a much bigger hit.

I'll remain a little skeptical of this until I can try it, on my iMac I'm more than happy using SeaShore, an Aqua implementation of Gimp. I far prefer standard applications to online applications. However, I must say there can be great benefits to online applications, such as your data being retrievable from any place with internet access, and the ability to share and collaborate with others online, this can be very powerful.

Photoshop Express:

Premiere Express:

While I understand that people who were entrenched with iMovie HD 06 feel short-changed with timelines and audio capabilities in iMovie 08 being less robust or missing. However, I think most people will prefer to do their home movies and short movie projects with iMovie 08 over iMovie HD 06. And come on, if you really like iMovie HD 06 that much, it's still there for you to use it.

Here's a note from MacSeven reader Mark in Toronto regarding his personal experience with iMovie 08.

I finally took iMovie 8 out for a serious ride. This weekend I did 2 of the 3 HD video tapes from last months trip to Los Angeles, I made these into movies using iMovie HD 06 a few weeks ago, and now I'm redoing the videos in iMovie 08 for a direct comparison.

I have to say, I really love it.

iMovie 08 doesn’t have all the bells and whistles (where is the audio fade out that the end of a clip?), but it also doesn’t have the idiosyncrasy’s that iMovie HD 06 has. For example, have you ever reviewed your movie, and decided to drop a piece in, or trim a piece of footage in the start or middle only to have all the audio un-sync on the 20 clips that follow? (yes, I know about the “lock audio at playhead” setting, but this still happens). This morning before work I needed to tightened up a little spot on the PCHwy Scenery video. There were at least 30 clips after this edit point, as well as 2 and sometimes 3 audio tracks (with sound effects, music, track audio, etc) of sync’d video. I wanted to set it up to render while I’m at work, but I had to do this tweak, so I figure this would be a good test as I had 5 minute MAX to do everything. I sparked it up, found the 3 or 4 clips I wanted to modify and applied my deletes/changes. To my amazement, the entire rest of the video popped right into place instantly. We’re talking all the transitions, titling, audio… everything! I did a couple quick tests to verify, the hit “Share” and loaded my H.264 presets and began the render. The important thing is the working time on the project: Start time 7:25am, end time 7:30am.

Well done Cupertino

Roxio Toast Titanium 8 is a fabulous application. I am a registered user and I love it. However, another pretty impressive application is the freeware Burn. Think of it as the free version of Toast. It isn't as slick or as well tricked out, but it does work pretty damned well, and it's hard to argue with the price. So if you don't do a lot of burning, creating video or audio dvds and cds, then Burn may just be the ticket for you.

Burn is actively developed and updated, the most recent version 1.71U saw some nice improvements.

Burn can burn data discs in a variety of formats, it can create redbook and mp3 discs, it can re-encode your video into all video disc formats, mount images, and more.

We’re proud to announce the public release of HandBrake 0.9.0. Download it here.

This is a major release. The changes cannot really all be summed up, but here’s a try:

* User experience is improved through a re-envisioned Mac interface and a Windows interface that’s been rebuilt from the ground up.
* Picture quality is improved through better image scaling, better deinterlacing, new filters for denoising, deblocking, inverse telecine, and new presets devoted to high quality settings.
* Speed improvements due to updated copies of x264 and ffmpeg. This includes improved multi-threaded encoding for the iPod.
* Compatibility is improved through new presets for devices like the iPhone and PSP. As well, HandBrake now supports DTS as an audio source and has limited support for .VOB and .TS file containers as input. Most excitingly, HandBrake can now output to the Matroska (MKV) file container.
* Stability has been improved due to countless bug fixes. (Including audio drop and mp2 issues). Handbrake also has optional support for MP4 files larger than 4 gigabytes.

Uncle Walt [Mossberg] did a nice quick video review of Apple's newly updated iWork suite, now complete with a spreadsheet application.

He sums it up very nicely by saying that if you're a Mac user and you want a nice Office suite and you aren't primarily a power Office user, then iWork may well be a great option for you.

I tried TED, which stands for Torrent Edition Downloader, several years ago and at the time I wasn't very impressed. However, it has been making progress and is now at a stage where it warrants a serious look. TED is a Java app and works on OS X and Windows, Linux should be working if not now, soon.

Legalities aside, torrent versions of your favorite broadcast shows are great because they're commercial free and are highly compressed - most are HDTV sourced, some are even 720P these days (HD). When you add a show to TED it will begin looking for that edition, and all future shows, in other words it's does the equivalent of TiVo's Season Pass. And to avoid getting themselves in trouble, TED only downloads the .torrent file, but you can have it work with your torrent client of choice to actually download the torrent show.

Here's what TED looks like in your menubar



Here is the main window of TED




Here is the ADD show screen

The other Edit show screens are equally well done. You can also create a custom show setting if the one you want isn't in the predefined list, which is constantly updated - you can set your preferences to automatically update the show list. You can also create custom filters to help filter which specific torrent you want.

Take a look it it interests you.

One of the great features of Apple's iPhone is that it has Safari and can display any webpage. Nonetheless, optimized pages for the iPhone are a good thing and the newest update to RapidWeaver contains iPhone themes. I haven't had time to check it out myself yet, but it sounds interesting.

It's no secret what my opinion of Quicken for Mac is [pathetic]. Good news, I was able to get onto the beta for a Mac personal finance competitor - they have an all new version in the works, and I'm pleased to be on the team for it. I won't be able to discuss it as a part of the deal, but I'll tell what I can, when I can, cool?

I recently bought VMware's Fusion, it's currently 1/2 price, but will go to full price on Monday when it comes out of Beta.. You can purchase Fusion while it is still in Beta, before it goes retail, for half of it's regular $80 price. I went ahead and bought it today for $40. May as well take advantage and save a few dollars.

You say QuickSilver, I say LaunchBar baby!

We just were graced with an update to 4.3 - please excuse me while I revel in the new update.

LaunchBar is so much more than an application launcher, it is a true productivity and efficiency tool. Definitely check it out if you haven't already.

If your task at hand is to combine several PDF's into a single PDF, there are many [not very good] solutions.

A great solution to this task is Combine PDFs 2.1 from MonkeyBreadSoftware.

It allows you to drag and drop PDFs onto the application, re-arrange page, rotate, trim, crop and more before combining them into a single PDF. I've tried a few solutions before, but Combine PDFs is the best I've used yet.

Transmission has been my day to day BitTorrent client ever since I found it. It isn't as full featured (bloated) like Azureus is, but it worked great for most things.

All of a sudden Transmission has checked off two important features that I've been hoping would happen for a long time now. Creating torrents and selective downloads. These two new features can be found in the most recent build of Transmission, they warn that it may be unstable, but it's certainly working well for me.

If Transmission is your torrent client of choice then you know that it wasn't ever able to create torrents. Well that has now all changed.

I'm not sure if the news that uTorrent is heading for the Mac had any impact on these two features getting completed all of a sudden, I guess we'll never know - but whatever the reason I'm certainly very happy that we've got these features now.

You can see here that I've customized my icon bar to include Create [Torrent]

If you select Create [Torrent] here is the screen window you are presented

The next great feature that has been implemented is the ability to selectively download. Say a torrent has 3 files, 1, 2, and 3. And each is 1GB big, if you only need 2, then you would have previously had to wasted a lot of bandwidth and download all 3 files in the torrent - even though you only wanted file 2. Now you can selectively choose which files in the torrent you download. Additionally you can set priorities for individual files at Low, Normal, or High.


If you go to the Inspector window for a torrent that you are downloading, you will see checkboxes to the right of each file, you can uncheck the box if you do not want to download that file, additionally, there is a little pill looking icon if you mouseover the file, this is the priority setting.

Priority Setting & Selective File CheckBox

Now, more than ever, is the time to check out Transmission for ALL your torrent duties.
Admittedly, I do wish that Transmission were a single window application, not the main window for torrents and a separate window for Inspector information. I think a condensed version like they show now is good for some and maybe that should remain an option, but it would be really nice for many other people if they gave you more information on a single unified window. But I promise I won't complain about that what with the two nice gifts!

Latest Build, Home page.

The HDHomeRun device has been very well received. It's a dual tuner HD OTA, Over the Air, and unencrypted HD cable tuner. It is not a DVR device but can work with one. This tuner gets rave reviews, even saying that it is the best OTA tuner available.

I wrote the guys over at CenterStageProject just two weeks ago asking that they consider looking at integrating the HDHomeRun function with their Media Center project using some drivers that an enthusiast had created to get the HDHomeRun working on the Mac.

Well now Elgato has come along and done all the hard work for us. They have made their Eye TV software compatible with the HDHomeRun dual tuner, and they are selling two licenses to the software, and the dual tuner device for $199 total. Here is the Elgato package.

This bodes well for the Mac community. Keep it coming!

From Elgato:

FTP clients are not used by everybody, there are certainly heavy FTP users, but there are also many occasional FTP users. While Transmit has the mojo in most peoples opinion, I prefer CyberDuck.

I've certainly got nothing against Panic, developers of Transmit, or Transmit itself. These guys are pretty cool when you get right down to it, effective software that is elegant - how Mac.

But the thing is, I'm not too excited to pay $30 for software that I only use occasionally, especially when CyberDuck is a damned good FTP client in it's own right. The Duck is opensource, and while they don't require money for it, they do ask for donations. If you use it and like it I would suggest throwing a few bones their way, they work hard to develop CyberDuck - and there are frequent updates.

One area where the developer and I don't see eye to eye is in regards to multipane for local and ftp server. I prefer ftp clients that display your local volumes as well as the remote ftp volumes like FileZilla does. However, I'm willing to live with the fact that the Duck only shows the remote ftp volumes, because it is otherwise excellent in it's design and implementation. I don't think FileZilla is in the same league as CyberDuck. By the way, I always thought that FileZilla was a blatant rip off of FlashFXP, the best ftp program I ever used on Windows.

Oh, and here's a great update on CyberDuck, they recently built in the functionality to be able to set specific upload and global throttling. Throttling is limiting your up/download speeds. Throttling your upload speeds is necessary in my opinion because if you max out your upload speed you will affect your download speeds in a bad way. With maxing out your upload speed you will get very slow download speeds. So by enabling throttling at a speed under your max upload speed, you will preserve speedy downloading. Great stuff.

If you need a nice FTP client, certainly take a look at the Duck.

If you like it, DiggIT.

Yes, OpenOffice is going Aqua on the Mac and yes alpha builds are available. But OOo without X11 is by no means ready for prime time day.

Aren't we all fortunate then that NeoOffice keeps on improving their very nice Office Suite for your Mac. Here's the goods on the new update:

This release includes support for the Mac OS X Spellchecker and Address Book and experimental support for Office 2007 Excel and PowerPoint files.

This update is for Early Access only right now, but all you freeloaders can download it on August 27, 2007 without having to cough up any money.

NeoOffice® is a full-featured office suite for Mac OS X created by Patrick Luby and Edward Peterlin

Timing is everything right? Not more than a few days after I review and post about CoRD, a great Windows Remote Desktop Client for the Mac, Microsoft Mac Business Unit posts a note saying that the Universal Binary of Remote Desktop Client is finally coming out in just two weeks time.

I have been using CoRD daily since installing it, and it works fantastic, it's so much more nimble than Microsoft Remote Desktop (PPC via Rosetta) on my system. It will be interesting to put it up against the new UB of Microsoft's version in a few weeks. Until then, I'll have no regrets using CoRD.

I have been using Microsoft's Remote Desktop client to access my Windows box from my Mac for a long time. It works pretty well, but it was slow because it runs through Rosetta, it is not yet a Universal Binary. It seems like a year ago or more when the MacBU announced that they had a UB in the works, but alas there is still no joy.

I decided to poke around and look to see if there was any news or other solutions and I ran across a fabulous alternative to Remote Desktop, CoRD. It connects to my WinXP box just the same way as RD did, only it does it better! It's faster, does full screen correctly. It's a real gem, and it is also freeware.

If you have the need, I highly recommend CoRD.

This sums it up pretty well: CoRD is a Mac OS X remote desktop client for Microsoft Windows servers using the rdp protocol. It is easy to use, fast, and free for anyone to use or modify.

I've been using Camino as my primary browser for a long time on my Mac. Love it!

On Windows at work I used to use CrazyBrowser for a long time which is a custom multi-tabbed interface that uses IE as the core rendering engine. I started using this way back when, because it offered a clean interface with tabbed browsing long before IE did.

I've been running Safari 3 for Windows quite a bit since it was released. It's kind of growing on me. There are certainly things that I wish it had. I have some thoughts on Safari, and a wishlist for Safari for Windows (and Mac):

PRO's:
- Fast rendering, very fast.
- Renders very well, extremely few issues.
- Text looks great

CON's:
- Often times when trying to load a page I get an error "Safari Can't Open Page"
- Clicking on a link from external opens in a new window not new tab


The text looking great is very interesting. When I switched back to the Mac, the way the text looked with the anti aliasing look bugged the crap out of me, now I find that a year and a half later, I prefer it! Holy crap, how did that happen? (I never ran ClearType on Windows)

MISSING:
- Clicking on empty tab space should open a new tab
- Close a tab, and you should go to last viewed tab
- Ability to save USR/PWD for all sites
- Ctrl+click bookmark bar favorites should open in a new tab
- Ctrl_click search box should open in a new tab
- Should restore all tabs open in previous session upon re-opening
- Site Favicons should show up on the BookMark bar and tabs


Text samples. I mentioned how I've grown fond of how Safari renders text. Some pages that I've compared in both Camino and Safari - they look exactly the same. But on other sites the two browsers have a completely different look. I've put some sample pages of a page on Yahoo that looks different, and I find that I far prefer the look of the Safari rendering over Camino and the other browser examples I've shown.

As you can see from the screenshots it is clear that OmniWeb uses the same rendering engine as Safari, it looks nearly identical to Safari.

Hmm...

SAFARI


CAMINO


FIREFOX


OPERA


INTERNET EXPLORER



OMNIWEB




Alright, why do you suppose it is then, that the following page look nearly identical in Camino & Safari? Both have the anti aliased text rendering that I suddenly realize I'm so fond of, but in the previous examples, only the Safari based browsers have the same look.

SAFARI



CAMINO

After trying out VMware's Fusion (think Parallels) for a little bit, I've decided to take advantage of the 1/2 price offer. You can purchase Fusion while it is still in Beta, before it goes retail, for half of it's regular $80 price. I went ahead and bought it today for $40. May as well take advantage and save a few dollars.

(RC1 is release candidate 1, this means that they are close to coming out of beta.)

IGG Software's upcoming iBank 3 won the runner up for the best designed Leopard Application, behind Delicious Library 2.

Previously I've talked about how I found the Mac personal finance applications lacking and that I'm still running Quicken 2007 for Windows. I had looked at iBank, but the main drawback to iBank 2 for me was the fact that it doesn't directly download your data from financial institutions. Rumor has it that version 3 will be able to do this.

This could be very good news for a lot of people, there is a lot of talk on the internet similar to what I have said about the sad state of affairs for Mac personal finance.

Instead of just bemoan the situation, I'm going to see if I can get onto the Beta, possibly even the alpha for this project, and see if I can help in some small way to influence it towards a world class application that we can be proud of the fact that it's a Mac app.

Here are some screenshots of iBank 2, you can click on the large thumbnails for full a size view. You can see that it is a very nice looking application. Hopefully if direct downloading happens, and a few more features come into it, this could be what Quicken should have been on the Mac.

I have been meaning to do a write up of some of the better bittorrent clients for the Mac. Then I happened to run across a write that largely echos my sentiments. It was done by TorrentFreak.

In this review from Sep 2006 TorrentFreak took a brief look at the following BitTorrent clients: BitTorrent, Transmission, Azureus, Tomato Torrent, Bits On Wheels, and Acquisition.

TODAY

Here are some quick thoughts in addition to the review.

BitTorrent's official client is sparse, it may work for a utilitarian need, but there's not much there.

Transmission is a really nice client that is very actively developed. It does a few things in a non-standard-protocol way, but it's never caused me issue. You can always grab the absolute latest build of Transmission here. I run Transmission all of the time, and it is my client of choice for downloading and casual seeding. Note that you cannot yet create a torrent with Transmission, why this key feature is left out of an application that is so constantly updated is beyond me. I would prefer that the Information Window where more integrated into the main window of Transmission and not as a secondary window.

Azureus may do a lot, but it just doesn't gel with me, it's too busy and offers more than I'm interested in.

Tomato Torrent is stale, it's not been updated in a long time, and there just really isn't a good reason to go with it in my opinion. It isn't as sleek as Transmission, and it is nowhere as full featured as some of the other clients.

Bits On Wheels must have been some client when it came out a few years go. Unfortunately it is still a PPC application. The forums on the website have recently been disabled, previous to that happening the word was that the developer of it was going to make it a Universal Binary but it ended up not being a quick and dirty exercise but he did intend to see it through. With the forums going offline I would say that is sketchy at best. But my fingers are crossed, BoW is a great client, by far my favorite when it comes to creating an seeding a new torrent. It is well laid out and informative in how it presents all the information. And the visual representation of your inbound and outbound activity is very cool. If BoW where a UB, and with some minor modifications it would be the killer torrent client.

Acquisition This is a client that at the heart is based on Transmission. Given this fact, and that's its a pay client, well - no thank you.


Tomorrow



uTorrent is arguably the best torrent client for Windows, and has been for quite some time. Before I switched back to the Mac uTorrent was my client of choice. uTorrent was recently bought by BitTorrent, I'm not sure what that means for the future, but I think it is positive. Recently uTorrent announced that they are coming to the Mac. I think this is great, shake up the tree a little bit. They are also brining uTorrent to Linux. I'll certainly be checking it out when it makes the official debut.

Don't be surprised if uTorrent becomes the consolidator in the Mac torrent client arena and gains the largest market share in an already crowded field.

You can check out a screenshot here.

Onyx and Cocktail are two well known and used applications to help Mac users clean out their system of log files, temp files, rebuild their spotlight indexes, run scheduled Mac scripts on demand, and so much more.

A new kid on the block is MainMenu by Santa Software, and it is really nice. It has a clean and simple interface yet manages to perform everything that I'm looking for in an application like this. This isn't something that I run every day, or even every week. I probably run this sort of utility every few months, but I like the fact that it is at my disposal and can make easy work of these duties. In fact it has got me to uninstall Onyx and run MainMenu instead.

I recently blogged about the exquisite Demo UI video, I also gushed about the well done PDF booklet detailing the thought and design of the upcoming UI.

Over the past few days I've had a great email dialog with David McLeod, graphic designer for the CenterStage Project. I was very pleased that David reached out to me for my input to take into consideration for the upcoming TV features for CenterStage. My guess is that he read some of my DVR/AppleTV/CenterStage posts here on the site and could tell that it's an area that I'm both very familiar with and passionate about - and that I feel that most solutions are not complete for a variety of reasons. David is a great listener and we had a nice discussion on the topic. It sounds like CenterStage will at first have very basic TV viewing and DVR functions, but hopefully it will ramp into a more fully featured offering as time and energy permits. I did let David know that I think it would be a terrific feature if CenterStage could incorporate and integrate TV Torrent downloading, sort of a DVR Setup without a Tuner Card for the pure time shifters (or consumers of non-local programming). As I think about this, David must be more than Graphics Designer for CenterStage if he's working on specs and features.

Btw - I told David that what I saw in the Demo UI Video for CenterStage is in my opinion what the AppleTV interface should have looked like.

Here is a new press release that David sent me on a significant new release of CenterStage.

PRESS RELEASE
===============
It's the eve of the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC), so we thought we would get everyone into the 'sprit of excitement', before the forthcoming announcements from Apple. CenterStage 0.6.2 has been released and represents a milestone in the alpha cycle of our Mac Media Center project.

This substantial update should be considered our most fully functional and usable release to date. It is now a 'proper' media center, allowing you to playback Movies, Music and view your Photos. The required framework is in place and the next step is to begin adding our proposed user interface.

Talking of our future and the proposed interface. Hopefully, you will have seen a couple of new pages added to the site recently. The Current Progress page charts the progress of our work and communicates where we are now, and where we are going. Current Progress page includes a demo movie of where the project is headed, and numerous supporting downloads to show exactly what has been happening behind the scenes and what we the future look of CenterStage will be.

As always, the more developers we can get on board the greater this project will become as we move toward the Beta at a faster pace.

Download 0.6.2

Current Progress

The Future

Start enjoying that cooler than [Parallels] Coherence, VMWare Fusion's Unity Goodness!

Dealzmodo: DivX Pro Free Today

Saw this notice over on Gizmodo today, free DivX Pro for Mac and Windows, get in on it now before they close the offer.

I've been successfully using Mozy on my work notebook (Windows XP) since I found out about it. I also set up Mozy on my iMac at home, but it gave me some troubles after a few days. I couldn't get too worked up over it since the Mac client was in Beta.

Good news, there has been a refresh on the Mac beta, and at least for me, it's working great now.

If you're not familiar with it, Mozy is a free online backup service for a 2GB account, and for only $4.95 you have unlimited storage. It's a really slick setup that I use and recommend. Click this link or the image below to signup with my referral, this will give you an 2.3GB instead of just a 2GB account.

I haven't tried either BootCamp, Parallels, or VMWare. The only application for Windows that I run is Quicken (because Quicken for Mac is nowhere as good as the Windows version), but because I have a Windows Media Center in my house, I run Quicken on it and Remote Desktop to it.

I do have friends who have tried these products, and more people who have asked me my opinion on them. Keep in mind that I've not used them. But when it comes to Windows on a Mac, I've been telling people that my choice is VMWare. Parallels was the early product to market, but VMWare specializes in this market, and has done really well in it over time. Additionally, VMWare already had better directx support, 64 bit support, and USB support that Parallels, and VMWare is still in Beta. I also told people that the 1 feature that Parallels currently has that VMWare's Fusion didn't was Coherence mode - but wait I told them, I'm pretty sure it will come to VMWare also.

Since Parallels has decided to charge an upgrade for it's latest 3.0 version, you just may re-think Parallels and consider VMWare's Fusion.

Here's a video of it's version of Coherence, Unity, in action. It looks really slick.

I checked out the new alpha of OpenOffice last night. The development team met there goal of having it distributable before WWDC - job well done.

I really can't recommend using it at this time since there are still some pretty big bugs to be fixed. But it was great to see it running natively without X11. In a few months it'll be time to put OOo Aqua up against NeoOffice and see how they compare.

If you'd like to check out the new OpenOffice Aqua, you can download it here.

The cool kids are running the Camino 1.6a1pre version of it. Here's a direct link to an Intel build of it.

If you'd like to be a slightly less cool kid, you can grab the official 1.5 version directly from Camino here.

X Lossless Decoder, is a lossless audio decoder for the Mac. X Lossless Decoder(XLD) is a tool for Mac OS X that is able to decode/convert/play various 'lossless' audio files. The supported audio files can be split into some tracks with cue sheet when decoding. It works on Mac OS X 10.3 and later.

XLD is Universal Binary, so it runs natively on both Intel Macs and PPC Macs.

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.

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 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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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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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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If you are [not so] patiently waiting for the new "post MediaFork" version of Handbrake to emerge, you're not alone.

No need to keep waiting for an update, here is a build from the SVN from April 7, 2007. Enjoy!

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Review of Rogue Amoeba's Fission
by DJ Deckard

Fission is an audio editor which has a fairly narrow focus. It's feature set as found on developer Rogue Amoeba's website is as follows:

- Software that will losslessly edit MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless and AIFF files without any need for re-encoding
- Splitting a long recording into multiple files
- Removing unwanted audio such as commercials
- Adding fade in and out
- Creating mp3 and AAC cell phone ringtones

The program looks and feels like a slimmed down Sony Sound Forge. I mean that as a compliment as Sound Forge is my audio editor of choice. The controls are nicely divided at the top of the screen and grouped by their functionality.

My main use for Fission was to be editing a long recording into individual tracks I am a DJ and upon finishing up my latest demo mix I need to take the final WAV file and turn it into individual tracks for the CD.

To begin my task I use the cursor and player controls to figure out where in the mix I want to split the audio into tracks. Once you find the appropriate place in the audio file you zoom in, select the Split cursor, and click the audio where you want the split to occur. Easy. Really easy.

I repeated this process for each track and using their Inspector tool named each track and then to finish the process hit Save Audio. Presto you now have multiple WAV files instead of one big one.

Splitting audio into separate tracks couldn’t be easier

Performing all the functionality within Fission is just as easy. To create a ring tone you load an audio file and using the Select cursor select the portion of the audio file you would like to use. A nice feature here is upon holding down the mouse button and moving the cursor the audio plays from wherever the beginning of the selection is currently at. Find a desired audio selection, hit the Crop button, Save Audio and you now have a ring tone.

The bottom line is that Rogue Amoeba’s Fission does exactly what it says it’s going to do. The features all work as expected, the interface is easy to use and looks nice. For the features they advertise and the overall experience I would give this 5 stars.

For my final score I decided to drop it to 4 stars based on the relative value. There are freeware programs out there that will do everything Fission will do though probably without the nice interface and ease of use. I would be more comfortable recommending Fission if the price were a tad lower than the current $32 price point.

Finally I write this last portion hoping that Rogue Amoeba will read this and take it in to consideration for future versions.

I was disappointed to realize that if I closed Fission I would not be able to further edit my DJ mix. If I made any mistakes I would have to open the original WAV file and make the same edits again. Rogue Amoeba, please consider adding this functionality to your next version.

A second request, though beyond the scope of their stated feature set, is to add the ability to burn the audio to CD. Honestly, I don’t know how much work would be required to do this, but if it were possible (perhaps in a Fission Pro version at a higher price point) you would have a direct competitor to CD Architect for the PC and would make me very happy indeed.

spacespace
Cropping Audio is a breezespaUsing Fission's inspector you can fully tag your audio

Likes:
- Look and Feel
- Ease of use

Dislikes:
- See feature requests

Feature requests:
- Save functionality
- Ability to burn to CD




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You may know that HandBrake has been one of the best, and free, tools for ripping DVD's into either XviD or H.264 files. However, the developer pretty much stopped working on it around a year ago. Some new blood came along and was re-started efforts to move it forward, they used the name of the new application MediaFork since they weren't able to get in touch with the HandBrake developer for permission to use the name. They were able to use the HandBrake code as it was open source.

After MediaFork came out, the group received permission to use the HandBrake name. Soon MediaFork will disappear, and only the trusty, familiar old name HandBrake will remain.

The website is now showing the merger of these two variants of HandBrake, and there is a new 0.9 version of HandBrake due out any day now. Until that is released you can still use the 0.8 version of MediaFork.

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I've gone off on StuffIT previously, suffice it to say I'm not a fan of it and it's proprietary compression formats.

The Unarchiver is a great lightweight file unarchiver. It can even do SIT files, but not SITX. That is the one quasi-common format it can't handle. I can live with that.

Hop off the bandwagon, say StuffIT and try out nice alternatives like The Unarchiver which just released a new version recently, 1.5.




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Hot off the Press: MediaFork

Handbrake has been one of those "must have" programs used for ripping and encoding your DVD's to files.

A group has taken over the Handbrake project and are moving forward with a new application called MediaFork.

Click here for a quick walk through the MediaFork.

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If you are a heavy PhotoShop user then you can stop reading this now. If you love GIMP's kludgey interface, then read no further. But, if like me, you only occasionally need PhotoShop type editing and you appreciate a beautiful Mac interface program. Then you may very well want to check out Seashore. Seashore is based on the GIMP, but it does not use X11, it is Mac Native - and it has a much cleaner interface. Click on the screenshot thumbnail for a full size image.

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Splasm, the developers of Audiobook Builder, saw the video overview on the application which I posted. They really liked it and put a link to it on their website.

This prompted me to re-do the video, it is now a bit nicer looking, and a better size for in-browser viewing. Check out the video now.

GREAT NEWS, Splasm has also offered to give away 5 licensed copies of Audiobook Builder to MacSeven readers!

If you are interested in receiving one of the free copies of Audiobook Builder post a note in the forum here. If we have more than 5 who are interested then we'll randomly select from those that post.

Post a quick note here if you would like a free copy of Audiobook Builder
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I'm an audiobook junkie. I love to listen to audiobooks during my commute and while I'm working around the house. Now that I'd got an iPod RED I am keen to convert audiobooks on cd's and audiobooks in MP3 format that I've had archived into the iTunes and iPod M4B format.

I recently bought Audiobook Builder from Splasm and am really enjoying how incredibly easy it allows you to create iTunes M4B audiobooks.

I put together a video of how I use the software. A video software review if you will.

Watch the video if you have an interest in creating your own audiobooks for your iTunes or iPod.

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ClamXav is a freeware Mac Virus Scanner. Now don't go calling me crazy, I'm not big on Mac Virus protection. I love the fact that the Mac is still a very secure Operating System, especially when compared to Windows.

Because i do download files from the internet, I prefer to take some precaution.

I have had ClamXav installed for quite a while, and had it setup so that the Sentry (real time scanner) was set to auto-run when when booting up OS X, and it would scan only my Desktop and the "Web Downloads" folder where I download things from the internet. While this was great in theory, what happened is that the Sentry wouldn't auto-load when I booted up my system. I had to start ClamXav and manually launch the Sentry - this means that it never happened.

The new version of ClamXav has fixed whatever was wrong, and the Sentry now loads up when you boot.

Consider some protection, better safe than sorry I estimate.

Tell us what YOU think.
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Parallels and VMWare are both tackling the virtualization approach to running Windows on your Intel Mac - in this example meaning that you can run Windows while running Mac. CrossOver is more akin to Rosetta for Windows in that it lets you run Windows applications without having to have Windows itself installed. This is a far better approach for my needs if it works as promised.

CrossOver went final the other day, and as a die hard Quicken 2007 for Windows user I was anxious to see how well CrossOver ran Quicken on my iMac. The summary is that Quicken 2007 installed perfectly via CrossOver, and I was a bit surprised to see that it launched without problem. There is one inconvenience to this setup, and one show stopper. The inconvenience is that the screen refreshes for Quicken were dead slow, painfully slow! The show stopper is that none of the online activities seemed to work for me, and it is the online accesses that make Quicken so very helpful.

I was quite impressed that Quicken installed and ran without errors, but it doesn't seem to be quite ready for my needs.

Additionally I did install Internet Explorer 6.0 for Windows through the CrossOver install menu, but I can't seem to find out how to run it now that I've installed it, oh well - that was more of a curiosity while Quicken is a necessity.

For now I'll continue to access Quicken with Remote Desktop to my MCE Windows machine.



Tell us what YOU think.
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This is fantastic news. I haven't checked, but I'm guessing this also means that OpenOffice will have the same support, by the way where has that X11'less version of OpenOffice gone? I swore it was due out by now.

VBA Macro support for NeoOffice is going to be fantastic, that's one major drawback about NeoOffice compared to Office, and it's soon to be gone.

Click on the image below for the full story.

I've been using NeoOffice on my Mac soly as my "Office" program, admittedly it's not Office 2003 but all in all it's pretty damned good.


Tell us what YOU think.
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Toast Titanium is a fantastic program. Of course it makes sense that version 8 just debuted, because I just recently bought v7.12. doh!

Click on the image above for more details, it looks like they put a lot of improvements into an already fantastic program.

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Nothing like a few snowflakes on your Mac's screensaver to get you in that holiday spirit.

Snowfall the Ice Storm is a really nice looking screensaver.

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There is no guessing my opinion of RapidWeaver - I love it! I use it for this site and a personal website and I love who easily it allows to build a website. Through in some affordable and fantastic plugins like those from YourHead and it's a great package.

One area where RapidWeaver could use a little more flexibility is in modifying themes. I just spotted this the other day. If you have tried RWThemeMiner please let us know your experience with it. I don't know if I'll get a chance to look at it for a while but I'm interested to hear more.

Tell us what YOU think.
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Most people love VLC. I'm sorry to say that I'm just not a big fan of it. When a new version came out today which included miscellaneous updates as well as the ability to play Windows Media Video files, I thought I'd check it out again. 2 of the 3 WMV files I tried playing on VLC 0.8.6 wouldn't play. The 1 file which would play didn't indicate any time, it stayed at 0:00:00 the entire time. And then there is the most frightening issue of all. The picture quality! Take a look at the images below. The image on the left is from QuickTime using the free Flip4Mac WMV decoder, and the image on the right is from VLC 0.8.6.

I applaud the efforts that go into VLC and what they are trying to accomplish. But the program is too full of glitches, bugs, and oddities for me, then when you factor in how poorly the WMV performance is, and I just fail to see the benefits. I'll stick to QuickTime.


Tell us what YOU think.

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I listen to Audiobooks most of the time during my commute and working around the house like mowing the lawn. There have been many times in the past when I wish I had known about AudioSlicer to easily break up a huge audio file into multiple files. The catch is to split them up at the points in the file where there are blank spaces, you don't want to cut the file in the middle of a word. Now you can do this easily, and free.

AudioSlicer is a Cocoa GUI application for Mac OS X that finds all silences in an audio file and allows you to split it into several smaller audio files and to name/tag them properly.
For now only MP3 is supported but other audio formats may be added in the future.
While most other tools doing this split automatically according to certain criteria, AudioSlicer shows you all silences within a certain range of duration. You can then listen to the silence - well, to the audio before and after the silence really - and then you decide if you want to split there.
The splitting is done without loss, there is no decoding and re-encoding of audio data taking place.

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AppDelete is another nice looking, highly rated Application Uninstaller for your Mac.

I actually paid for AppZapper a while back when it was on special at MacZot - but this AppDelete looks really nice, regardless of the free price.

Of course donations are happily accepted from the developer.

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AppZapper made a quick name for itself, filling a void that Apple left out of OS X for some unknown reason... An Application Uninstaller.

uApp is the new Application Uninstaller on the block, and it's free! (I've linked to the MacUpdate page for uApp because the developers page isn't coming up right now.)

If you like the idea of finding and deleting related files on your system not just the Application file (like I do) then give this a try.

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RAR is a great compression system, it is far more flexible than Zip formats, it has very fast or very high compression, and option all in between, it spans an archive to multiple files like no other compression program out there. The options are simple and easy to use, and to unarchive a multi file archive you only need to unRar the first file, the rest automatically unarchive along with the first.

For single file archiving, since switching back to the Mac, I prefer DMG's - there's a lot to like about them. But for making multi file archives, or unarchiving RAR compressed files, SimplyRAR is my program of choice. RARsoft Labs makes a great product, and the Windows GUI is really nice, but for the Mac they only make command line compression tools. That is where SimplyRAR comes in, it gives a very nice and simple yet powerful interface to RAR for the Mac. SimplyRAR also handles PAR files.

The developer of SimplyRAR has a website for his main business, but not for SimplyRAR, so I've linked to the MacUpdate page for SimplyRAR

NOTE: The Unarchiver, a nice unarchiving program for OS X that fully integrates with your system, it just runs in the background and unarchives as needed, it supports unRARing. There is a new build as of Nov 12, 2006. Grab it here.


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CrossOver Mac is a program which lets you run Windows programs from your Mac - without needing Windows. Think of it as a Rosetta for Windows instead of PowerPC Mac applications. They specifically comment in the notes that Quicken 2007 for Windows still doesn't run on the new CrossOver Shoot! That's the one Windows program that I can't do without. - I would love to see TMPGEnc run on CrossOver, I'll have to test that one.

Notes on the new release: (release url)

Hi Folks,

I'm happy to say that we've now made a public prerelease versionof CrossOver Mac 6.0 available for your testing pleasure. A summarylist of changes is available below.

At this point, we feel we're finally beginning to converge on a final 6.0.We still have some major issues we hope to solve, mostly withprograms like Quicken 2007.

However, we hope this build brings a lot of joy, particularly in fixesfor service packs, Outlook 2003, Quicken versions prior to 2007,and with some Half Life 2 fixes.

We're also hoping to confirm that we've made progress on non US locales,particularly European and Japanese environments, which should nowbe working reasonably well.

Major issues we will continue to work on are around Quicken 2007,and just general polish and clean up of a variety of applications(e.g. End Note and others).

I'm particularly interested in Outlook 2003 use in Exchange environments.In all of our testing, this seems to be working pretty well. I'd really appreciatetest reports on your experiences with it.

At any rate, thanks for your interest and help. We'll be watching the betareports and forums more closely, please direct your feedback there.

Cheers,

Jeremy

Your Comments appreciated.

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LAME is a fantastic MP3 encoder. The new build 3.97 has been packaged for easy installation on your Mac (Universal Binary) by Thalictrum. Many audio programs use LAME for it's encoding, you may very well have an older version of LAME installed already, whether you do or not, grab this one and run the latest.

Your Comments appreciated.

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Switch Sound Converter is another audio converter that I've tried. It has a simple, easy to use interface, and works well. I have read reviews where people complained that Switch didn't work well with all audio formats, I'm not sure if this was an older model, or on audio formats I haven't tried, but I've had no troubles.

Switch is available for free with limited format support, and Switch can be registered for $39.

NOTE: Switch is on sale until November 15th for $19.40

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The guys behind www.MacZot.com have a program in beta now, Disco. It's is an attractive looking cd/dvd burning program. It looks to mainly be data oriented, though I see it can burn Video_TS to a dvd movie. Some features I was hoping for were encoding non DVD-Compliant videos to DVD-Compliant and burn them to a Video DVD, or burn say a DivX DVD, maybe also create menus for video dvd's, etc. At $14.95 it looks like it will be a good deal for what it does.

It's a nice app, great attention was paid to the GUI which is always a good thing! Hopefully as it matures it will become more full featured and give Toast a run for it's money.

Check out the cool smoke effect, click on the picture below for an MOV movie of it in action.

Your Comments appreciated.


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I'll keep in line with yesterday's audio entry about Audacity, and keep the theme today.

Sometimes we need to convert an audio file to a different file format. I often use SoX Wrap for this task. It is a GUI front end to a Linux conversion program, Sound eXchange (SoX).

You can drag audio files onto SoX Wrap and quickly tell it what format you would like to encode them into. It does not let you specify settings like CBR / ABR / VBR / Bitrate, etc but it still has a valuable use even without these more advanced settings. I'm not sure if it is Sound eXchange itself which doesn't support these features, but regardless they aren't available in SoX Wrap today.

SoX Wrap is a wrapper for the conversion routines of the open source sound utility SoX (Sound eXchange). It transfers to and from the following formats: 8svx, aiff, al, au, avr, cdr, cvs, dat, gsm, hcom, la, lu, maud, mp3, nul, ogg, prc, raw, sb, sf, sl, sph, smp, snd, sndt, sw, txw, ub, ul, uw, vms, voc, wav, and wve.SoX Wrap is a free application. It's merely a GUI wrapped around the standard distrubtion; an attempt to make SoX accessible for people unfamiliar with the UNIX environment that it runs in. I encourage anyone who is interested in the application and has some programming skill to visit SoX's SourceForge page (linked above) and participate in the project.

Your Comments appreciated.

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There is a new Intel (and PPC) build of Audacity for Intel Mac's today. This is a really nice freeware sound editing application which is a multi-platform effort. It's great that the Intel Mac builds are getting some love. Download the Intel verison here. If you're on a PPC Mac, the latest version for you can be downloaded here.

New Release:

The Audacity developers have been busy with many new features over the past year. We're pleased to announce Audacity 1.3.2 (beta), which contains dozens of new features and capabilities. Because it is a work in progress and does not yet come with complete documentation or translations into foreign languages, it is recommended for more advanced users. For all users, Audacity 1.2.5 is a minor bug-fix update that addresses some problems with Audacity 1.2.4, but does not add any significant new features. It is complete and fully documented. You can have both Audacity 1.2.5 and 1.3.2 installed simultaneously. Also, we have just made available a set of 92 LADSPA plug-ins for Windows (for both Audacity 1.2.x and 1.3.x).

Here is the Wikipedia page for Audacity.

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I saw today's ad for Fry's Electronics and noticed that they had an AcomData 320GB USB2/Firewire400 drive on sale for $99. I already have one of these drives and really like it. It got me thinking that these drives stack up on each other... and that Leopard with Time Machine will be coming coming out pretty soon. So I grabbed one today at the sale price. Sure, I could have got a 500GB or 750GB drive - but I like that this drive is the sister drive to the one I already own, I'm very happy with it, and for $99 it's a great deal, I'm pretty big on value - I can live with 320GB dedicated to Time Machine instead of more.

If you're needing a drive, the deal at Fry's is good through November 2nd - I also saw it listed at www.frys.com this afternoon, but I just went to get the URL to it, and now I don't see it listed.

The image in the center is the drive standing on it's own, the picture to the right is 3 of the drives stacked on each other.

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I have been using StuffIT Expander, the free un-archiver on my Intel iMac. For some unexplained reason I wasn't completely happy with it. After searching around for a little bit I came across The Unarchiver which I tried and liked it. I decided to remove StuffIT Expander for now and give The Unarchiver a longer term trial run (it's freeware.)

You won't believe the horrible manual uninstall necessary to remove StuffIT Expander from your system. The developers of this application should be shot for not including an uninstall option to remove all of this little bits and pieces which they twaddle all over my system!

Here are the uninstall instructions straight from their website:

Note: for all paths given, we assume "Macintosh HD" is the name of your startup (boot) drive and "[username]" is your Mac OS X login name. Please substitute whatever names you are using in your given situation.
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1 - To manually remove StuffIt first quit out of any open StuffIt applications.

2 - Then delete your StuffIt Application folder. The path is typically similar to:

"Macintosh HD:Applications:StuffIt Deluxe 7.0.x"
"Macintosh HD:Applications:StuffIt Deluxe 8.0.x"
"Macintosh HD:Applications:StuffIt Deluxe 9.0."
"Macintosh HD:Applications:StuffIt Standard 7.0.x"
"Macintosh HD:Applications:StuffIt Standard 8.0.x"
"Macintosh HD:Applications:StuffIt Standard 9.0"


3 - Then delete any of the following files or folders you find in the main Library folder on your boot drive:

"Macintosh HD:Library:Application Support:StuffItCM DropBoxes:" folder
"Macintosh HD:Library:Stuffit Menu Preferences" file
"Macintosh HD:Library:StuffitCM Dropboxes" folder
"Macintosh HD:Library:CFMSupport:StuffItEngineShell.cfm" file
"Macintosh HD:Library:Contextual Menu Items:StuffItCM.plugin" file
"Macintosh HD:Library:Frameworks:Stuffit.framework" folder
"Macintosh HD:Library:InputManagers:MagicMenuEnabler" folder


"Macintosh HD:Library:PreferencesPanes:StuffIt AVR.prefPane" file
"Macintosh HD:Library:Preferences:com.stuffit.Deluxe.plist" file
"Macintosh HD:Library:Preferences:com.stuffit.DropStuff.plist" file
"Macintosh HD:Library:Preferences:com.stuffit.DropTar.plist" file
"Macintosh HD:Library:Preferences:com.stuffit.DropZip.plist" file
"Macintosh HD:Library:Preferences:com.stuffit.Engine.plist" file
"Macintosh HD:Library:Preferences:com.stuffit.ExpressPE.plist" file


4 - Next, delete any of the following files or folders you find in your User folder:

"Macintosh HD:Users: [username] :Library:Application Support:StuffItCM DropBoxes:" folder
"Macintosh HD:Users: [username] :Library:Caches:Archive Assitant Helper:" folder
"Macintosh HD:Users: [username] :Library:Logs:Archive Assitant.log" file


5 - Next, delete any of the following files or folders you find in the Preferences folder in your User folder:

"Macintosh HD:Users: [username] :Library:Preferences:Aladdin" folder
(NOTE: If you have other Aladdin/Allume products installed, you should leave this folder, but open it up and delete any "StuffIt" items from inside it)

"Macintosh HD:Users: [username] :Library:Preferences:Allume" (NOTE: If you have other Aladdin/Allume products installed, you should leave this folder, but open it up and delete any "StuffIt" items from inside it)

"Macintosh HD:Users: [username] :Library:Preferences:Allume:StuffIt Deluxe Recent Items" folder
"Macintosh HD:Users: [username] :Library:Preferences:ByHost:com.stuffit.Deluxe.*" files
"Macintosh HD:Users: [username] :Library:Preferences:com.stuffit.Deluxe.plist" file
"Macintosh HD:Users: [username] :Library:Preferences:com.stuffit.DropStuff.plist" file
"Macintosh HD:Users: [username] :Library:Preferences:com.stuffit.DropTar.plist" file
"Macintosh HD:Users: [username] :Library:Preferences:com.stuffit.DropZip.plist" file
"Macintosh HD:Users: [username] :Library:Preferences:com.stuffit.Engine.plist" file
"Macintosh HD:Users: [username] :Library:Preferences:com.stuffit.ExpressPE.plist" file

* If there are multiple user accounts on this machine, login to each account and repeat steps 4 and 5 for each account.

* If you have StuffIt Deluxe do the following additional steps:

1 - Remove StuffIt's background apps from the startup list:
In Mac OS 10.2 and earlier, go to System Preferences->Login Items, in Mac OS 10.3 go to Accounts->Startup Items. Delete the following from the list:
MagicMenu, StuffItAVRDaemon and Archive Assistant Scheduler.

2 - Remove the StuffIt Command Line tools:
Open the "Terminal" application located in the "Utilities" folder, which is inside your "Applications" folder.
At the user prompt type "sudo rm /usr/local/bin/*stuff"
Enter your Administrator password when prompted.

Your Comments appreciated.

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Firefox 2.0 is released! Yawn, sorry I just don't 'get' Firefox.

But that reminds me, Camino is great - try it out. If you're on an intel Mac there are Intel only builds (they can be buggy but are generally very stable - I run these builds myself without much trouble) available here. Be sure to install CaminoSession if you use Camino.

Your Comments appreciated.

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I bought Voice Candy when it first came out, thinking that my daughter find it fun to use as sort of an audio version of PhotoBooth. Boy was I right, she loves the funny sound effects that you can apply to your voice recordings.

I have tried several voice email programs before, some where ok, but none I would consider great. What I didn't expect to find is that Voice Candy isthe best voice email program I've come across - it's stellar! The only major function missing for me is lack of MP3 support, currently Voice Candy only supports MOV file types, which isn't the best universally playable file type.

Voice Candy can run tucked away on your MenuBar, has an Audio Notes feature, and Audio Reminders.

Check it out, it works very well and it's a really nice looking app too. Well worth the $13 asking price.

My son's name is Luke, yes I have fun using that Vadar sound effect. ...I am your father.
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I don't currently pay for .Mac, it's a bit too expensive for my perceived benefits. Having said that, the upcoming .Mac webmail looks pretty sweet. That's not enough to make me subscribe, bit it's something in the right direction. Lately all I hear about .Mac is grumbling, hey if Apple can turn around Aperture into something great (Aperture 1.5 looks wonderful) then maybe there is hope for .Mac too.

Your Comments appreciated.
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Video is good, free video over the internet on an Open Source player is even better.

I've played around with Democracy Player a little, and it's pretty good. Now available as a Universal Binary so it runs great on any recent Mac. Click here for a screenshot.

Over 600 Channels Waiting for You - There are more than 600 channels in the Channel Guide that is built-in to Democracy and new ones are added every day. They're as interesting and diverse as the internet itself. Subscribe to any of them for free with a single click. Here are a few examples.

"Want to see the future of Net video? Download the open source Democracy Player" -Wired Magazine, May 2006

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I'm not a big VOIP user, but I really like the technology. Talk about competition, wow. Skype, Gizmo Project, SightSpeed, iChat AV.

It's great to have all of these available VOIP Options.

If you're interested in VOIP, Andy Abramson from www.KenRadio.com is the guru, check out his site VOIP Watch.

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Most of us use a web browser quite a bit over a day, week, month, etc. It's important to have a browser that suits you well since you use it frequently. I've tried Safari and it just doesn't gel with me, though I'm anxious to check out Safari 3 when Leopard ships with it. I've tried OmnWeb and it is extremely fast, and has some unique features. Opera looks great on paper but it doesn't play out. Shiira 2 is interesting, but I haven't spent enough time on it. FireFox 2, what's the fuss about, I would be shocked if there is an uglier browser in existance.

What it comes down to is that every time I check out a browser, I always come back to Camino. Camino is made for Mac, it looks fantastic, works great, it is fast, it just feels and works right. PimpMyCamino has some addon goodies for Camino.

About the only thing that I don't like about Camino is that if you copy a section of a web page from Camino and paste it into say an email, or a word processing document, the formatting doesn't paste - it pastes as plain text. This is with all the mozilla based browsers, not just Camino, but it's a bit of a drag.


Your Comments appreciated.
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Tetris was a fun game for what it was, I had been hearing a bit about Quinn which is a multiplayer Tetris type of game, but then all of a sudden it was pulled due to legal issues, but hey it's back now with full support and a brand new updated version.

Click on this image of Quinn to check it out.

Quinn is an implementation of a popular falling-blocks game which, according to the Tetris Company, must not be named here. Written specifically for Mac OS X, it features a neat user interface, perfectly integrated with Aqua, and a smooth look and feel for best user enjoyment. The goal was not to reinvent falling-blocks games with yet another modification of the rules, but to preserve the simplicity of the original idea. Still there’s everything you might expect—including a two-player mode, network play with Bonjour support, online server and highscore lists, and five different multiplayer rules.

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The good people over at RealMacSoftware have offered a 10% limited time discount on the new RapidWeaver 3.5

If you have yet to purchase RapidWeaver or our theme pack, make sure you use this coupon:CPN4271628770 It entitles you to receive 10% off your entire order at our online store. This offer is only valid until September 17th 2006.

Click on the RapidWeaver image below to be whisked away to RealMacSoftware.

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Rapidweaver is a terrific program that allows you to easily create and maintain websites. This website is done with RapidWeaver. The approach to building sites in Rapidweaver is quite different than with iWeb, and I find it much faster to use. The support forums are a great asset.

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I had heard rumor a few months ago that OpenOffice was going to be native Mac soon, without having to run X11 and then the news dried up. Today it was announced that next month the new native Mac OpenOffice would become available.

While I think this is fantastic news, I feel a bit sad for the NeoOffice group who has been doing such great work 'porting' OpenOffice to the Mac. I would sure think that most people will just use OpenOffice now that it won't require X11.

I'll certainly try out OpenOffice and run with the one I like better.

Here are many screenshots of the new OpenOffice for Mac.

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I have tried various RSS readers on my previous system, a Windows XP box, before without taking to it. I just didn't find it any more convenient than surfing the website myself.

Recently, however, I gave Vienna a try and am really enjoying it. Vienna is a freeware RSS/Atom reader for the Mac; and it is very nice and a delight to use.

I am finding that an RSS reader is a very efficient way to track blog type sites. My only wish is that there were a WinXP version of Vienna that I could run on my PC at work - AND have the two installed copies sync with each other so if an entry is read on one machine, it would also be marked as read on the other machine. Sort of like IMAP functionality for RSS readers. (If this is available somehow, please let me know.)

Are you an RSS user? Let us know your experiences and how you use it.
Thanks,

You can discuss this topic here.
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I've now had the opportunity to spend some time on the newly released NeoOffice 2 Aqua Beta. FANTASTIC. I'm really impressed.

If you're not familiar with NeoOffice, it's basically OpenOffice at the heart, but 'Made for Mac' so it looks great and it doesn't need X11 to run on your Mac, PPC or Intel.

The only drawback for me with NeoOffice is that it doesn't support macros in Excel. NeoOffice does have Macro ability, it just can't run Excel macros. This has to do with VBA and it's restrictions, it seems that other software would have to license it or something in order to run VBA code. This isn't a deal breaker for me, it would be nice though.

Here is a partial screenshot of the new Aqua interface for NeoOffice, this is with stock icons - which can be changed.

I don't have Microsoft Office installed on my Mac, and with NeoOffice at my disposal I don't miss it either.

Oh, in case you weren't aware. NeoOffice is freeware. Donations always accepted. This is a great Office Suite, give it consideration.

Which Office Suite, installed or online, are you using - likes dislikes?

You can discuss this topic here.
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