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