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.

iPhoto Buddy is an application which lets you effortlessly create, use, and manage multiple iPhoto libraries. It works with the new iPhoto in iLife 08.

What is iPhoto Buddy?iPhoto Buddy is a Mac OS X application (Universal) that allows you to easily create, manage, and switch between multiple iPhoto Libraries. The advantages of splitting your One Huge Photo Library into multiple, smaller ones include improved iPhoto performance, increased flexibility in organizing your digital photo collection, and a consistency with most other Mac applications that allow their respective data to be stored in as many documents (in this case, "Libraries") as you like.iPhoto Buddy uses a simple, streamlined interface that was inspired by iPhoto itself. Anyone that has used iPhoto will immediately feel right at home using iPhoto Buddy. It truly is a companion application--a real buddy!

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!

Rogue Amoeba has come out with a free utility to make your own iPhone ring tones.

I'm of the opinion that it would be an overall better idea to use your shiny new iPhone with AT&T, but hey I'm not the one deciding for everybody am I.

If you've decided that a hacked iPhone to work outside the World AT&T is just your cup'of'tea then you'll be pleased to know that a new GUI unlocking tool is now available from the iPhone Dev Team. If you must have, a quick search should yield satisfying results.

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.

Well now they've gone and done it, open source iPhone unlocking.

More details here on Engadget.

Growl is a great notification system, I feel that Apple should integrate it into OS X.

It's been a long time since the last update, but Growl was updated today.

What are Notifications?

Notifications are a way for your applications to provide you with new information, without you having to switch from the application you're already in.

What's new in version 1.1?

* There is now a global positioning system built into Growl (took 2 years to make!).
* There are now close buttons available on notifications when you mouse over them.
* Multiple performance enhancements/memory leaks fixed up. The only problem at this point should be webkit message views.
* Totally redesigned applications tab.
* There is now a sound option available per notification.
* Application level positioning. #657

I have my iMac set to put the monitor into sleep mode after 2 hours. There are times when I want to put it to sleep on demand. Back when I had a freestanding monitor I could just hit the power button, but with an iMac the monitor is integrated into the computer - I can't turn off just the display.

Thankfully LineStreet come up with a drop dead simple Widget that you can press from Dashboard and it will put your monitor to sleep. Very handy.

And if you're not fond of Widgets, it is available as an Application too.

If you have a beautiful new iMac, you know how nice and bright the screen is. Thing is...sometimes a bright screen isn't what you're going for. Enter this widget. It allows you to IMMEDIATELY sleep just your display so that you can continue running your background jobs. It doesn't permanently affect your energy settings, so when you start working again, your monitor will not sleep immediately. It's a simple widget, but it solves an annoying problem.

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.

Not long ago I talked about how nice iStat Menu's is, actually getting to me uninstall MenuMeters and run iStat Menus as my full time Menu bar info provider. It has received an update, great stuff check it out. Peep here for a full list of updates to the new version 1.1.

The MacBU has just sparked up a new site for Mac Office users, Art of Office. Art of Office is a place for people to submit artistic and/or useful content made using Office applications (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint). Whether it’s creating pixel art using Excel (a la our Post-it Notes) developing an animated short story in PowerPoint or artistic pieces in Word, this online community allows you to share, rate, remix and discuss user-submitted content with other Mac Office users around the world. It’s a fun way to show unique applications of our product and helps people think of Mac Office in ways they may not have thought of before.

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.

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.

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.

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

Yesterday I posted a how-to on preventing volumes from mounting when you boot, the near opposite it todays topic.

How to automate the mounting of filesystems of any of the following type AFP, FTP, HTTP, NFS, and SMB. How cool to be able to easily mount a volume on your desktop for not just network drives off various computer flavors, but also FTP and HTTP. Slick!

Disclaimer, I had great success and ease using this to mount my Windows LAN, I spent about 1 minute trying to mount the MacSeven.com ftp site just to test it out, and I wasn't successful. Since it was only a test I didn't pursue further - your mileage with FTP mounting may vary.

Update: AutomountMaker actually connects great to the MacSeven.com FTP - I had a setting wrong, on the "Volume" Setting I had an incorrect entry, by just leaving it blank it connects great and puts the mounted drive right on my desktop, very cool.

AutomountMaker is just the tool to make this happen. I used AutomountMaker to automate the mounting of a volume on a Windows computer on my LAN, so I used the SMB protocol. It's very easy to save pre-defined connections that you can run on demand, or you can launch any of the presets so that you can mount the volumes when you boot.

If you like it, DiggIT.

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 recently pointed out a file made available by the fine Perian folk. They have updated and enhanced their utility which gives a proper icon to media type such as FLV, instead of the blank icon that you would otherwise see.

Grab the updated installer and file type Perian't Type Installer here.

Perian is a great utility which adds codec's to QuickTime's arsenal, allowing you to play more file types with QuickTime. A fan of Perian has created a simple applescript that will get your Mac to show a nice QuickTime icon instead of a blank icon for the following file types: FLV, AC3, MKV, MKA, and VOB.

Well done!

You can snag the applescript here to fix your icons.

Many people are familiar with iStat Pro, a widget with system information galore from iSlayer.

Their new utility is not a widget, but instead it runs on your Menu bar, iStat Menus. A similar utility has been out for a long time, MenuMeters. I have been a user of MenuMeters since coming back to the Mac. Like iStat Menus, it also runs in the Menu bar, and it is able to display system information that you may like to be able to easily monitor. Things like network upload and download rates, hard drive activity, cpu load, memory usage, etc. As I looked at iStat Menus today, I bring with me a familiarity and fondness for MenuMeters, I think that this gives me a good background instead of never having used this type of program previously.

Here are my initial impressions of iStat Menu:

It is an elegant implementation, the Preferences are simply gorgeous.

It also looks great on your Menu bar.

You have a high degree of customizability with regards to what you choose to show on your Menu bar. I have mine setup to show the Hard Drive icon, and there are arrows for drive activity, an UP arrow on the drive indicates a read, and a down arrow a write. Next is my CPU temp, the Date and Time information, network transfer rates, and CPU usage. There are many other items you can choose to show as well.

I like the date and time section so much that I turned off the Tiger Data & Time section that I had previously been showing on my Menu bar, iStat Menus shows the same information more concisely, and you can also click on the Calendar icon / Time and you will get a quick drop down calendar.

While I really like the look of the calendar above, the fact that it matches the look of the Menu bar, I'm not so crazy about the look of the other drop down information panels. They look great in their own right, but they contrast with the Menu bar, and the Unified look coming to Leopard.

There are really only two things right now that I kind of miss from MenuMeters, one is that MenuMeters CPU usage showed System and User usage on the graphs while iStat Menus only shows total in the graph, though it does show the breakdown in the drop down panel. The other item is that I liked being able to configure red and green lights to represent drive read/write activity. The arrows on the drive icon represent the same thing, I just prefer the larger color icons from Menu Meters. I'm sure I'll get used to the arrows though. Yes, that's correct, I've switched over to iStat Menus, and I'm not using MenuMeters any longer. This is a really nice utility and I'm already enjoying it quite a bit!

By the way, I just got a note from the developer and they are considering having a different look for the drop down panels in the future, I would guess with a color scheme that more represents the Calendar drop down. Great news.

iStat Menus is freeware, but remember that donations for all this hard work is greatly appreciated. I'm donating $5 right now - this is really nice and I'll use it every day. Maybe more would be fair? At least it's something.

There is a cool new BART Widget from WorryDream to help you with San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). Maps, routes, schedules, fares - it has it all.

There is also an official iPod BART QuickPlanner that is put out that can be very helpful if you're not at your computer (or soon to be released iPhone.)

When it comes to searching, there’s no such thing as too fast.

And now, if you're a Mac user, you can search the entire online archive, including royalty-free, without ever opening your browser.
With our efficient Search Widget, you have almost instant access. You can scroll through thumbnail search results, preview your clips, choose between rights-managed and royalty-free, even download motion comps—all in seconds.
And because our Search Widget is so fast, it’s a defacto idea generator. A fun way to discover the unexpected shot or spark inspiration.
Apple has built powerful, easy features into Mac OS X, like Spotlight and Dashboard, to expedite production workflow, and we intend to take full advantage of these innovations to make your creative life as easy as possible.
DOWNLOAD

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

GAS WIDGET

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

File Shredder

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Here's the info:

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

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

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

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

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

David McLeod (Mucx)


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

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

Streamer


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

From CrunchGear


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I've got a ton of Joost invites available.

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

Send me an email and give me your:

First Name
Last Name
Email

(I need that info to send the Joost Invite)


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visit Handbrake's website.

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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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Wikipedia tells me that Joost is pronounced like "juiced", I'll take that to be correct. But regardless of how you pronounce Joost, I finally got on to the Joost beta program.

If you're not familiar with it, in a few works, the guys behind Skype and Kazaa have come with a IPTV sort of product. There isn't a ton of content on Joost right now, but it's pretty cool. The quality of the videos is higher than I would have guessed.

My real interest would be to run Joost from an AppleTV into a TV, not on my computer. I'm not sure how well Joost operates from a remote yet, I guess I'll have to test it out with the Apple Remote.

I made a 5 minute video moving around in Joost so that you can get an idea of what it's all about.

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MKV and OGM files are audio video containers. They contain AV streams such as H.264 video and AAC audio. One of the benefits to an MKV file is the ability to have DVD like menus and chapter entries.

I've been downloading a series off of BitTorrent, Engineering the World Rally, I'm waiting until I get all 6 episodes before I watch it. It's a documentary of sorts with my favorite World Rally driver being featured, Petter Solberg and his Subaru WRC Team.

I don't care to watch TV shows on my computer, so I'll convert these to MPEG2 and play them on my AV system via Windows Media Center. I was converting the first three episodes to MPEG. Shows 1 and 2 were AVI's so that's an easy convert. But Show 3 was an MKV file and none of my standard tools like ffmpegX or MPEG Streamclip could successfully convert the file to another format.

Some digging led me to an awesome program MoKgVm2DVD (this stands for MKV - OGM). It is really just a frontend for MEncoder (or was it ffmpeg, I'm not positive) but it correctly identifies the audio and video streams and passes on the correct commands to convert them into another file format.

The developer of this freeware application cautions that it is in preliminary stages and far from stable, however, I had great success with it.

It can also play MKV files too, as well as VLC.

MoKgVm Screenshots:

Main screen after opening the MKV:





When you press the Convert button you are presented with this slide out option window:






And when you press the OK button from the above Convert option window, you are presented with this Queue / Status window:




Even though this application isn't fully developed yet, it is a great asset.




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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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NTFS-3G for Mac OS X is a great utility if you have the need to write to flash drives greater than 4GB in size.

It uses MacFuse and NTFS file system on the Flash Drive to make it happen, the behind the scenes on this one is "more than I need to know" just know that you can do it, and it works.

Check it out here.

Now when you see that smoking deal on an 8GB USB Flash drive, you'll have no reason to ignore it.


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Uno makes your Mac look unified and gorgeous. Now it's updated for the first time after iTunes 7.1 was released.

Head over to their site now to download.


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The Linksys Tomato Firmware released an updated firmware to version 1.05.

Enjoy the goodness that is known as Tomato Open Firmware.

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Daniel has made some updates to WebExport, his already great export utility iPhoto.

WebExportWebExport is a universal exporter for iPhoto 5 and 6. It is geared for the production of low to high end photo galleries on any kind of website. I developed it to produce the galleries on my website, and in all likelihood, it will work on your site. It is a semi-derivative of CustomHTMLExport, with new features, a new look, and a redone basecode. Templates are not cross-compatible.

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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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Flip4Mac's WMV addin for Quicktime is wonderful. Perian is a similar addin for Quicktime which enables playback of AVI's, FLV (Flash Video), etc. it's a great addition to QuickTime so that it is more video format agnostic.

Definitely check out this wonder free addin.

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What a fantastic little utility this is, RapidRestore for RapidWeaver.

This elegant and simple utility backs up information for you regarding RapidWeaver, and can then later restore that information.

RapidRestore allows you to easily back up all of your RapidWeaver add-ons like themes, plugins & carousel styles, and the RapidWeaver preferences. This allows you to transfer from one computer to your new one.

All you do is open RapidRestore, press Back up and save the .rrp somewhere, then burn it to a CD or transfer it to your new computer. Then launch RapidRestore on the new computer and press Restore. Your files will be restored immediately, you won't even have to re-enter any serial numbers.

RapidRestore also saves your serial numbers for addins from the following developers: Yourhead, LogHound, RapidCal, RapidScript, RWmultiTool, and RWThemeMiner.

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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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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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I think Google Earth is a cool program, although it's mainly a curiosity with me. I don't have any real need for it other than using it for the occasional diversion to look at some place on the globe. The fly by feature is cool. I know many people use it for cool uses like mapping out routes, hikes, motorcycle rides - as well as commercial applications. All great stuff.

MSN has a nifty online satellite photo web portal which is nice in that you don't have to install a 100GB program like Google. It's called TerraServer. If memory serves, Microsoft has a Google Earth competitor called Virtual Earth, though I don't think it's Mac compatible like Google Earth is.

When I checked my installed Google Earth, it was from July 13, 2006. I probably missed a few updates along the way, but an update was just released 2 days ago.

Download the latest version here.

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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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PandoraMan is a nice easy way to enjoy streaming music from Pandora to your Mac. It uses the Apple WebKit in a minibrowser which only works with Pandora, you don't have to leave your browser of choice open.

Pandora is a great music service, from the Music Genome Project read more about it here. I don't think Pandora is perfect, but it's nice enough that I use it frequently.

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Every now and again I find myself with multiple files that need to be concatenated, Split & Concat is just the program! It runs in the background, senses when it is needed and runs automatically - great stuff. The new version is now a Universal Binary, great for us Intel Mac users. The program can also create Par files.

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I wrote about a great iTunes addin back in September, Gimmesometune. I use it and really like what it adds to iTunes. Of course Gimmesometune will automatically fetch cover art for you, making CoverFlow a nicer experience, but what I really like is the information window that it displays when tracks are played.

The developer recently wrote me and let me know that he's included a suggestion that I made to him, and it will now also fetch Lyrics for you! Sweet, that's awesome, thanks Matt.

Take a look at the website for all the information.

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I've used Plaxo for years, it's a fantastic service to help you keep all your addressbook information sync'd.

The Mac client has been out for a while now, it is Universal Binary and it works great.

Integrates with OS X Address Book
- Syncs with all your other clients
- Lightweight and easy to use
- The Plaxo Toolbar for Mac synchronizes your Mac OS X Address Book with your Plaxo Universal Address Book. Wherever you install a Plaxo toolbar, your address book will be consistent and stay up-to-date automatically. You can also access your address book on the web through Plaxo Online.
- No need to learn any new programs; the Plaxo Toolbar for Mac synchronizes with your built-in Mac OS X Address Book.
- Your Plaxo Universal Address Book is a single address book that goes with you, wherever you have Plaxo installed - your data will always stay consistent and update itself automatically.

Your Comments appreciated.

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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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I've mentioned UNO on the blog before, if you haven't checked it out I urge you to. It really enhances and unifies the look of apps on your Mac. Looks do matter! And Darling, your Uno Mac looks marvelous.

UNO derives from the Latin word for one and stands for "as one".

UNO is the root of Unity.

UNO is a theme that brings the sunken unified toolbar/titlebar look&feel to every single window on your system (cocoa or carbon, metal or aqua and already unified windows as well).

On an higher level, UNO's main goal is to enhance aqua interface consistence, by making all elements look&feel "as one".

UNO is aimed to those who want a clean and un-osbstructive interface while keeping the best of Aqua.

The unity level proposed by UNO does not compromises overall GUI contrast: UNO and UNO shade can be mixed up in order to achieve that usability goal.

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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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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 wrote about CapsWarn back in August, read here. I use it as a great visual indicator for to see if my CapsLock key is enabled, it has other uses too.

A new version was released, if you missed it before, check it out now.

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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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LittleKnownSoftware makes a cool Mail.App plugin that you might be able to benefit from. If you use Mail.App and you use it for multiple email accounts, this may be a neat plugin to facilitate using different Signatures.

Basically what this plugin does for you is add the ability to have replaceable tags in your signatures that are context sensitive to the Mail account that you are sending from. In addition, you can have it autofill information from iTunes into a signature as well. Each account can also have an entire replaceable piece that is used for that account only if a certain tag is in the signature. That's how the "Professional Assasin" appears above. It is what is called the "Tail Signature" for the Phil Anthro account.

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Some times the best things are really simple like this one, SyncTwoFolders. Easy to understand - it synchronizes two folders.

Not too much to say other than this is occasionally really useful. Nice job. Click on the image on the right for a full size image.

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Oh man did this just make my day when I found this utility. CaminoSession gives you control to restore tabs in Camino when you restart the browser. It can be set to always do restore tabs, after a crash, or just save the tabs and not actually restore. This is powerful and much needed.

CaminoSession is a plugin for the Camino web browser. It provides session management so Camino can restore the windows and tabs you had open last time you used it. And if Camino crashes, CaminoSession will let you restart where you left off.

Click on the Image below for a VIDEO DEMO

Ben the developer of this is also the creator of GrowlCamino and other great goodies for Camino. Check out his site here.


Your Comments appreciated.
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I use LaunchBar, and love it. However, one function that QuickSilver has which I would like in LaunchBar is the QuickSilver Triggers. This lets you assign a key combination to do things directly. LaunchBar doesn't have a similar function today.

Soulver (really nice calculator) is something that I use most days, and I was looking for even a faster way to launch it than a launcher program like LaunchBar was capable of. My quest led me to a now 3 year old freeware utility called Xkeys. Thankfully it runs great on my Intel Mac with OS X 10.4.7.

Now I can just press my F5 key and in about a second Soulver is up and running. Perfect. There are a few other "Function Key" applets out there, but Xkeys is the only free one that I found.

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Growl is something that has really proved to be a fantastic thing for the Mac, I get frustrated now when applications don't support Growl. Fortunately there are some Growl fans out there who love the Camino browser. This Camino Growl method of notification is much cleaner and less obtrusive than the download manager. Check it out.


Growl is a cool tool for Mac OS X that provides notifications when an application needs your attention. If you start using Growl, you will probably find that you become totally dependent on it...

...and then you will be sad that a few of your favorite apps don't support it.

GrowlCamino is a plugin for the Camino web browser that posts Growl notifications at useful moments. It provides a convenient Growl-based replacement for Camino's Downloads window and popup blocker.

Download the latest version of GrowlCamino here, or see the installation instructions.

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The BBC (Beeb) has a lot of great content, a lot of that content in Radio based. I've recently been using a dashboard widget which has turned out to be the most drop dead simple way to listen to Beeb content. The only improvement I could suggest would be to have a station select button on the font of the widget instead of clicking the "i" and selecting from the back side of the widget.

The BBC Radio Widget by HawkMan at Phantom Gorilla is really nice. Treat him nice and donate a pint of ale for his efforts, as he requests. You can download the widget right here. Full list of available stations through the BBC Radio Widget right here.

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Last week MacSeven.com reader Mark from Toronto wrote complaining about Album Art only being available from iTMS with an account, he didn't like that he had to give Apple a credit card when all he wanted was album art.

I did a bit of research on this topic and found a very elegant solution, and one which has a much higher success ratio than iTMS in getting Album Art. It does take longer, but works really well and it doesn't use iTMS.

There are two applications necessary to make this happen, well, really one application and one AppleScript.

GimmeSomeTune is a great application that has the ability to grab album art (cover art). The image below is what GimmeSomeTune shows when a new track plays on iTunes.

You can set the preferences to grab Art if it is missing. Click here to see the setting to make so that it grabs your album art. Whenever you play a song or album without art, GimmeSomeTune will fetch it for you.

Now for the AppleScript to help you grab all your album art. Needle Drop from Doug's Apple Scripts will let you play through your library for X seconds per track.

Step by Step Method for grabbing your missing album art.
1) Install GimmeSomeTune
2) Set GimmeSomeTune to download album art
3) Fire up iTunes and start it playing from the first track in your library.
4) Run Needle Drop and tell it to play each track for 10 seconds, starting at (enter any number you like, 0 is default)

Needle Drop will advance to the next track after 10 seconds, repeat until the end of your library. And for each track played, GimmeSomeTune will try to fetch the correct album art.

The only albums I'm having trouble with it grabbing as a group are those with "Various Artists" as the group name. If you have any suggestions on how to get those to work please let me know.


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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UNO is a theme that brings the sunken unified toolbar/titlebar look&feel to every single window on your system (cocoa or carbon, metal or aqua and already unified windows as well).

I really love UNO, it makes your apps look great, and all with a more similar look and feel to them.

Click the image below for a view of what UNO looks like

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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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I had to search pretty hard until I found Dockless. It always bothered me that running applications would show up in my Dock whether I wanted them to or not. I don't mind it so much for things that I run occasionally, but things that I always run, utility based things mainly, I really don't want it hogging space on my Dock - I don't want to see it.

Dockless provides the solution, it is currently a PowerPC application, I hope it is updated to a Universal Binary because I intend to keep using it. Here is the developers description.

Dockless is a little app that does what some people have always wanted - remove certain applications from their dock. Dock real estate can become precious, and some apps don't make a whole lot of sense sitting there. That's where Dockless comes in. With Dockless, any OS X application can be made to show in the Dock or not.

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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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Not long ago I blogged about a couple easy ways to create cool Java slideshows from iPhoto. One solution uses a small applet which accesses your iPhoto photos to create the slideshows. CustomHTMLExport, however, was a slicker design in that it creates the slideshows from within iPhoto. This is nice because you can select specific photos to be included in the slideshow, with the external solution you pretty much have to select an album.

CustomHTMLExport has been shelved, and Dan has done some great work in upgrading it to the new version, WebExport.

In less than 5 minutes I downloaded WebExport, installed it (with a new install, previously you had to copy files to the correct location), I installed the included sample templates (also now automated for ease), and from within iPhoto selected some photos of my recent trip to Cannon Beach, and created a slideshow using AirTight's Simpleviewer.

Here is the link to the slideshow I just created (you can use the right and left arrows to navigate through the photos, or click on the thumbnails.) I ran with the stock settings but you can easily customize, add comments, etc.

This is a really slick way to create nice java slideshows from within iPhoto. I hope Dan or somebody else puts together a template for AirTight's AutoViewer.

Join on the forum and tell about your experience with it or other solutions.

You can discuss this topic here.
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Spaces was announced to be a new feature in the upcoming version OS X, Leopard. Spaces is a virutal desktop utility which allows you do have multiple desktops concurrently on your Mac. Virtual desktops are nothing new, you can find a virtual desktop application for any popular OS out there. Spaces represents the first time a virtual desktop application will be bundled with the Mac.

It was interesting timing, the announcement of Spaces, because I just recently started using a virtual desktop utility on my iMac. I made the decision to go this route because I often have too many apps/program windows to deal with on just one desktop. After using a virtual desktop program for a little while, I'm finding it very helpful to keep more oranized as I work on my computer. My MO is to keep Mail and Camino in my first desktop, then I group things logically in other desktops as needed. For my purposes 3 desktops is a good number, some times 4 if I am using remote desktop to access my Windows Media Center Edition computer which powers my Audio Video system.

I chose to go with Desktop Manager instead VirtueDesktops, largely because of two things, first Virtue Desktops at that time needed tweaking to run on an Intel Mac and I really didn't want to mess with this, and secondly because I really like how Desktop Manager has a menubar access option to access your destktops - you can also use Key combinations.

Spaces, what I saw of it in the WWDC Keynote speech video, is already in it's pre-release state a far more polished looking virtual desktop implentation than either Desktop Manager or VirtueDesktop. I especially like how if you click on an application icon in dock, Spaces will bring the desktop which that application is displayed into focus. What a great feature, this was most certainly a feature implemented by somebody who uses virtual desktops themselves. The other feature of Spaces which is compelling is how you can drag and drop apps from one desktop to another. There are times when I want to have Camino display in a different desktop so I need to go to the desktop it is currently displayed, minimize it, go to the desktop where I want it, and reveal it. Not the most elegant way to get this job done.

A feature that I would love to see Spaces implement is the ability to "pin" a program. Say you want for example, iChat, to be visible in all windows, or Safari, or Camino, it would be nice to tell Spaces to show that application in all desktops not just one. I have no idea if this is currently a feature of Spaces or not, but I would love to see it happen.

You can discuss this topic here.
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MineSweeper is a game many of us have played at one time or another.

When I ran across Mine Swept I had a nostalgic moment, give me a second to compose myself please...

No, this isn't as exciting as new Leopard features, or a MacPro, but hey it's free and fun.

Check it out at Malarkey Software.

What classic games have you recently rediscovered?

You can discuss this topic here.
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iPhotoToGoogleEarth is a utility from Stanton Software, freeware, donations happily accepted.

From Craig's website: iPhotoToGoogleEarth is a plugin for iPhoto 6 that will export photos for viewing in Google Earth. To make the most of iPhotoToGoogleEarth you'll need to have GPS infomation stored in the Exif tags. If you don't know what that means this plugin probably isn't for you.

The best GPS tagger out there is GPSPhotoLinker, check it out. Once you have photos tagged correctly, select your images in iPhoto and then Export. If you have a track log (in NMEA format) you can include it with the images and configure the line thickness and colour. If the track is very long you may wish to lower the detail (it skips points) so that Google Earth runs smoothly, this will depend on how fast your computer is.

The file it produces is a KMZ. Open it with Google Earth or share it with friends to show off where you have been.


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Caps Warn is a great little utility that I've started using. The developer says that this program is designed for the following use:

"CAPS Warn is designed for people who type with one hand using Sticky Keys, or for anyone who presses the Caps Lock key frequently by mistake."

But that's not why I use it. My Keyboard & Mouse is the Logitech S530 wireless keyboard & Laser wireless mouse set. In order to conserve battery life, the wireless keyboard had no indicator for the Caps Lock. Since my keyboard doesn't tell me if my Caps Lock is on or not, this utility is really handy.

Caps Warn can be configured to do more than just Caps Lock notification, but I'll focus on that since it's how I use it. The default setting is to display a red outline of an Up Arrow if Caps Lock are turned off, and a filled in red arrow if Caps Lock are enabled.



This is with Caps Lock turned OFF:

This is with Caps Lock turned ON:

I prefer another setting which is more discrete, and doesn't use up precious menu bar space, and that is to have nothing show when Caps Lock are off, and it will display a small red box at the very top left of your screen, left and above the Apple Menu.

This is what it looks like:

By the way, regardless of which display option you choose, the notifications also light up if you engage the Shift key.

John Woodward developed this utility, you can find it at his website.

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Use your Mac to upload photos!

Now there are two ways to upload your photos to Picasa Web Albums -- from directly within iPhoto or using drag-and-drop from a standalone application.
For iPhoto users
The Picasa Web Albums Exporter lives right inside iPhoto. Select photos, choose Export in the File or Share menu, and upload them directly to your web album.
For a standalone application
Use the Picasa Web Albums uploader -- just drag photos from the Finder and click the Upload button.

Requirements:

• Picasa Web Albums account to use the Exporter or uploader.

  -  You must have a

• OS X 10.4 or later.

  -  Requires

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