Freeware

Handbrake 0.91 emerges

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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.
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iPhoto Buddy

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.

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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!


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A free Mahjong Game

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!

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MakeiPhoneRingtone

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

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iPhone Unlock Tool, AnySIM, now has GUI

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.

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IBM is flexing it's muscle for Open Source again.

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.

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iUnlock released: the first free, open source iPhone SIM unlock software

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

More details here on Engadget.

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Growl update

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.

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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

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Nighty, Night: Sleep Display Widget

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.

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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.


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Burn, baby Burn

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.

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iStat Menus Update

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.

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Art of Office

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.

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HandBrake 0.9.0 Released!

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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.

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TED = Torrent TiVo

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
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Here is the main window of TED
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Here is the ADD show screen
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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.

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Combine PDFs 2.1

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.

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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.

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Hot Damn! Transmission Double Header

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

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Throttle the 'duck

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.

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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.

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If you like it, DiggIT.
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NeoOffice compatible with Office 2007

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.

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

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How to mount network and FTP filesystems

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.


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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.

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If you like it, DiggIT.


Digg!

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New Remote Desktop coming

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.

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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.

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CoRD: A better Windows Remote Desktop

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.

CoRD

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Perian's Type Installer

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.

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Get the proper icons for Perian media files

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.

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A look at iStat Menus

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

iStat Pro


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.

iStat Menus Preferences



It also looks great on your Menu bar.

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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.

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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.

iStat Drop Down Panels



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.



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Mac & iPod, meet BART

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.

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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.)

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BBC Motion Gallery Search Widget 1.5

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

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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

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Significant CenterStage release, 0.6.2

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.

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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
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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


Digg!

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Mozy revisited

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.

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XLD, the Lossless audio decoder for Mac OS X

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.

XLD

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CenterStage Printable Demo PDF Booklet

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.

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CenterStage is making nice progress

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.

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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.


Digg!

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TVShows (auto snag TV shows via Torrents)

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.

TVShows


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.


Digg!

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Free Stopwatch application

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.

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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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Gas Prices and File Shredder Widgets

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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.

Gas Prices Widget



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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