The newest release of Chax adds a very cool feature for iChat - now you can use a unified contact list. Instead of separate windows for different services, you can now use a single window.

How nice (Apple, you already did tabs, lets step it up and follow suit.)

The three pane 'hack' stopped working with Mail in Leopard, here is an update.

Download here: WideScreenMailPlugIn

This is a plugin for Mail.app (for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) which turns the message view from a two-row horizontal view, to a two-column vertical view.

Eternal Storms is the developer of a great iTunes addon, GimmeSomeTunes. Now they have made a utility, OpaqueMenuBar, to take the new transparent menu bar in Leopard and make it not be transparent - like Tiger used to show it.

While I do like much about the new Dock, I don't like the transparency of the Menu bar, so this is one that I'm jumping on.

Logitech sure makes great hardware, but their Mac driver support isn't as nice as it could be. If you run VMware's Fusion with a Logitech mouse you'll know what I mean.

Today Logitech released the new version of LCC, 2.31. There are two nice updates that I noticed straight away. First of all, you can have LCC automatically check for updates thank you very much. And secondly, when you use VMware you no longer get the message about Caps Lock showing up - very nice.

Well done boys. Grab the latest version here.

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!

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.

The great developers over at Objective Development make two of my favorite and most used utilities for my Mac, LaunchBar and Little Snitch.

Little Snitch is an application that is akin to a reverse firewall, it notifies you of any outgoing network activity from your computer, you can authorize and set rules for recurring traffic. When you first start using Little Snitch you will be answering the dialog box frequently setting rules, but after a short time you won't see the dialog box too often so don't worry it isn't really a bother at all.

You can read on the website about all the updates and improvements from 1.2.4. In short, Little Snitch now alerts you to far more network activity than it used to, I think this is great, more protection and awareness of what traffic leaves your computer.

There is also a network monitor which you can show all the time, or configure to show only when there is activity, or not show it at all. This is a slick addition.

All in all I find this to be a very nice upgrade, even though it is in Beta.

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.

Perian allows you to play more media file types via Quicktime, they recently updated to version 1.0

You can grab it here.

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.

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

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

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.

1) I installed the VMware Fusion 4.1 beta today. I've never used Parallels or VMware previously. I did try Q which is a freeware alternative, but they don't have virtualization working on it yet so it's much slower, probably more like VirtualPC was.

VMWare installed very easily, and installing Windows 2000 Pro on it went smooth as silk. I installed a Virus program and a few utilities, all seemed to go well. Although after I adjusted it to use more of my system memory, it seems to really slow down my entire system - yeah I know that may happen, but here's the odd thing. After I closed out of VMware my system was still really sluggish. I didn't have time to go back and retest, it could have been NeoOffice or something else that was the culprit. As I get more time to play with it, I'll post my experiences.

2) It has been a very long time since the last update, so the new Plaxo for Mac which came out today was a much welcomed update. Plaxo is fantastic. Consider it one more reason why you don't need to pay the .Mac tax.

3) I may have to shoot somebody if the iPhone fever doesn't end. The iPhone is either going to be the most successful new [electronic] product ever released, or the biggest letdown in history. I certainly hope it is a huge success, however it goes, we'll know soon enough.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks!

Here are some screenshots:

MENU BAR ICON

STATUS WINDOW




CONFIGURATION SCREEN





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

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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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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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I spotted this over at Gizmodo and think it's just fantastic. I can't believe nobody has done this before. USB and docking outlets to mount in your desk. Story here.

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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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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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Cleardock by Unsanity is a nifty little utility. The Dock on your mac has a translucent border around it that frames the icons in your dock. Cleardock removes the translucent border that that the icons just seem to float above your desktop.

I have my Dock set to auto-hide, but I still really enjoy the clean Dock when I do see it.

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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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QuickSilver may have that Google Buzz about it, but I prefer LaunchBar. LaunchBar feels like a part of OS X to me, QuickSilver feels like a definite addon. They both operate lightning fast, LaunchBar in my tests is far faster to update its indexes than QuickSilver. LaunchBar has a very extensive list of things it can do in addition to simply launching programs, however, QuickSilver does have an edge here with it's more extensible architecture. The fact that LaunchBar can't do everything out of the box that QuickSilver could potentially do doesn't bother me too much, LaunchBar does so much great stuff, if it did any more I'd probably start forgetting everything it is capable of.

Whether you are a fan of LaunchBar or QuickSilver you may have heard that during the WWDC Keynote Speech, it was announced that Spotlight is getting a major overhaul for Leopard, and one of it's new features will be the ability to launch programs much more efficiently. Without my seeing Leopard, my pure guess is that Spotlight will have a very effective and slick launcher feature. But I wonder about the other things that I use LaunchBar for, will Spotlight take on some of these tasks too?

I use LaunchBar for the following tasks:
● Launch Applications
● Fire up specific files and have them open in the appropriate application
● Launch websites from my Favorites
● Launch any URL (not from favorites, but free-form)
● Start an email to people in my address book
● Search Wikipedia, Google, Froogle Google, Buy.com, Amazon, MacUpdate and other sites,
● Dial phone numbers from my Address Book (needs Jon's Phone Tool for this)
● Look up contact info my my address book
● Navigate to a drive/folder on my computer
● Start an email and auto-attach a file to that email
● Spotlight searches via LaunchBar
● For control in iTunes

LaunchBar can do other things too, but this is how I use it.

It would be a terrible thing for the guys who bust their butt to make great software like LaunchBar and QuickSilver, but wouldn't it be better for the mass audience if something similar to them were integrated into the OS? I tend to think so, but I doubt the new Spotlight will be as full featured as either LaunchBar or QuickSilver. Time will tell.