Archive for March, 2007

Ah, the weather. For many of us, the fascination of what the weather will be like today, tomorrow, or next week can drive our entire day. For this reason, there are dozens of weather websites and a handful of weather widgets out there. But what about those of us that want weather information right on our desktop at all times, even without having to pull up Safari or Dashboard? Today I present for your reading pleasure a showdown of desktop weather applications. Read on…

MarsEdit is a weblog editor for Mac OS X that makes weblog writing like writing email - with spell-checking, drafts, multiple windows, and even AppleScript support. It works with most blogging services, including Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad, Movable Type, and others. Technorati, and the pinging of many popular blog search engines is also built in. MarsEdit’s live preview and templating system let you view your writing just as it will appear when published. Its text filtering system includes built-in support for many emerging technologies, such as Markdown, SmartyPants, and Textile.

OK, I’ll admit it, I use my desktop as a file storage area from time to time. Disorganization of your desktop, dock, bookmarks, and more can cause clutter and confusion. With a disorganized Mac, valuable time is wasted on finding files, apps, and more. Today I’m going to show you how to organize several parts of your Mac to make life on the desktop a bit easier.

If you own an Airport Extreme Base Station, the old AEBS, or Airport Express Base Station, Apple just rolled out 2007-001 compatibility updates and general fixes for the following applications:

• Airport Utility
• Airport Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow Base Stations.
• Airport Disk Utility
• Airport Disk Agent

It’s about time Apple made this move since many owners of the new Airport Extreme Base Station (802.11n), including myself, have been unhappy with some of the connection problems and administrative issues. It’s important to note that this download does not update the actual firmware on the AEBS’ unit, it simply upgrades the aforementioned applications residing in your Mac. As always, make sure you backup your Mac first before getting the update, just in case. You can get the 12.7mb update either by running software update or straight from Apple.

Life is full of distractions. Whether it’s birds chirping outdoors, your dog constantly barking at the neighbor’s cat, or your desktop filled with way too many windows open. Believe it or not, most people who write stories, blog posts, and news articles are often distracted with panels, menu bars, Instant Messages etc. Many programs like Mircosoft Word and even Apple’s Pages can have distracting qualities. There’s no need to worry. Hog Bay Software has found a cure and it’s called WriteRoom.

Most games these days want you to have a disk in your computer to play. One reason is this keeps people from giving a copy of the game to their friends. This can become a pain and a major annoyance on long trips or anywhere where you can’t reach your disk, and you have a case of Call of Duty fever.

I don’t know about you guys, but I usually hate social networks like myspace or xanga, but facebook is an exception. It’s well designed and a great way to keep in touch with friends. A big part of facebook are pictures; everyone who uses facebook can easily tell you that facebook is loaded with pictures from vacations or times out with friends.

Speaking from personal experience, whenever I would have to upload pictures to facebook, I would have to choose them in iPhoto, dump them onto my desktop and then proceed to upload them via facebooks built in Java uploader, which is not a fun experience.

An update to Apple’s Boot Camp software was issued today to OS X users. Boot Camp is a free partitioner and set of drivers that allows Mac users to run Windows as well as OS X on the same drive. Boot Camp was introduced early last year and is going to be a feature in Apple’s upcoming OS X 10.5 release, Leopard. Boot Camp 1.2 includes many fixes and features, making Windows on the Mac a bit easier.

ChocoFlop is an image manipulation program based entirely on Apple’s CoreImage technology which takes advantages of the processing power in your GPU (graphics card). It’s a very lightweight program and has the ability to apply filters in real time, with no long term damaging effect to your respective image. Chocoflop takes advantage of CoreImage’s built in support for many file formats, as well as layers, masks, selections and paint tools. It even features the ability to filter high-resolution HDR images at 128 bits per pixel. It is built to have no learning curve for Photoshop users and features many of the more obscure abilities of CoreImage, such as rich text layers.

Apple has recently shipped their latest product, The Apple TV. This device allows you to play your iTunes and iPhoto content on your television without the hassle of wires and cables. Simply sync the media like you would with an iPod or stream the media off of your computer. The video content on the iTunes Store is near DVD quality with amazing detail and sound, and the format of the video is 640 by 480, which is fine and barley noticeable when comparing the two. One of the great features of the Apple TV is it’s ability to play 1280 by 720 videos which is also known as 720p. 720p is one of the many high definition formats available for playing on today’s modern TVs. This format is very clear and looks stunning on your TV. Here’s a way to export your videos using QuickTime Pro so that you can play them on your Apple TV in crystal Clear 720p format.

If you are the type of person who spends a lot of time chatting online, then you probably have plenty of chat transcripts. Chat Transcript Manager from Unsanity is an invaluable application if you need your transcripts to be searchable and organized. It has support for the 3 major Mac instant messaging clients: iChat, Adium and Fire.

Chat Transcript manager’s strongest features are it’s searching and sorting capabilities. You can search all of your iChat, Adium or Fire transcripts right in the main window. The sorting abilities also come in handy, as you can weed out transcripts based on date; whether they happened this week, last month etc. and whether they contain emails, links or pictures.

The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for the venerable “BOMArchiveHelper.app”, the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than OS X by default, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder. It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with foreign language versions of other operating systems.

AppFresh is a utility that keeps all applications on your Mac up to date by checking the internet for new releases and making downloading and installing them a breeze. It covers software updates from Apple and third parties and can be used as a replacement for Apple’s own Software Update application to provide one central place to make sure you’re up to date.

Even though all of these features may exude “must-have app,” it’s still very much a work in progress. It’s only a preview for now, not yet in beta. For safety reasons, it won’t overwrite your applications but extract downloaded updates to your desktop. Users have also reported crashes while updating Saft for Safari. Despite these downsides this app looks very promising and may very well become a staple application in the future.

If you want to record, for example, a podcast or an important phone call over Skype, you’ve probably looked at either WireTap Pro or Audio Hijack Pro. These apps are great and powerful for much more than just Skype, but if you want absolute simplicity and all you really want to do is record both sides of a Skype conversation, Ecamm’s Call Recorder for Skype, just upgraded to version 2.0, may be the best option for you.

There are tons of RSS readers for the Mac. However, most of them ship with basic features and are almost powerless. Introducing NetNewsWire, a powerful and robust RSS reader. NetNewsWire has a familiar three-paned interface, similar to Mail.app, and can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs, making it quick and easy to keep up with the latest news. Besides reading articles and news, you can download podcasts and audio files and have them sync to your portable audio device. The app now synchronizes with NewsGator Online and the rest of the NewsGator RSS Suite.