It’s a great way to manage what you eat and do it in an extremely geeky way. Your CEO may even be impressed with the included pie charts, that is provided the word pie doesn’t make him drool.

Personally one of my biggest problems with losing weight was that I was raised with the believe that you ate until you were tired, so I feel my weight problem is most likely hereditary. However there’s no excuse for the rest of you! As with most Mac applications installation is easy and the software will prompt you to enter your information.

Said information includes your name, height, current weight as well as your goal weight. You also select how many pounds you want to lose per week and it will automatically calculate your suggested calorie intake as well as a reasonable date you can lose that weight by.

Why not make it a family affair with multiple user accounts? Your account is then password protected to keep other peoples’ noses out of your very personal information. Unlimited users are supported so if you’ve got a family of 24 you’re in luck! Besides, passwords appeal to the geek crowd very well. Once logged in, you’ll find a screen that allows you to log everything you’ve ingested during the day. The bottom area offers you a report of calories, carbohydrates, protein and fat that you’ve consumed along with a pie graph.

At this point you’re saying “I don’t want to have to figure out the calories for everything I eat!!!”. That is exactly why they call this the Perfect Diet Tracker, it provides a searchable database of over 15,000 foods along with suggested serving sizes. The tracker can also search for more foods via the internet. As you can see I’ve eaten about 1165 calories today and it’s only a little after lunch!

With my current settings entered, I’m going to have 1193 calories left over for a very tasty dinner. Say you had a fetish for those tasty glazed donuts, the Perfect Diet Tracker will allow you to save the food you eat regularly to your favorites, making it much easier to add those trusted mainstays of your diet.

But all is not lost; you can also earn back those hard earned calories with exercise. Yes, our Perfect Diet Tracker also tracks your exercise. More exercise will allow you to consume higher-calorie food later. This app tracks more than your standard aerobics; everything from automobile repair to unicycling burns calories and the Perfect Diet Tracker has them all listed.

This is by far one of the best diet tracking applications I’ve seen in a long while. The nutritional targets are customizable, should your doctor recommend more or less protein or carbs in your diet. You can also “weigh-in” and track your weight. This also helps the software analyze the necessary steps to achieving your proper weight.

Perfect Diet Tracker was developed by Byoni Ltd and is available for a one time cost of $39.95 on both Mac and PCs. That’s actually 5 cents cheaper than the monthly Weight Watchers program! For those of you cross-trainers and cross-platformers, the license includes both the Mac and PC codes.

Try Perfect Diet Tracker absolutely free for 7 days to see if it’s right for you. Let us know how much you lose…or gain!

After trying out their previously adware/spyware ridden Window’s version a few years back I completely swore off the company altogether. So, will this latest edition change our minds about how we view RealPlayer?

What about all these new features that will cater to every iPod owner’s quest for RealMedia content? Sarcastic as that may sound we give RealPlayer 11 a look over and see what we like and dislike. RealPlayer 11 has now been introduced as a beta version for the Mac following the Windows previous beta. As promised users can now copy their downloaded RealMedia video content to their iPods.

Of course this is provided the file is free of any digital rights management. Also this feature doesn’t come for free, you’ll need to purchase RealPlayer Plus for a hefty price of $39.99. The Plus edition also includes DVD burning features, as well as crossfade audio controls. We’re not really sure why crossfade audio carries such a high cost, but the DVD burning and iPod exporting could perhaps make up for it?

Acquiring the Beta is as simple as going to RealPlayer and downloading the file. During the installation process, RealPlayer, as usual, attempts to become the default player for virtually any and all media files you would open, so be sure not to get too clicky while installing. The software does allow you to select the files you wish to associate so with some prudence and patience, you can save yourself the hassle of resetting those associations, should you end up not liking the RealPlayer experience.

RealPlayer was able to play most of our media files right out of the box, however we ran into some problems playing video files encoded with AC3 audio. The files played well; however, while skipping ahead or going back during the video, it was a little more choppy then we normally like. RealPlayer 11 does include a nice equalizer system complete with customizable room sizes for achieving the best possible sound from your speakers or headphones.

While we weren’t able to demo the RealMedia to iPod export, we imagine this would be a straight forward process like the rest of 11′s functions. But with a price tag of nearly $40 it seems that few people will be willing to invest in this media player. In RealNetworks’ favor we do applaud them for a much cleaner release, relatively free of adware for RealGuide content. When viewing content from RealGuide you do get an advertisement much larger then the content you’re trying to watch. We find that it degrades the overall viewing satisfaction.

Our final thoughts? RealPlayer 11 is a good straightforward player for viewing your RealMedia encoded files. We don’t think anyone will be ditching iTunes, Quicktime, VLC, or mPlayer anytime soon unless they want to play RealPlayer’s proprietary formats. If you decide to give it a whirl, download RealPlayer 11 and tell us how you rate it. Do you like it? Hate it? Let us know.

Now you can customize your possibly-hard-to-see dock by just dragging and dropping a .zip file onto the free program from Dockulicious aptly named DockSwitcher. In essence this works exactly like all the other dock hacks out there saturating message boards and blogs alike, minus the manual terminal hacks.

This introduces a very user friendly way for the average user to change the dock’s images. Simply copy over DockSwitcher into your applications folder and then drag a .zip file containing the proper .png files over it. DockSwitcher will then install the files in their proper location automagically and you’ll instantly be sporting your newly pimped out dock.

Dockulicious.com offers multiple pre-made docks for you to download and install. No registration is required unless you want to join the community to rate, comment and submit your own docks. If you’ve already found a great dock hack out there, just zip up those dock files and drop them on DockSwitcher.

Should you feel the need to switch back to Leopards originally included dock, the fine developers have included a restore file that will have you back to squinting your eyes in no time. Stop by Dockulicious, give them a try and let us know what your favorite dock is.

Instead of control or right clicking on every image on a page and accidentally missing a few; why not download everything referenced on the page instead? SiteSucker will even “localize” the html documents so they link to the files on your hard drive for easy offline access.

The interface provides for easy customization of virtually every aspect of the “sucking” process. You can quickly select to download only archives, audio, images, movies or any combination of the above. You can also filter by file extensions. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a vacuum cleaner like this that would only pull up dirt and dust and avoid the cat and drapes?

SiteSucker also allows for time delays between downloading each file. For sites that restrict access based on the users browser, the built-in ability to masquerade as any popular web browser will most definitely come in handy. Once you get your filters and settings set up the way you like them, you can save them so you can easily re-download. Keep in mind that this is not a download manager, this is web site downloader, however, it can be used like a download manager in some cases by tweaking the settings.

SiteSucker has been recently rewritten from the ground up using Cocoa, so it’s 100% Universal and will work on any computer with Mac OS X 10.4 and higher. Currently it can’t localize flash files. The price is just what we like…FREE, though the developer asks for donations if you find the program useful. So go ahead and dowload SiteSucker and give it a try. If you like it, be sure to send the developer a little something for their hard work.

Enter Linotype’s FontExplorer X a robust and stable program for managing all your fonts, both system and user added. If the fact that it has been developed by Linotype, the world’s leader in fonts, doesn’t excite you, let’s take a look at some of its enterprise level features.

Cross platform support
Why use an amazing program on your Mac and not be able to use it on your PC? FontExplorer X recently completed its PC beta program, so almost all the amazing features you’re about to find out about will be there for you.

Intuitive iTunes-style interface
So you don’t think of iTunes as being at an “enterprise” level, but this quickly becomes an IT director’s dream. If a user can rock to the beat of their music collection, they can easily feel confident in having full control over the management of their fonts. Activating fonts is a simple click of a check box. Fonts can also be color coded so you can quickly find those fonts you just picked for your next brochure.

Much like playlists and smart playlists in iTunes, users can use their own custom sets with ease. With the smart set feature you can create an intelligent font set that is automatically created based on the criteria you specify. So you want a set that contains only OpenType fonts, Bold-faced and with a copy-write of 1998? Simply enter in those variables and FontExporer will create a font set based on what it can find in your current font library. My favorite use of this feature is a smart set that finds all activated fonts, this allows me to turn off all my fonts with a single click and bring me to the base system fonts for troubleshooting.

Unimaginably quick activation time
While testing this software in our lab we were able to open over 5,000+ fonts at one time in less than 3 minutes. This same operation tried with Extensis Suitcase X1 resulted in a spinning wheel that rendered our system useless until we forced quit out of Suitcase. Definitely not an acceptable action as now you’ve messed up your font cache and you now need to go reset over 70% of Suitcase’s preferences in order to restore proper font order.

In-depth font information and previews
FontExplorer provides the most detailed information about fonts that I have ever found in a font management system. A simple click on the desired font and a preview is displayed in the bottom window with details of the font’s official family, format, and user modifiable comments displayed clearly.

Double click on that same font and a robust information window is opened. The summary tab details just about everything you could ever want to know about a font including it’s Foundry, Trademark information, purchase location, version and copy-write information. A 5-star based rating system is included that allows designers to quickly pick their best fonts as they work. A click to the Characters tab provides you with a preview of the individual characters included in the font along with options for customizing the view. The detailed Preview tab allows you to sample your fonts in a variety of sizes and colors to find the perfect match you’ve always wanted.

Easily export fonts
When you’re finished with a project, you sometimes have the need to hand off the fonts to the printer or prepress house. FontExplorer gives you several options for copying out fonts. A simple drag and drop to your desktop can either copy the fonts directly to your desktop, put them in a disk image, or my personal favorite of placing them into a .zip archive. The benefit of the .zip archive is they’re already packaged and ready to email out. This same feature will also allow you to select a font’s preview text and drag it to your desktop, thus saving a .jpg image of the preview that’s perfect for sending out for approval from your client.

Auto-activation support
While some firms frown on that auto-activation of fonts for obvious purposes, FontExplorer gives you the option nonetheless. Currently they have plug-ins for all of the Adobe products as well as Quark.

Do you have an application that doesn’t fall under either of those two companies? No problem as again FontExplorer has you covered. In the preferences you can select which programs to intercept font requests from. Your CEO just sent you an InDesign document that he needs you to magically turn all nice and pretty for a presentation in an hour, of course he fails to provide you with the 25 fonts he used to create his masterpiece. Once you open the file, FontExplorer will prompt you to load the missing fonts and if they’re already in your library will attempt to load them automatically. Don’t like your fonts being opened for you? FontExplorer also allows you to select a text-based document and will scan it for fonts even without the editing applications installed on your computer.

Built-in font cache cleaning
This is almost a minor point, because in our testing and company-wide release of this software, the need for cleaning up corrupted font caches is a thing of the past. But if you ever get to that point, the program has an area for cleaning your application and system font caches with a simple click. If you allow FontExplorer to manage the actual font folder structure, you can also optimize and clean out unused fonts from this area.

Built-in Linotype store access
Think of it as an iTunes for your fonts. Not only does it keep your fonts all nice and tidy, it also allows you to purchase new fonts for your collection right through the software. Fonts are then added to your Library upon purchase.

Amazing software at an amazing price
So you're ready to make the switch, you have your credit card ready and you really want to order. Unfortunately for your credit card company this software is 100% free. All you need to do is download it from the Linotype website and enjoy!

So with all those pros, are there any cons? Well if you just spent a ton of money on another solution you’ll feel really bad about that decision. The only thing we’ve really found that isn’t a huge concern is a lack of the ability to connect to a font server solution. But if you’re diligent about managing your fonts, a large company can get by without this feature. Also from time to time, we noticed that the cache cleaning’s didn’t always work, but we also haven’t had a need to clean them up since installing FontExplorer, so it’s a good trade off.

As always we love hearing any feedback you might have from using this software, so please don't hesitate to contact us and let us know what you think.

It was an achievement worthy of a downtown parade when Apple introduced the first built-in CD/DVD SuperDrive in 2001. The ability to burn a 4GB DVD on the go was amazing. Now thanks to FastMac, you can upgrade to a Blu-Ray optical drive capable of storing up to 50GB of data on a single disc.

FastMac officially announced on October 5th, 2007 that they will make these new drives available within the next 30 days and you can go ahead and pre-order yours for a mere $999.95. For that chunk of change they do give you a 1-year warranty as well as a 30-day money back guarantee. Also included is a copy of Toast 8 Titanium and a 25GB disc.

The vast storage provided by Blu-Ray technology makes it the perfect medium for High Definition video and mass storage. The technology itself is designed to support up to 200GB, but currently, only 50GB is supported. You’ll need some time burning 50GB at 2x, but at least you have the option. Hopefully by the time 200GB discs are supported, faster technology will be in place.

Blu-Ray is the name given to the next generation of optical discs. Instead of using a standard red laser to read and write data, a blue laser is used. I know that sounds really technical, and you’re scratching your head right now to figure out how the color makes a difference. The difference lies in the fact that the blue laser has a 38% shorter wavelength vs the current red laser. This allows Blu-Ray to place data closer together on the disc and in turn give you more storage capacity.

Here’s the list of the Mac candidates currently eligible for the upgrade:

• iBook G4
• iMac G5
• iMac Intel
• MacBook Pro (17-inch)
• Mac mini
• PowerBook G3 Pismo
• PowerBook G4 Titanium (667 Mhz or higher)
• PowerBook G4 Aluminum

FastMac already has a tray-loading upgrade available for for your eMacs, PowerMacs, Mac Pro and iMac G4′s. So if you don’t mind doing a little installation work yourself or finding a local expert to give you a hand, check out FastMac’s Blu-Ray area here and throw those floppy disks away.

You’ve already decided you want the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection, and that’s going to take up about $2,500 of your hard earned budget. Depending on how you planned it, you may not have much more left over for essential software. That’s where this list comes in. The following software is 100% free and tried and proven with excellent results. Besides, if it doesn’t work for you, it didn’t cost you anything to start with. SO without further adieu this is my list of freeware essentials for OS X.

1. Mozilla Firefox – Web Browser:
No savings, aside from your sanity

This is a great browser, and much more powerful than the included Safari could ever be. It supports RSS live feed bookmarking, a seemingly endless amount of plug-ins, thousands of visually appealing themes, all a built around the most robust web browser ever made. It also includes pop-up blocker support that actually works.

2. Mozilla Thunderbird – Email Client:
Savings $50

Brought to you by the Mozilla crew that gave you Firefox. Thunderbird is a lightweight email client that will replace Apple’s Mail. It includes great built-in SPAM filtering, as well as integrated anti-phishing support. Like most Mozilla products it also has a Windows based version.

3. Cyberduck – FTP Client:
Savings $25

Cyberduck is a full featured FTP client that support FTP, FTP/TLS, SSL/TLS and SFTP protocols. Why spend $25 or more when you can get a better product for free? They’re also very quick with patches and updates, it seems like they’re always making their product better and better. It’s also available in over a dozen languages if you decide to pickup Slovak or Indonesian.

4. Linotype FontExplorer X – Font Management:
Savings $40

FontExplorer X is a very powerful and efficient font management program. We discovered FontExplorer while looking for a replacement for Extensis Suitcase. The deciding factor wasn’t the fact that it was free, but the fact that it far outperformed any other font management software. In our own benchmarking, we were able to load and activate over 3000 fonts in less than 2 minutes. It’s also developed by the world leader in fonts, so you know it’s got to be good. Windows version also available.

5. Open Office – Office Software:
Savings $350

While we wouldn’t recommend ruling out the purchasing the Microsoft Office suite, Open Office works quite well. Open Office includes word processor, spreadsheet, vector drawing, presentation, and database programs. It’s also compatible with the other leading office suites currently on the market. It will require X11 to be installed on your computer, however this is included on your OS X discs if it’s not already preinstalled. Windows version also available.

6. ClamAV – Virus Protection:
Savings $50

While Mac’s are virtually virus free, sometimes you’ll need to check files before sending them out to others if they’ve been altered previously on a PC. ClamAV does a good job of this, at the price we want to pay. Currently for a Mac, this is going to be able to offer all the protection you need aside from the built in Firewall. Windows version also available.

7. Adium – Chat Client:
No savings, just an all-in-one IM/Chat client

Adium is a great program that allows you to have all your IM accounts all in the same place. Currently it supports all the major systems such as AOL/AIM, ICQ, .MAC, Jabber, Google Talk, LiveJournal, MSN, Yahoo, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Novell Groupwise, Lotus Sametime, QQ and most recently MySpace IM. The only thing is you won’t be able to do audio or video chats. You’ll need the individual programs for that. But for basic IM services, file transfers, tabbed messaging, and searchable chat logging, Adium is your client. It also is 100% skin-able and customize able. Thousands of icons, menus, themes and more are available for easy download. Adium is actively updated so new features and protocols are added in quite often.

8. HandBrake – DVD Ripper:
Savings $40

This is without a doubt the best DVD ripping software on the market. Great for backing up movies, family DVD’s and more. It supports converting DVD’s to .avi, .mp4 and Apple TV compatible files. It supports 6 channel audio as well as DTS and Stereo. DVD conversion is a breeze and it’s very easy to use. Once you get your settings the way you want, you can save it as a preset and all future DVD rips is a simply 2-3 click operation. Windows version also available.

9. Print Window – Window Printer:
Savings Unknown

If you were a former OS 9 user one of the things lost when moving into OS X was the Print Window function in Finder. This program basically restores that functionality as well as offers various improvements and options. For those of you not familiar with OS 9, this program will allow you to print the contents of folders, etc. Sometimes when delivering a CD or DVD you may be required to provide your client with a directory of everything on there. Print Window facilitates that for you.

10. Transmission – BitTorrent Client:
Savings $10

One of the quickest and safest ways to download and transfer files these days is through P2P torrent files. Transmission is a great client that supports hot folders, manageable queues and more. My favorite feature is a hot folder that allows me to download the tracker file into the folder and Transmission automatically handles everything from there. That’s what I call service! It’s open source and often updated.

11. VLC Media Player – Media Player:
Savings $30

One thing you will notice if you’re migrating from a PC is the lack of support for certain video formats. VLC has successfully handled any video file we’ve sent to it. Now that QuickTime offers full screen viewing for free it’s not as important to have. Windows version also available.

12. UnRarX – RAR Archive Extractor:
Savings Unknown

My favorite archive type of choice will always be the .rar a format. UnRarX provides a very efficient Mac based extractor. I generally find it to be faster than it’s Windows WinRAR counterpart. You won’t be able to make any .rar archives with this software, but you can certainly open them. Also for those of you who use StuffIt, the built in Archive feature in OS X is a great replacement. Simply ‘ctrl+click’ or right click on the files or folders you want to zip and select “Create Archive of…”. This will create a multi-platform .zip file that can be opened on virtually any machine without the need for extracting software.

13. Chicken of the VNC – VNC Client:
Savings $500

Chicken of the VNC is a lightweight and speedy VNC client. OS X 10.3 and higher already comes with a built in VNC server, and you can also install a VNC server onto any PC. This allows you to view and control the desktop of the VNC server. While not a complete replacement for the powerful Apple Remote Desktop or Timbuktu, it will provide you with some of the same basic features.

Load them all up, give them a whirl and let us know what you think. We also have reviewed some other great software, some free, some you’ll have to pay a little bit, but you can see them all here.

Originally slated for an early 2007 release, Leopard contains the most updates compared to any previous OS X system. A completely redesigned dock and Finder bar are just the beginning. Other additions include a new viewer capable of opening almost any format for your quick and easy perusal. iChat has also been revamped to allow photo sharing among other things. But enough about the software, you want to know when you can get your hands on it.

While rumors of possible release dates vary from this week to the 26th of the October, the only information provided by Apple currently, is simply “October”. The rumors of an imminent release are prompted by Apple’s delay of many hardware shipments this week, a sign that they may be preparing to load them with Leopard prior to shipment. The latest build of 10.5 is receiving rave reviews from beta testers and could very well be the proper candidate for the gold master that will provide the rest of us with a stable Leopard release.

Just to be on the safe side, we’d recommend waiting for an official release date before purchasing any new Macs. There’s no sense in trying to file a lawsuit, just because Apple released the new operating system the day after you spent all your hard earned cash on a quad-core Mac Pro.

So what’s your guess on a Leopard release date?

The downside for true audiophiles everywhere is having to settle for 8-16GB of storage space minus what it takes to operate the iPhone firmware. Thanks to the ingenious collection of scripts by Brian Ashe you will have all the space in the world, at least for your music.

While it will involve slightly more than double clicking an installer, this steaming project includes very easy to follow instructions. Just about everything you need is already on your OS X-based system with the exception of the lovely iPhone-style interface and PHP. The interface is currently provided by the developer for free, so you have absolutely nothing to lose. A link is provided on the developer’s site to acquire PHP for free via an automated installation.

In a nutshell this places your iTunes library on a website hosted by your home computer or wherever your music resides and allows you to stream remotely to your iPhone. The interface is easy to navigate and carries the iPhone theme very well. While the developer has slated this as an iPhone-based project, it’s fairy certain that this same software will work for streaming music to your iPod Touch or other wireless based devices including Windows Mobile. Currently our experience with non-iPhone devices results in the audio file needing to be downloaded. But it’s still a great way to access your tunes from the road.

Heaven forbid you don’t have an OS X-based computer and are visiting us regularly, but fortune has shined down upon you. While the developer has only provided instructions for an Apple based system, with some basic knowledge in setting up a simple web server on your computer the provided programming should work just as well. But we strongly suggest you go get yourself a proper computer in the very near future!

While currently their is no supported search functionality, look for this in the very near future. Check it out here.

Users currently using Boot Camp Beta 1.2 or earlier will need to upgrade to version 1.4, if they wish to continue using the Beta after support for this version ended on September 30, 2007. So if you’re trying to create a new Boot Camp partition and it just isn’t working, now’s the time to upgrade to version 1.4.

Current users running version 1.3 or 1.4 will have until the release of Leopard to continue their Beta usage. The only way to continue using Boot Camp after this period is to upgrade to Leopard, which will include the final version. Not such a bad deal I guess, since we don’t know many Mac users who aren’t planning on upgrading. Can’t say the same for the latest versions of some other popular operating systems…

For more information please see the official Apple support document here.

To sweeten the deal, not only will BusySync share your iCal calendars, it also features an automated backup system that saves your calendars daily and keeps the last 10 backups for easy restoration.

From examining the way this program works, the backups are saved in a folder on your hard drive, so it stands to reason that you could relocate these and maintain more than 10 days worth of backups for mission critical data storage.

The overall concept is very simple, you install BusySync onto each computer you want to serve/share iCal calendars with. Then select which calendars you want to publish and subscribe to on each computer in the BusySync System Preferences pane.

Once you have your calendars shared, simply go to the other computers and follow a similar process to publish/subscribe to the desired calendars.

Once this is complete the new remote calendars show up automatically in iCal and are able to be edited on the fly. Once a change is made on one computer, very shortly it shows up on all the others as well. It also allows you to make changes offline and then sync those changes once your machine is reconnected to the network. Slick.

For our specific testing, we set up BusySync on one of our Xserve’s and served out a dozen calendars to 6 Macs that operated as clients. Each of the Macs were able to see the changes made by others within a few seconds.

For step-by-step instructions be sure to download the helpful Users Guide from BusyMac.com. Currently only a 30-day trial is available, but I’m guessing they should be posting the actual price soon. Keep an eye on the BusyMac site for updates.