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Want to share your files quickly, easily and with no waiting for uploads? Then Papaya may be just what your looking for. Papaya makes it super easy to turn your Mac into a server and allow anyone to download files you specify by giving them appropriate URLs. This video review tells you all you need to know:

 Papaya Review [5:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Lighthead Software has been kind enough to provide us with 3 licenses to give away to lucky MacApper readers. To enter, simply add a comment below with a feature that you would like to see in Papaya.

Just over a week ago I reviewed Flow, and the developer was kind enough to provide us with 5 licenses to give away.
To enter all you needed to do was to add a comment with a feature request. The winners were randomly picked using random.org.
The 5 lucky winners are as follows:

Conrad
roderick
lh
Ben
Jon Hubartt

The developer has been informed of your emails so expect your licenses shortly!

Hard drives are an important part of our computer lifestyle — everything is stored on one eventually (unless you have one of those flashy new SSD ones, in which case I’m very jealous!). Therefore, managing and maintaining them should be a top priority, although it rarely is.

You may need to partition, erase, restore or simply maintain one. In any of these cases Drive Genius 2 from ProSoft engineering claims it will be your one stop shop for all things disk management. This is a tough claim, especially as Leopard ships with a fairly complete disk management application in disk utility anyway.

Flow is an application that has been long awaited and much talked about. It was indeed billed as a possible Transmit killer by this very website. So now that it has been released, does it live up to the hype? Will it really be a Transmit killer or does the yellow and purple truck have some mileage in it yet, not to mention the many other Mac FTP applications?

I have spent a while with Flow before it was released and I have begun to build a pretty decent view on the application. It does some things differently from other FTP apps that I believe will ultimately make you decide whether you love it or loath it.

Recently I reviewed RAGE MapDesign, the image map creation software from RAGE. The developers kindly offered 5 licenses to be given away and there were many entries. Here are the lucky winners:

Rees Maxwell - Rees had the great idea of adding a preview as the image was being exported so you could see what effect the different export settings would have on your image map. Great idea Rees, I think this should be a feature in a lot of apps!

Yong Hwee - Young wanted to see integration with online photo services with one click exports and proper tagging.

You might remember my software BitClamp, that has been mentioned here a couple of times, launched back on the first of November. Well this week I released the first major update to the encryption tool in the form of version 1.1.

I won’t make a secret of the fact that the launch could have gone a lot better and the response wasn’t 100% positive. But, instead of being totally negative, it was clear what people wanted: stronger encryption, as well as a couple of other features such as a confirmation field for when you enter your password.

Image maps. We have all seen them dotted around the net. If you are a Facebook user you will be more than familiar with “tagging” people in photos. That is a particularly clever form of image mapping.

Essentially image mapping is adding different links to different parts of an image that you select, which link to something relevant. For example, if there is a particular building in an image you could make it so when someone clicks it, it takes the user to the building’s website.

Screencasting is a growing phenomenon, with popular podcasts such as ScreenCastsOnline, and tutorial services like TeachMac being at its forefront. Due to their simplicity to put together and ease of how they convey information, many developers are now creating screencasts to show off their new applications.

Like so many other areas, screencasting is dominated by one or two apps (namely, iShowU and SnapZPro). I was therefore thrilled to see an announcement by the Araelium Group saying that they had developed an application to compete in this growing market.

A few weeks ago I gave the guys at MacApper a preview copy of my new software BitClamp. The response was pretty positive in that quick preview and I did my best to answer reader’s questions. Today Bitclamp is unveiled for all to use. What follows is developer’s preview of BitClamp so be warned this is not an unbiased review (as I’m the developer).

Ever loved an application, but wished it never appeared in the dock, like spotlight? It’s always there, but has no dock item. I’ve wanted such functionality a surprising number of times, particularly with application launchers such as LaunchBar and Quicksilver.

They’re great, but I never use their dock icon; I use their keyboard shortcut instead. So, why have them sitting there taking up space in your dock? There is a relatively simple hack that fixes it, so that when launched, the application still runs but does not appear in the dock (or when command - tabbing).

A week ago, I reviewed Domainer, the new Domain information manager app from Rage Software. I thought maybe a tool of this nature would only appeal to a small group of users but there was some lively discussion. As I mentioned in that article Rage kindly offered to give away 5 licenses to lucky MacApper readers that could suggest killer features to be added to Domainer.

I have to say there were some very good suggestions (in the case of any duplicates, credit was given to the first commenter); it was tough to pick but here we go.

I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with Little Snitch: it’s a popular network filter from Objective Development, who, incidentally, are the people behind LaunchBar. For those who don’t know: Little Snitch lets you know whenever an application or process wants to connect to the Internet and what server and port they want to connect to.

Once it catches these sneaky little programs, you can then apply rules to these connections to decide which applications can connect to what. So, I’m sure some of you are saying at this point: “It’s called a firewall mate, and Mac OS X comes with one built in”. Well actually, it isn’t a firewall in the truest sense. Firewalls block incoming traffic by blocking specific ports.

I am sure that a lot of you reading this own domain names and websites. It’s interesting to see how different people retrieve information for their various sites, but most use a variety of web services (Alexa for example) or simply the tools provided with your registrar. This is sufficient if you own a few domains, but if you’re like me, you can end up with a lot of information on a lot of sites which can be hard to manage. Domainer from Rage Software helps you manage the data on all your domains. This new app, aimed at webmasters, provides a great way to see information about all of your domains all from within one interface.

Most of the time when developers release announcements about a new version of their software, they are full of pride about the wealth of new features that have just been included; however, the developers of HandBrake are “chagrined” to announce a new version of their DVD ripping software for a different reason. Why? Simply because it fixes so many bugs and stability problems. They have said on their website that v0.9.0 was no where near as stable as it should have been.

I have been hearing rumors around the developer community for a while now about a supposed “iTunes for MacApps”, and today I got the evidence I had been waiting for. The image below is a screenshot of a very early alpha build of a new program sent to me by Mark from TheMacPak, a well placed group in the Mac community.

Now some of you may remember TheMacPak - it was a website that sold a nice bundle of Mac apps at a reduced rate. Well it seems it has, or rather will be, reinventing itself as a piece of software much like iTunes, but exclusively tailored for distributing Mac software.