WhatSize is a neat little tool that can tell you exactly what’s taking up so much space on your hard drive. Starting from a screen that looks very similar to the column view in Finder, you can drill down and see how big each folder and file on your disk is. This can actually be quite daunting, but WhatSize uses a color-coding system to indicate the comparative size of the files and also sorts them with the biggest ones at the top.

Using WhatSize, you can measure any volume or directory. Keep in mind, though, that the bigger the directory you’re measuring, the longer it will take. From my experience, it can measure my entire 120GB hard drive in about three to five minutes, much faster than many of the other file measuring utilities out there. In addition, WhatSize can measure networked drives and even NTFS Boot Camp volumes. There’s a lot of power behind this little application.

There are several other measuring utilities out there, but WhatSize is the easiest to use and the fastest one that I’ve found, and it’s also free. Download it here.

Encoding video is somewhat of an arcane art, with all sorts of things to worry about from resolution to bitrate to frame rate. VisualHub acts as a big brother to Techspansion‘s other encoding app, iSquint, and takes a results-oriented approach to this issue by essentially asking the question, “What do you want to do with this video?” You are offered presets for iPod, AppleTV, PSP, DVD, and many more formats. This entire process is very simple, and you don’t have to worry about all the technical details behind what you’re doing.

VisualHub makes it easy to quickly create a video that matches a certain format if you’re a novice, but if you’d like to play around with specifics, you can do that too. Most likely, though, you’ll be able to do everything you need from the app’s main window. For example, in the tabs of the various formats, you’re provided with a quality slider ranging from “Tiny” to “Go Nuts.” One particularly cool feature of VisualHub is being able to quickly convert any video format into a Final Cut-ready DV movie. (Of course, this feature will be moot once Final Cut Studio 2 comes out, but it is useful nonetheless.)

For the often-opaque process of encoding videos, VisualHub is really a one-stop shop. Given the amount of options in the app, you can play around with various formats and find one that suits your needs. VisualHub is $23.32 from Techspansion. For anyone working with video on a daily basis, it’s definitely worth every penny.

Drive-in has a very simple core concept that is a bit different from the DVD ripper/encoder apps like HandBrake and MacTheRipper. Instead of extracting just the movie in a compressed video format, Drive-in actually makes a one-to-one copy of the disc. It then allows you to mount the image file it creates to play it in DVD Player, and your computer is none the wiser. The advantage, of course, is that once you copy the disc to your hard drive, your DVD drive doesn’t have to do the work to play the movie, saving tons of battery life.

Drive-in stores the disc images as .dvdimage files inside its own special wrapper that it calls a “case.” The interesting part about this is that the case stores all of the information about the disc from Amazon, including DVD cover image, synopsis, review, and cast information. Each case can also hold multiple image files, so if your movie includes special features on a separate disc, you can store them all in one single file.

One big advantage to using Drive-in for watching movies on the go is that you can copy an entire DVD to your drive in about 1015 minutes, as opposed to an hour or more with a ripping/encoding option. There are a couple of disadvantages, though. First, as the image file is a bit-for-bit copy, it’s just as large as the original DVD, often several gigabytes, and includes the same copy protection that the disc itself did. Second, you can’t play or open the image files with anything else other than Drive-in, so once you use it, you’re somewhat stuck.

Overall, if you want a complete, full-quality copy of a DVD disc for archival purposes or to watch while traveling to save battery life, Drive-in is not a bad option. If you just want the movie itself and you don’t mind going to extra mile to rip and encode it to a compressed format, there are better options out there for archiving DVDs. (We like HandBrake.)

Flip4Mac Drive-in is currently in a public beta, and is free during that period. You can find it here.

FotoMagico, unlike iPhoto and iMovie, is designed specifically for the task of creating photo slideshows. It features the same easy-to-use interface and media integration that the current iLife suite does, but it makes the process so much more functional. The first thing you see when you open the app is a dialog asking what format the slideshow is being created for. This is insanely useful, as a slideshow that looks great on your widescreen LCD monitor may not look so good on a standard-definition 4:3 television, or vice-versa. I’ve been bitten by this one too many times myself, and this feature of FotoMagico is excellent.

Once you’ve got your project going, it’s as easy as dragging pictures and music into the timeline. From here, you have full control over length of pictures, transitions, audio looping, and much more. One of the great things I loved about the otherwise-subpar Pinnacle Studio was the full control over pan and zoom, also known as the “Ken Burns effect,” on images. FotoMagico incorporates this same control in a much more usable way.

Much of the real “magic” of FotoMagico comes when you get ready to export your slideshow. Not only can you simply play it on your computer screen on-the-fly, you can create movie files formatted for the web, iPod, DVD, and even full 1080p HD video. If you want to make viewing the slideshow even easier, you can create a self-contained application file that will play the slideshow fullscreen on any Mac, great for the technologically challenged. Another great feature, new in version 2.0 of the software, is the ability to export the slideshow as a standalone screen saver file for OS X.

Boinx offers FotoMagico Express and Pro versions, offering various levels of features. The Express version, at $49, will probably do everything that most home users would need to do. The Pro version costs $129 and includes Aperture support and customized exporting options, as well as making the screen saver and standalone slideshows created by the app without a watermark. If you create photo slideshows on even a semi-regular basis, it’s definitely work checking out.

The dev team at HandBrake have packed a slew of new features into this beta release, including surround sound and AppleTV support, among many others. Along with these fancy new features come a ton of minor tweaks to make the app just that much better. The devs also report that we should expect to see an updated 0.8.5b2 version shortly with even more features.

HandBrake is available for OS X, Linux, and Windows. The servers are getting slammed right now, but keep checking back at the spiffy new HandBrake site to get the latest version.

Speed Download really is a different kind of download manager. If you just wanted to download more than one file at a time, Safari or Firefox would do just fine if you’re on a decent connection. The advantage of Speed Download is, well, speed. Using multiple concurrent connections to the same server, your download rate can increase significantly. In my non-scientific tests, I’ve seen speed increases of up to four times what I got using just Safari.

Speed Download has some other interesting features, including FTP support and scheduled downloads. It can also organize different types of downloaded files into different folders on your hard drive based on file extension. Overall, the app has tons of settings for you to play around with, and once you get everything tweaked just right, you can even incorporate it directly into Safari to replace its built-in download manager.

If you have a need for speed when it comes to downloading big files, or you just need to manage a huge number of downloads without throttling your bandwidth, Speed Download is probably the best and easiest option available on OS X. Speed Download 4 is $25 from YazSoft. Get it here.

Core Image Fun House
Found in /Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools/
If you’ve used Photo Booth, you’ve seen all the cool effects that can be done to the pictures you take there. Believe it or not, effects like these are actually available to any application using the Core Image and Core Video frameworks in OS X. Core Image Fun House is a little app that allows you to play around with all the different effects available with the Core Image component. Not only can you have some real fun with all the different effects at your disposal, but playing around with the Fun House will make you realize just how powerful OS X is.

Pixie
Found in /Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools/
Another neat little image tool, Pixie magnifies the area surrounding your cursor on the screen anywhere from 200% to 1200%. It doesn’t do a whole lot, but it’s a nice tool for designers or pixel artists to have at their disposal.

Quartz Composer
Found in /Developer/Applications/Graphics Tools/
The great thing about many of the Developer Tools is that they give you a better idea of the inner workings of OS X, if that’s what your interested in. Quartz is the underlying image layer that allows for all the visual effects such as transparency and shadows that are prevalent in the operating system, and it is the foundation for the cool screen savers in OS X. Quartz Composer gives you the entirety of this powerful imaging layer to work with to create your own compositions.

AU Lab
Found in /Developer/Applications/Audio/
Core Image and Core Video are often touted as awesome features of OS X, but many people often forget about the very sophisticated sound subsystem that Core Audio allows for. To go along with that sophistication, Apple included AU Lab with the Development Tools. AU Lab is a very full-featured audio mixer that can do some amazing things, though it does have a steep learning curve. You’re in luck, thoughApple includes extensive documentation for all of the Development Tools.

Spin Control
Found in /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/
Though it was designed for developers to debug their own apps, Spin Control is a useful tool for determining exactly what’s taking a program so long to do its thing. We all hate that spinning beach ball of death; Spin Control won’t stop it, but it will do its best to tell you why it’s there in the first place.

Thread Viewer
Found in /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/
Thread Viewer is another great back-end debugging tool. “Attaching” it to a running app can tell you how many cycles the app’s processing threads are taking up, and what kind of activity those threads are doing. This can be especially useful in determining where an app stalled out.

FileMerge
Found in /Developer/Applications/Utilities/
As a writer and editor, I was very pleased when I found FileMerge. This app allows you to compare two text files side by side and find their similarities and differences. Each alteration is highlighted, and you can choose which “side” you want to accept. It’s a really great way to compare two similar but not exact blocks of text and make changes and corrections.

Repeat After Me
Found in /Developer/Applications/Utilities/Speech/
I haven’t had a whole lot of time to play around with Repeat After Me, but the concept is great: you input a word or phrase in text form, then you repeat the same word or phrase into a microphone. Over time, doing this will increase the accuracy of the speech-to-text in OS X. There’s a lot of science going on in there that I know nothing about, but it’s very fun to play around with and see what you can get working.

SetFile
Found in /Developer/Tools/
Lastly, SetFile is a very useful shell script for setting the attributes of files, folders, and volumes, even ones you don’t normally have access to. There are many uses for this script, including hiding a Boot Camp volume from OS X, but be warned: playing around with file attributes can be mighty tricky. You can find the documentation for the uses of SetFile within the Developer directory and also on Apple’s website, but I wouldn’t recommend using it unless you know what you’re doing.

These are just a few of the many tools you’ll find in the Apple Development Tools package. I’d say even if you’re not an application developer, it’s worth the download just for the useful and fun tools you can find there. The Apple Development Tools are available for free. Download the latest version here.

UPDATE: I goofed. Reader EmptySet says this about Repeat After Me: “R.A.M. is simply an app that lets you contour the prosody (pitch and duration) of speech spoken by Apple's speech engine. You can also record your own voice to see what it's prosodic contour is, so you can try to copy the same curve for the artificial speech, thus making it sound ‘better’.” Thanks for the clarification, EmptySet!

Meteorologist
Meteorologist, sometimes simply known as Meteo, is a little app very analogous to the weather Dashboard widget, except it sits in your menu bar and/or dock. The app is simple and to the point, delivering a visual representation of the current weather, providing more details when clicking on the menu bar item. Though it’s not feature-packed like some of the other weather apps, Meteorologist above all else emphasizes simplicity and beauty. It is easy to use and very nice-looking, which can’t be said for some of the other weather apps here.

Note: There is one little caveat with this app: there has been a change in the way Weather.com does listings, which breaks the current version’s city search and updating. Thanks to the community involvement, a simple fix has been created, which you can get right here.

Pros: Simple to configure and use; beautiful icons; open-source

Cons: Not a huge offering of options; third-party patch required to get it working

Meteorologist is free and open-source.

 
Seasonality
Whereas most of the apps I’m looking at here today will just give you a simple overview of the weather and maybe a radar image, Seasonality is more of a weather “journal.” It uses weather data available online to track everything from temperature to wind speed to humidity to barometric pressure. You can track all these factors for long periods of time, even up to a year, and see them with really beautiful graphs. Seasonality will even show you the daily sunrise and sunset times every day. I can imagine this app becoming invaluable to someone who relies on weather information, such as a pilot or a ship’s captain.

Pros: Dizzying amount of stats and options; cool and useful graphs; “journal” features to track weather stats over time

Cons: A bit expensive for a home user; may be too complex for some

Seasonality is $24.95 with a 30-day free trial from Gaucho Software.

 
WeatherDock
Many of the options in this showdown are very good at giving you weather right from the menu bar, but appropriate to its name, WeatherDock does a great job of giving you that same information in the dock. Of course, you’re given all the same weather information you’d expect from any of the other apps, but WeatherDock provides you a nice interface for creating a completely customized dock icon that can give you instant feedback on any stat you’d like. The app also has some other nice features such as being able to speak you the weather information. Overall, WeatherDock provides a level of customizability that the other apps just can’t match.

Pros: Cool ability to completely customize dock icon; nice speech feature; completely free

Cons: Some options are confusing; app artwork could be better

WeatherDock is donationware from Alwin Troost.

 
WeatherManX
WeatherManX is somewhat of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to weather apps. It combines many of the greatest features from each of the other apps, such as WeatherDock’s icon customization and Seasonality’s stat tracking, into a nice little package. Of course, this is a bit of a downfall as wellwhen you do so many things, it’s hard to do them all well. This is evident in WeatherManX’s confusing interface, for one. I also found that I had to coax it do download the initial weather information, even after telling it in the preferences to do this automatically.

Pros: Access to all the best features of other weather apps

Cons: Interface and options are difficult to navigate; updating properly is somewhat of an arcane art

WeatherManX, from AfterTen, is $10 with a 30-day free trial.

 
Wx
Wx is unique in that it provides a single unified interface for all the weather data that flies at you. Really it just gives you one main window to see all your data for today and an extended forecast. There’s honestly nothing groundbreaking with Wx. Its interface is a little dated and the dock icon just doesn’t feel like it belongs amongst all your other apps. One nice feature of Wx is an automated screen saver featuring your local weather information, but it’s really just a simple mod to the default OS X RSS screen saver.

Pros: Nice unified place to see all your weather information; weather screen saver

Cons: Clunky options control panel; dated interface; ugly dock icon

Wx is $10 from Hunter Associates. A free trial is available, though you can’t save any settings in the unregistered version.

 
WeatherPop Advance
WeatherPop is another desktop weather app with nothing very spectacular about it. In contrast to the other apps I’ve mentioned, it sits only in the menu barthere are no dock icons or windows to futz with. This is both good and bad. Because it’s only in the menu bar, it’s simple and straightforward to use, but in order to provide this level of integration, it doesn’t actually run as an app. Rather, it installs itself as a menu bar extra. This can be a bit annoying at times, and I actually found it difficult to uninstall WeatherPop fully, even with AppZapper at my disposal. WeatherPop also has a paltry amount of configuration options in comparison to the other apps here.

Pros: Straightforward user interface; loads of information available right from the menu bar

Cons: Very few customization options; runs as a menu bar extra instead of a regular app

WeatherPop Advance is $8 from Glucose with a 14-day trial period.

 
Conclusion
I had to pick two winners in this battle. If you just want a simple way to view your weather how you want, when you want, and where you want, WeatherDock has the most customizable interface and the most balanced array of weather information available, and it’s got the right price tag. If you’re a weather fanatic and willing to spend the money, though, Seasonality reigns supreme.

If you have any other desktop weather apps to recommend, please leave them in the comments!

Photo credit: Flickr, Nicholas T.

Call Recorder is a simple plugin for Skype that sits as a little floating window when you open the app. When you’re in a conversation, either Skype-to-Skype or Skype-to-phone, simply hit the big red record button to save the call until it ends or until you hit the stop button. The resulting recording gives you both sides of the conversation at the full quality you originally heard it in, which is just what you want for a podcast or personal phone call for your own records. With the newest version of Call Recorder, you can record one or both sides of video chats as well.

Call Recorder also allows you to customize settings for how the call is recorded. You get to choose what kind of compression you use to record, including AAC of various quality or uncompressed QuickTime movie files. You can even choose to automatically record all incoming or outgoing calls, which would be a great option for logging all your talking activity if Skype is your main “landline.” All of these great features do come at a bit of a price at US$14.95, but if all you need to do is record Skype, you’ll save money by going for Call Recorder rather than other options. Ecamm has a seven-day trial of Call Recorder for Skype, so check it out here.

MacApper Public Service Announcement: Please remember to check your local laws when recording phone conversations without consent.

The TuneFlex AUX is the next generation of the popular TuneFlex line of iPod car chargers from Griffin Technology. The TuneFlex AUX and its predecessor are very similar in design. They’re essentially just an iPod dock attached to a stiff but flexible cable that plugs into your car’s accessory outlet. Immediately, this solves two of our issues. First, it constantly provides power to the docked iPod, and second, it gives a nice steady place for your iPod to live in your car without just tossing it into the seat next to you.

The new feature of the TuneFlex AUX, and where it gets its name, is a built-in auxillary output near the base of the unit where it plugs into the car’s outlet. This then brings us an answer to our problem of how to play the iPod through the car stereo in the first place. This auxillary output is a standard 1/8″ stereo miniplug, just like the headphone jack on your iPod itself. Using this output, you can go straight from the TuneFlex AUX into a head unit with an auxillary in, or you can even use it with a tape adapter or universal FM transmitter.

The addition of this output may seem trivial, but it solves the problem of using the TuneFlex with the iPod nano, whose audio output is on the bottom of the unit. In fact, Griffin has made a version of the TuneFlex AUX specifically sized for the nano, though the full-size version also includes a sleeve to make the nano fit it better. The location of the output also makes it more convenient, requiring less cable or more managed cable in most situations.

We’re still left with one problem, though: controlling your iPod easily and safely. I said the TuneFlex AUX solves this problem as well, but I kind of cheated a bit. The unit doesn’t directly fix this issue, but it does work easily with other options that do through the use of its pass-through dock connector. This allows you to plug another control option into the iPod’s dock connector while still keeping it docked in the charger’s base. There are many options for doing this, but I specifically took a look at the AirClick wireless remote, also from Griffin, which was great in conjunction with the TuneFlex AUX. You could also use other output options using this pass-through connector as well, like an iTrip or another FM transmitter that uses the dock connector.

Overall, I found the TuneFlex AUX to be a great option for listening to my iPod in the car. I’ve already used it on a couple long drives, and it was great to know that I didn’t have to worry about my battery dying. More importantly, using it in tandem with the AirClick made it safe for me to navigate through tracks without even moving my hands off the steering wheel. Griffin’s TuneFlex AUX hit stores just last week, retailing for US$49.99. The AirClick remote is also available now, with an MSRP of US$39.99.

1. HumaneText. Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber took simple web coding to a new extreme with his cool markup language, Markdown, which has a great balance between human readability and power. HumaneText is a system service that can convert Markdown-formatted text to proper XHTML code and vice-versa. For bloggers like myself who use Markdown on a regular basis, this service should be indispensable.

2. Summarize. Included with OS X, and recently much talked-about in the Mac community, the Summarize service does just what you would think: it summarizes things. Specifically, it will take a block of text, large or small, and pare it down to the fundamental ideas. This service is by no means perfect, but it typically does a decent job.

3. WordService. This neat little system service includes a host of features. Among them, you get a slew of editing and formatting features, automatic insertion of date/and or time, and an extensive statistics analysis including word and character count.

4. CalcService. The first three system services I mentioned here increase your ability to work with words in OS X, but CalcService instead works with numbers. Using this service, you can quickly calculate anything from simple math problems to very complex equations by highligting them and pressing ⌘=. You can also choose other options for the calculation from the Services menu.

5. ThisService. Okay, so I cheated a little bit on this one. ThisService is not itself a system service, but it does let you automatically convert any AppleScript or terminal shell script into its own system service, essentially adding unlimited customizability to the Services menu.

Using these system services (and ThisService to create your own powerful services), you can empower yourself to manipulate all kinds of data between applications from anywhere in the OS X system. Other applications also often add their own items in the Services menu, so keep an eye on this menu from time to time and see how its power has expanded.

The first option, the Character Pallete, is built in to OS X so you don’t even have to download anything. If you only speak one language you may not have ever discovered this feature, because it’s hidden in the International section of your System Preferences. In this pane, navigate to the Input Menu tab, and check the box beside Character Pallete, which should be the first item in your list. Once you’ve enabled this item, the input menu will appear on your menu bar if you hadn’t already been using it. Aside from giving you that warm patriotic feeling inside, this menu actually serves some useful purposes. When you need to insert a special character, just click on the input menu and call up the Character Pallete from here, double-clicking on the character you need to insert in your text.

The second choice is to download the CharacterPal widget from Taco Widgets. This widget is simpler to navigate than the menus of the Character Pallete, but it doesn’t feature as many special characters, and of course it hides itself away in the Dashboard when you’re not using it. If you really need it sitting on your desktop for easy access, you could enable the developer mode for Dashboard or, like I did, use Amnesty Singles to make the widget its own little app.

After using both of these options pretty extensively, I find that I’m really fond of the Character Pallete for its immense depth, its ease-of-access from the menu bar, and the ability to set favorite special characters for even quicker access. Either way you decide to go, though, you’ll be inserting special characters left and right before you can say “interrobang.”

To the readers. One of the more common complaints I’ve seen come out of the woodwork lately is that MacApper is becoming just the same as all the other Apple blogs out there. My response to this issue is twofold.

First, in all honesty, we have never claimed to be anything but what we are a group of diehard Apple fans getting together to write about what we love. Already I believe this puts us ahead of most of the competition. We’re not in this only for the money, like other blogs out there. Yes, we would like to make back our costs and maybe a little more, but our payment system is based on quality, not pay-per-post. One thing all of the staff agree on is that we don’t want this to become a 12-post-a-day Apple news regurgitation blog. That’s not what we’re about, and if it came to that point, I personally would leave.

Second, none of the staff here see any real harm in expanding our horizons. Yes, we’ve done a few hardware reviews, and yes, that doesn’t quite fit our namesake but again, we are all about spreading the word about products we love, and that’s what we’re still doing. The concern about MacApper becoming “just another Apple blog” is moot for one main reason we do have somewhat of a unique perspective on the Mac world. Some of you may know that we have a relatively young staff here, and we think this is a great thing. Take, for example, the trend of teens jumping from one social network to another it’s our young minds that make us good at adapting to new things. Also, as young people become the dominant age group on the planet for advertisers and content producers, products and services that are coming out will begin to cater specifically to them, and who better to write about a product or an application than someone who it was designed specifically for?

To the writers. This is a somewhat of a more personal message to the staff of MacApper, but I want it to be here in public because I want the entire community to know that we are striving to make this site the best it can be. The above message to the readers is very applicable here. Writers, we are looking for great, quality articles. As I said, we are not paying per post, and we are not paying writers up front. If we did, we’d probably have a more steady stream of articles being published on MacApper, but I really feel like the quality would dip significantly.

This is a learning experience for every single one of us in some way or another. All of us writers, including you, are learning how to write quality technical stuff on a regular basis. The editors are learning how to manage a large staff. Even our benefactor Miles Evans, who has had much experience in the blogosphere, is learning a thing or two. This is an exciting time for all of us here on the team. You guys are the lifeblood of the team, and without you, we couldn’t be nearly what we are right now. Just keep posting, and learn what’s good and what’s not based on what we publish. It’s that easy. All that being said, we’re always looking for new writers. Contact Miles if you’re interested in an opportunity to write for the site.

In conclusion, all of us here at MacApper are working hard to make this a better place all the time. To the readers, give us a chance to expand our horizons and write about some possibly unexpected things. We’ll do our best not to disappoint. To the writers, simply keep writing, and we will certainly reward quality articles. I hope that this little chat will allay many of your fears, and I know that this community will work together to make everything work out great. Thanks for your time.

I’ll cut right to the chase: both Macs and PCs have had FireWire for years, but Macs can do some really cool things with FireWire that Windows users have probably never even dreamed of. Many of these features are not widely known among people who have not had to use them in an emergency situation, but they can be quite useful in a pinch. Here’s a quick rundown of just a few of the great things you can do with FireWire on your Mac:

Target disk mode. It’s no secret to the other staff here that I had a bit of an issue with my Mac not too long ago. I couldn’t boot the machine and I was desperate to get my data, which is where target disk mode came in. With this feature, you can make your Mac look just like an external FireWire volume, so even if you can’t boot into OS X, you can connect your computer up to another Mac and pull data off of it or perform diagnostics. Sure, you should make regular backups to avoid having to use this feature at all, but in a tight situation it can make all the difference.

Mac-to-Mac migration. If you’ve done a first boot on a Mac recently, you’ve probably seen the screen asking if you’d like to move your data from another Mac to your new one. The fact that you can network two Macs together with a high-speed FireWire connection is really cool, but don’t misinterpret this seemingly simple feature it’s not just taking your data and putting it in a big lump and sitting it on the desktop of your new Mac. It pulls all of your preferences, settings, and user data from your old Mac and sticks it in the appropriate places on your new machine, essentially putting you right where you left off. Quite a nifty feature if you’re getting a new machine.

Booting from FireWire devices. This feature is somewhat along the same lines as target disk mode, except it’s really the opposite. Instead of booting your machine as a FireWire volume, you can boot your machine using an external FireWire drive as the startup disk. I’ve known some Mac users to keep a very slimmed-down “first aid” version of OS X on first-generation iPods to boot from in emergencies. Again, a really nice feature that we hope we’ll never have to use, but it’s beyond useful if we ever do.

FireWire 800. If you need super-fast external drives or video capture, the cutting-edge FireWire 800 is the way to go. Both the MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro have FireWire 800 on-board. Yes, you can add a FireWire 800 card to a PC, but even the most high-end PC setups, such as Dell’s XPS series or Alienware’s ALX line, don’t come with FireWire 800. It’s a nice feature to have built-in for pros who need the latest in technology.

So there you have it. There are many more neat things you can do with FireWire on your Mac, but these four features really highlight some of the best underappreciated Mac features out there. Keep them in mind for future reference.

The matte finish of the “BlackBook” is notorious for attracting fingerprints and smudges, and the keys get very oily, even when the typist’s hands are seemingly completely clean. Needless to say, I searched high and low for a good way to remedy this problem, trying everything from soap and water to household cleaners. Luckily none of these desperate attempts ruined my MacBook, but I was still at a loss as to how to clean the computer well.

Just about a week ago, I stumbled upon a quick suggestion on the InsanelyMac forums, saying that the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser would do the trick. Granted, I was a little reluctant to try this solution at first, not knowing what kind of chemicals were in the “Eraser,” but finally I relented. Amazingly, it works! Here’s a rundown on the steps I found to give the best results:

1. First, of course, buy the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. You’ll want to get the plain white ones, not the new foaming kind. You can find these at many supermarkets or grocery stores in the cleaning supplies section. A two-pack of these will run you around US$3.
2. Turn off the computer and make sure it is unplugged, and if you want to be extra careful, take out the battery as well. We’re not going to soak our MacBook, but let’s be on the safe side.
3. Wipe down the MacBook with some sort of soft cloth. A microfiber cloth, like the kind that comes with an Apple Cinema Display or the kind used to clean eyeglasses, works very well for this. Go over the entire case thouroughly, including the top case, the wrist rests, the trackpad, and all the keys. This is mainly just to get any extra residue off the computer before we really clean it.
4. This step is somewhat optional, but I would recommend using canned air to blow out the extra dust between the keys if your keyboard is particularly dusty.
5. Wet the Eraser and wring it out fairly well. Don’t squeeze it bone-dry, thoughit needs to be a bit moist for best cleaning.
6. Wipe down the MacBook with the Eraser, going back and forth in straight lines. It’s safe to do this on the entire case, even the trackpad and the keys. Do your best to avoid the spaces between keys if you can.
7. Finally, use the soft cloth again (preferably a clean one) to dry the MacBook. If you find that any particular area needs a bit more work, feel free to use the Eraser again. The spacebar can get particularly oily, so you may need to go at it two or three times. If you feel like you may have gotten the insides of your computer wet during the cleaning process, I would recommend leaving it unplugged and leaving the battery out while it dries, which could take a few hours.

And there you have it! After going through this process, thouroughly cleaning my MacBook, it looked nearly as good as it did out of the box. The good thing about this is that the Magic Eraser is reusablejust let it dry out and when you need to use it again, wet it like a sponge. I wouldn’t recommend reusing one Eraser more than three or four times, but the good news is that they’re a steal compared to “specially-formulated” cleaners on the market today, and they’re much more readily available.

I have real confidence in this method, but as always, your mileage may vary, I am not responsible for any damage you may or may not do to your MacBook, etc. If you’ve got your own methods, or if you’d like to report your own success with this method, leave us a comment. Good luck!

There’s so much to say about SuperDuper!, but the first thing you’ll probably notice when looking at it is its simplicity. If you’re used to backup applications, you know they can be full to the brim with buttons and widgets and sliders. SuperDuper is unique in that it’s a powerful piece of software that even your grandmother could use. This is paramount in one key section of the appthe unique and insanely great “What’s going to happen?” feature. When you’re changing options for your backup, SuperDuper! displays what will really happen with your backup in a human-readable format. Even for a fairly advanced user like myself, this feature came in handy, so I can only imagine how helpful it is for beginners.

SuperDuper! has all kinds of options to choose from. You can backup just your user folder, or you can even copy your entire hard drive to a bootable image file. This makes for a very streamlined backup process, allowing you to save that single disk image file to a network share or an external hard drive for offline backup. Unlike some other utilities, you can navigate this image file as if it were a real hard drive. Accidentally delete that important file? Just mount your backup and find the file to copy it back to where it needs to be.

SuperDuper! is totally free if you just want to do standard manual backups, but if you buy a registered version, you get a host of really cool premium features. The most prolific of these features is Smart Update. With this option selected on your backups, SuperDuper! will do a comparison of your drive to your existing backup and only make the changes it needs to in order to “sync” your disk and the backup. This will save loads of time on your backups, making what could be a three hour process into a super-quick update procedure.

Among the other premium features you get when purchasing SuperDuper!, you’ll find scheduling for automatic backups, extended “copy modes,” and customizable backups through scripting. Even though SuperDuper! in its basic version is free, the registered version could really be the best $27.95 you ever spend. With our Macs increasigly holding more and more aspects of our lives, backup is becoming hugely important, and SuperDuper! is just the solution that we need. Check it out here.

RetroPlayer doesn’t serve any real purpose other than to have a little fun, but it’s a cool concept and it works well. For us young folk, I think it can really help to give us an appreciation for the way we listen to music today, and people who actually remember using records will get a kick out of it as well. RetroPlayer is free, so go grab it right here.

Monocle is a slick web search interface with a few really cool features. First, it sits in your menu bar and is accessible at all times from any location with a simple customizable keystroke. Second, it incorporates “callwords,” or quick keyword searches similar to those available in Firefox. This means, for example, you could search the Internet Movie Database for an entry on Martin Scorsese just by calling up Monocle and typing “imdb martin scorsese” in the search field and hitting Return. Monocle’s search engine list is completely customizable, so you can add any search you want along with its own callword.

Until Apple decides to incorporate web searching into Spotlight, Monocle is a very good solution for a system-wide web search at your fingertips. Download it for free right here.

Just as a quick background, GigaVox Media was founded by Doug Kaye of IT Conversations. Kaye is one of the first real podcasters, and in the past several years he’s produced thousands and thousands of hours of audio interviews with tech luminaries. In short, Kaye and the guys at GigaVox know a thing or two about how stuff should sound. If you know anything about editing audio, you know that the editing can in many cases take three or four times longer than the recording itself, and that’s on a good day. Kaye soon realized that all in all, the editing of these interviews went rougly the same, so he helped develop The Levelator to automate the process of level adjusting, sound compression, limiting, and other factors.

It would be a great disservice to say that The Levelator is just a sound compression tool. Using a bit of arcane “black magic,” The Levelator doesn’t do a typical compression job, it uses both very short-term and very long-term look-ahead to generate an overall loudness profile of the audio and then adjusts levels of many individual slices of the file with multiple passes. If you’re feeling left in the dust with all of this audio talk, don’t worry – The Levelator is extremely easy to use. Just drop an uncompressed WAV or AIFF onto it, and it will churn away, getting your levels just right. If you do any audio interviewing at all, The Levelator will, appropriately to its namesake, adjust all the levels to get them matched and sounding top-notch.

The Levelator, for all its greatness, is absolutely free! Download version 1.1.0 here.

Twitterific is a simple little app from the Iconfactory that sits in your menu bar and updates you on your Twitter friends’ status changes, as well as letting you update your own status quickly and easily. Twitter itself can be pretty addicting, and Twitterific adds another extension to that addiction, giving you access to the site right from your menu bar. Twitterific, now at version 1.1.1, is free.

Many of the MacApper staff are on Twitter, so please feel free to hop on the site and add us as friends. Here’s a current list of some of the writers and editors with their Twitter profile pages:

* Josh R. Holloway (me!) (twitter.com/joshrholloway)
* Miles Evans (twitter.com/milesevans)
* Michael Yurechko (twitter.com/michaelyurechko)
* Glenn Wolsey (twitter.com/glennwolsey)
* Alec Feld (twitter.com/alecfeld)
* Tucker MacDonald (twitter.com/tuc11)
* Kristiano Ang (twitter.com/kristiano)

Come join us, and be sure to add your Twitter profile in the comments so we can Twitter you as well. Just a note, the standard web 2.0 warning is in play here: curmudgeons need not apply!

These updates are all but essential, so run Software Update or download iTunes 7.1 (which includes the QuickTime update) here.

First of my annoyances with Preview is that it’s one of those apps that stays open when you click the close window. I tend to forget to quit applications when I’m finished, and before long I have a ton of apps still open, clogging up my RAM. JustLooking solves this annoyance for me simply by quitting when you close the window.

My second issue with Preview, and much more annoying than the first, is the way it handles image sizes. Even with the “actual size” view selected, some images actually appear smaller or larger than their pixel dimensions. This has to do with DPI, and you can change this setting within Preview, yes, but JustLooking handles everything just fine “out of the box.” Also, JustLooking will automatically resize an image within its window as you drag around and resize the window itself, which Preview will not do.

Lastly, working with the side drawer in Preview can get a bit troublesome. JustLooking uses a different system for viewing multiple images, similar to the Picture and Fax Viewer in Windows. With this feature, you have a simple forward and back button for navigating through images, and you can even start a slideshow of all the images within a particular folder on the fly. The one thing JustLooking lacks that Preview does have is the image correction feature, but if you’re doing any editing on images at all, you probably shouldn’t be doing it in Preview anyway.

Overall, JustLooking is a better image viewer than Preview, though only marginally. But nonetheless, better is better, and JustLooking has become my new default image viewer. Try it out and it just may become yours, too. JustLooking is free, available here.

For those of you who didn’t win, keep your eyes peeled, as we have lots more software to give away in the future!

PixelStick takes the idea of many paid-for measuring apps like xScope and boils it down to the simplest functions that most people need. It is little more than a tiny window with numbers in it and some lines overlaid on the screen. Using these lines and numbers, you can measure pretty much anything that can be measured – horizontal, vertical, at an angle, a circle, whatever. For example, I can tell you that the text box I’m writing this article in is exactly 989 pixels wide, 368 pixels tall, and about 1055 pixels on the horizontal. Scintillating, isn’t it?

Okay, so I don’t make PixelStick sound all that spectacular – but the truth is, it’s not one of those whizz-bang apps that wows you at first sight. Again, it picks a task, sticks to it, and excels at it. For meausring screen elements without having to fuss with anything too complicated, PixelStick is quick, easy, and free. Get it here.

The Spotlaser interface is very friendly and intuitive, giving you every option Spotlight does, and many more. Those that are annoyed by Spotlight’s lack of boolean operators and custom options will certainly be happy with Spotlaser, which allows you to search for items that match any terms, all terms, or exact phrases with no trouble at all. In addition, you can search within specific parts of the file (filename, content, metadata, etc.) or for specific types of files or file sizes.

Spotlight does offer a bit of control over a search time frame, but Spotlaser reigns supreme here, too. Say you know you were writing a document sometime between Christmas and the middle of January. Spotlight can only search either the past month, which won’t find your document, or the past year, which might give you tons more than you want to sort through. With Spotlaser, you can search by those specific dates and precisely find that document.

Finally, delivering the knockout to Spotlight, Spotlaser can save any searches you make with it as smart folders, allowing you to go back and view your results over and over again. The one downside I found to Spotlaser, though, is that it doesn’t currently search mail messages. I imagine this feature will be added in the future, and it’s only a minor flaw in an otherwise great little app. I also wished Spotlaser could replace Spotlight completely in OS X, but I imagine that would be quite an undertaking, so I can see why the feature’s not there.

Spotlaser is available here for the low, low price of completley free!

At its very core, Pzizz helps relax you into a sleep state, and once you’re there, helps you sleep better. This may seem silly, but there is much scientific evidence to support that napping, especially in the middle of the day, can help increase productivity and mood. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of complex science behind Pzizz – neuro-linguistic programming, binaural beats, sleep-state induction, etc. – but the great part is that it’s transparent. Once you find the settings you like, just click a button and Pzizz does its thing. And with all its dozens of sound effects, musical pieces, and vocal suggestions, you’ll literally never hear the same nap twice.

Pzizz currently offers two modules – “Energizer” and “Sleep.” The key difference between these is the amount of sleep you get. The Energizer module will create a refreshing nap that wakes you up after a defined period of time, anywhere from ten minutes to an hour and a half, with a gentle alarm. The Sleep module generates a different soundscape designed to help you drift into a deeper sleep state and stay there for a full night’s sleep, so it doesn’t wake you up.

I’ve been using both Pzizz modules for a few months now, and I have to say, they really have helped me. I’m not an insomniac, but the Sleep module has certainly helped me get to sleep faster and easier, and the morning after using the Sleep module, I wake up more gently. The Energizer naps are great as well, and even when I don’t actually fall asleep, a quick 20- or 30-minute session is a great rest, and I wake up feeling refreshed and ready to start on more work.

Sure, Pzizz may seem hokey to some people, but there’s really no reason not to give it a try. There’s a trial here, so check it out – if you like what you get, leave a comment on this post, because thanks to our friend Edward Laing at Brainwave Limited, we’re giving away two Energizer module licenses for Pzizz. If you’re not one of the lucky ones, Pzizz is $29.95 for the Energizer module and $29.95 for the Sleep module, but it’s well worth it.

In short, ImageWell is a simple image editor that’s not so simple. Do you ever have those times when you fire up Photoshop just to crop or resize a simple image? Until I discovered ImageWell, I found myself doing that all the time. But now, instead of waiting for Photoshop to open, I just drop an image onto the ImageWell icon and use the intuitive interface to resize and then save my image. But what if you need to do more extensive editing? Then you’d open up Photoshop, right? With ImageWell, that’s not the case. Click the Edit button at the bottom of the ImageWell window and you gain access to a host of more in-depth features, including drop shadows, opacity, shapes, text, and more.

For bloggers, ImageWell has even more features under the hood. For example, you can quickly and easily watermark your images and publish them directly to an iDisk or FTP server. Another great feature is a built-in screenshot grabber, which will take a full screen snapshot or just a selection area. On top of all this, ImageWell opens in less than a second and uses up only a small amount of memory, a welcome change from the resource hog that is Photoshop.

There is so much more to say about ImageWell, but I recommend that you download it and give it a try. I doubt you’ll be disappointed. ImageWell is free from XtraLean Software, but if you want to unlock some premium features, you can buy the ImageWell Xtras package for $14.95.

HandBrake, easily one of the best and most popular open-source apps available for the Mac, is finally getting an update after nearly a year of dormancy thanks to some new blood on the development team.

The no-nonsense DVD-to-MP4 ripper and encoder was originally developed by Eric Petit, also known as “titer.” After getting off to a great start, HandBrake’s production halted when Petit all but disappeared around May of last year. During his absence some contributors to the project decided to take matters into their own hands by creating a development fork of HandBrake, appropriately named MediaFork.

After months of development, the new team released the first public build of MediaFork, version 0.8.0b1, early last week. Now, the “unofficial” MediaFork team and HandBrake’s original developer Petit are joining forces to continue development of the app under the classic HandBrake moniker.

In an exclusive interview with one of the MediaFork team members, I learned that Petit approached the team only a day after the initial release to give his approval of the new project. “[Petit]‘s effectively given us carte blanche. He says he’s glad we’re taking over, and he’s offering us the keys to the kingdom. His response has been more positive than we ever imagined.”

The MediaFork team holds great respect for Petit, insisting that they released MediaFork as a separate branch because they “didn’t want to step on [his] toes.” Petit has agreed to join forces completely with the new developers, offering to help answer any questions they may have, though he will mostly stay out of the development process.

The team indicates that the 0.8.0b1 build of MediaFork had almost 28,000 downloads in less than a week, but they’ve made it clear that they’re not done yet. The next version, 0.8.0b2, will have improvements to anamorphic video in QuickTime and 5.1 AAC audio, and major planned features for future versions of HandBrake include x264 encoder options, user presets, and AppleTV support.

Mac software blogs have been abuzz since the release of the MediaFork build, and this merger will certainly come as great news to the Mac application world and open-source in general. The development team has been very happy with the response. “It appears that HandBrake remains the weapon of choice,” another developer adds. “Yes, [Petit]‘s really here, yes, he supports us, and yes, we’re going back home. That’s the short version.”

So now you know the history, but how does this new version of HandBrake compare to the 0.7.1 build that we know and love? I decided to compare the two versions to see how it stacks up.

The test process was relatively simple. I ripped a DVD with both versions using all the same encoding options on my Core 2 Duo (2 GHz) MacBook. The disc, coming in at 01:47:09, was ripped in 81 minutes using the older version and 78 and a half minutes using the newest build. The new build’s encoded file was also slightly smaller on the disk and had a slightly sharper image quality in some areas of the film, but I had to really focus on certain aspects of the image, like cigarette smoke, for example, to tell the difference.

These marginal improvements come due to the use of new encoding libraries, which were vastly outdated in the older version. The improvements don’t stop there, though. In addition to the additional fixes I mentioned above, the new version of the app adds a host of user-definable preferences, including encoding iPod-friendly video, with many more to come.

HandBrake is still known as MediaFork until the next beta rolls around, but the transition in both the application and its Internet presence is already underway and will be completed shortly. For the time being you can download MediaFork 0.8.0b1 here.

PresentYourApps is essentially just a front end to a line of code that is present in every application, defining whether or not to hide the dock and/or menu bar when that application is open and in the foreground. The one thing that PresentYourApps does that other “focus” applications like Think or Isolator don’t is that it permanently changes this line of code within the application for which you want to hide the menu bar or dock. This means once you set up all your applications like you please, you don’t even have to bother with PresentYourApps again unless you want to change your settings.

PresentYourApps does lack the ability to automatically hide desktop icons and background windows, but when combined with something like Backdrop, PresentYourApps is the best and easiest fullscreen and focus application I’ve ever used.

PresentYourApps 1.0 is freeware from Eternal Storms Software. Get it here.