Yes, it’s no mystery that iPhone users would benefit from copy-and-paste functionality. In fact, the feature frequently tops bloggers’ lists of most requested additions. So, now that we have this bustling App Store and hundreds of eager developers, why are we still forced to memorize and retype names and addresses?

John Casasanta, president of the iPhone app development company Tap Tap Tap, would love to build it, but with the tools Apple gives developers, it’s technically impossible. “Apple doesn’t really provide it in their SDK,” he said. “There’s no real way of doing copy-paste.”

That didn’t stop one developer from trying. One effort involved creating a framework for third-parties to build into their apps that would allow them to share text among a common repository. But because the ability would need the support of each individual developer, it wasn’t a feasible solution. “Ultimately, it wouldn’t really work for anyone because even if third-parties supported it, like even if you could have copy and pasted among two different third-party applications, if Safari and the Mail program … don’t support it, it’s pretty much useless.”

Having developed iClip for the Mac, an app that allows you to save multiple items onto a clipboard, Casasanta is probably the ideal candidate to bring copy-paste to the iPhone. But even if it were technically possible to implement, he says it probably wouldn’t be an overwhelming success. “I get a lot of people asking me if I’m going to do iClip for iPhone,” he said. “Even if it was [feasible to build], I don’t see it being a very big seller compared to some of the things that are a little more mainstream.”

Many iPhone users would probably disagree with Casasanta. (I would guess there’s a reason it tops most feature requests.) But it’s a moot point because this is one add-on that Apple won’t be able to push off on third-party developers to take care of.

Feed Streamclip a raw MPEG video  like the one from my Sony Cyber-shot camera that iMovie is so picky about  and quickly export into a variety of formats. You can output to an iFriendly QuickTime video, a DV, an AVI, an MPEG-4 or a variety of other formats. Like QuickTime Pro, you can even export just the audio or even a single still image frame.

I’m a sucker for simple apps that do one job, and do it really well. While its icon and interface may incite painful memories of Windows 98 software, you won’t have to look at it for very long. And perhaps best of all, MPEG Streamclip is free  a big surprise considering these types of lifeline apps always seem to strive on nickle-and-diming the consumer. If you do video editing with a variety of formats, developer Squared 5‘s app may just get you out of a jam one day.

The social web browser, as the Flock developers like to call it, can tie in to many major social Web 2.0 sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Digg, del.icio.us and YouTube. So that they weren’t left in the dust with the release of Firefox 3, the Mozilla Gecko-based Flock has pushed out a public beta of Flock 2, based on the latest Firefox engine. The new version packs all the feature, security and stability enhancements (well, mostly  more on that later) of Firefox 3 with the added social features. The Awesome Bar, the new favorites engine, the new password log handling — it’s all in there.

On top of all the Firefox goodies is the ability to see what your friends on any number of social sites are up to with message notifications right in the “people” sidebar. Another sidebar checks popular web-based e-mail clients, and another acts as a clipboard for anything on the Web, like links, text, and images.

Flock’s custom start page, called My World, is a sleek, customizable page where you can display a few headlines from your favorite RSS feeds, YouTube and Flickr media streams, and most visited sites. Flock handles RSS similarly to Safari, though feeds are selected from the sidebar with headlines shown in the body. With Flock you can save news stories by starring them, a feature I’ve longed for in Safari RSS. Another nifty feature is the media browser, which displays streams from YouTube and Flickr, giving users the ability to add their own from any site.

All these features seem to come at a price, though. Flock isn’t quite as zippy or as stable as Firefox 3. Crashes were a fairly common occurrence during my testing. I would also find myself feeling guilty when I’m only taking advantage of a fraction of Flock’s total feature set. And with all these functions, the interface and the Mac simplicity mentality gets overwhelmed with clutter. There are just too many buttons at the top of the window: one for sending a page via e-mail, one for Digging the page, one for installing a search engine (which cannot be removed). Really, in the rare instance I want to install the search engine from Ma.gnolia.com, I think I can manage to use a menu item.

Because this is a beta, the stability errors I ran into will likely be stomped out before the final version. This is only the first public beta, so we can even expect a few additional features before the next milestone. So if you like the all-in-one browser mentality and are a big user of everything Web 2.0, give the new Flock 2 beta a shot.

Evernote is different. By the end of Evernote’s closed beta, which amassed 110,000 users over four months, it was more polished than most version 2.0 software releases. Previously invite-only, today Evernote has opened its doors to everyone, and believe me, when you start using it, you won’t want to live without it. It’s that good. A full review is forthcoming, but I got a chance to talk with Evernote CEO Phil Libin about launching the application he calls “your external brain.”

“Just one brain isn’t enough anymore,” Libin says. “We never want you to think about: where is that information? What computer was I using when I took it?” Evernote’s accessibility is perhaps its most attractive feature. Evernote automatically syncs all your notes to your server account. Because it’s cross platform, I can clip items and add notes from my Mac at home, and still have access to everything from work with the Windows application. There’s even a fully featured web-based version of Evernote and a slick iPhone web app. And “as soon as the [iPhone] App Store launches, we intend to be there,” Libin says.

Evernote iPhone App
The app is still being tested, but it’s got a wealth of features already. It allows you to snap photos from the phone’s camera and record voice memos. Everything is synced to the server (when WiFi or 3G/Edge service is available), giving you access to your content from any web-enabled device. Cooler still, you have the option to tag every note with searchable GPS coordinates. “So let’s say I remember I was in a restaurant in Paris,” Libin says. “It was about three years ago. I had a napkin with a phone number. I wanted to find that napkin.” Simply search the date and location, and Evernote digs it up.

Having a catalog of notes at your disposal at all times can help you out of a lot of jams. Libin is especially excited about the picture-taking feature: “I do a lot of traveling, always leaving my car in an airport garage. I will always snap a picture of a sign near my car in the garage [so I can find it again later]. I kind of do that almost automatically. I know that I’ll be able to get that information from anywhere.” An upcoming feature, which may only be available to premium users, will take advantage of the geotag info to propagate a Google map, with pins showing the locations where your notes were taken. Evernote may also add the ability to map addresses written within notes, Libin says.

Advanced Technology
What makes Evernote so useful is all its practical technology. Snap a photo, sync with the server and then any text in the image is indexed and can be searched. This worked surprisingly well in my testing. Any printed text is almost guaranteed to be indexed, though handwriting can be a bit iffy. But because the technology is processed server-side, it can be easily tweaked over time. “We’re constantly improving archiving and the search algorithm,” Libin says.

You can also add voice notes, a feature that will soon be available in the web interface. The Mac application doesn’t yet support it, but right now you can drag in audio files (and PDFs for that matter). Soon Evernote will transcribe the spoken word files, and let you search the contents of your memos, Libin says.

Evernote supports in-line to-do entries (similar to Mail), though it’s not integrated with the system-wide iCal to-do framework. Evernote will soon roll out an external API, allowing developers to write applications that tie in with the application, Libin says. He expects a third-party developer will add Leopard to-do compatibility and other features like Google Calendar support before his team gets to it.

Sharing is Caring
Once the open beta is running smoothly, the development team’s next goal is fleshing out the note sharing options. Right now you can publish notebooks for the public, and you will eventually be able to share them with select users. And in a few months Evernote will tie in with major blogging platforms for note publishing. Libin acknowledges that Evernote, which currently only supports audio and PDF files, could become a mainstream file sharing application. “We thought about that a lot, and we’re still kind of debating that internally” Libin says. “If you can drag a PDF file in there, why can’t you drag a Word file in there? On the other hand, it kind of goes against the whole Evernote philosophy. We don’t want you to think about files. We only want to store things that we can index and process.”

Evernote will no doubt enjoy a lot of media attention over the next few weeks, so it will be interesting to see how it scales to the traffic. “We made a pretty big investment in data servers,” Libin says. “We think we’re pretty prepared. We spent a good nine months thinking about how we’re going to handle that stuff.” We’ll see about that!

Users can sign up for a free Evernote account that allows you to add up to 40 MB of data per month, and thankfully they aren’t going the Flickr route. “There’s no restrictions on totals,” Libin says. “You’ll never lose access to your old memories.” The premium version of Evernote costs $5 per month (or $45 per year) and allows 500 MB of new notes per month, including support for SSL security, priority access to server syncing, technical support and exclusive features.

The Mac application is a little behind the others, lacking voice memo recording, a Mac-compatible Firefox extension, a Service menu entry, Mail compatibility and a few other features, but these should be added soon. Evernote is one of the most exciting new app releases, so give it a try, and look out for a full review soon.

The most touted of those features is an addition that developer Mozilla calls the “Awesome Bar.” Firefox’s Smart Location Bar, as it’s also referred to, is like QuickSilver for your browser. Simply navigate to the location field, type a few letters, and matching results are displayed instantly. The bar searches the titles, URLs and tags of pages in your bookmarks and history. Like the all-purpose app launcher QuickSilver, the Awesome Bar learns your usage habits over time, and adjusts the order it displays results based on how frequently you access each. This has proved to be incredibly useful and really has started to change the way I browse. More often I find myself typing a couple letters instead of clicking bookmarks.

Firefox’s bookmark system has also seen a complete overhaul. For simplicity’s sake, a star button is placed directly next to the location bar to quickly save a page. With the inclusion of tags, and a shift away from forcing users to catalog favorites in the traditional folder hierarchy (though, you can still obsessively organize your pages in folders if you like), Firefox 3 marks a long overdue shift to the Web 2.0, del.icio.us way of easily archiving loads of pages using searchable tags. This has also paved the way for Smart Folders — constantly-updated directories — like most-visited pages or frequent bookmark searches.

One feature that didn’t get a much needed revamp, however, is the built-in RSS reader, which is still as worthless as ever. Live Bookmarks treats RSS feeds like folders on the bookmarks bar; when clicking the feed, it opens a drop-down list showing an up-to-date list of headlines. News nuts need look no further than a multitude of extensions that allow feed viewing in a sidebar or in the main window, similar to Safari. And Firefox lets you set any reader, including web-based aggregators like the exceptional Google Reader, as the default for subscriptions. You can even set web-based e-mail clients, like Gmail, as the browser default without any additional software or add-ons. Nifty!

Inline search in Firefox may not be as pretty as Safari’s, but it’s just as usable. By pressing the forward slash key you can quickly search within a page, and even activate links by pressing return or open them in a new tab with command+return. This has helped me limit my use of the mouse immensely. Like Safari, tabs can be dragged around to reorder them, but can’t be ripped away into new windows. Firefox does, however, let you reopen recently closed tabs for those times you accidentally nix the wrong page.

The browser’s password saving feature has also received a slight update, changing the obtrusive pop-up window asking to remember a site’s password to a small slide-out bar. This is a fantastic change that Safari will no doubt need to emulate in a future release, as it allows you to specify whether you want to save the login information after you’ve verified that it’s correct. Often times, I’ll punch in a user name and password combo for a site, save it into my Keychain, and then find out seconds later that the info was for another site, my Keychain now cluttered with the wrong info. (On the topic of little tweaks that go a long way, the ability to select multiple blocks of text is brilliant; just highlight some text, hold command and highlight another block of text elsewhere.)

While the new password handling is a welcome addition, we’re still stuck with Mozilla’s proprietary password manager. Because Firefox remains (and will continue for the foreseeable future) to be coded in Carbon instead of Cocoa, support for the OS X system-wide Keychain, in addition to other features like the services menu and the Mac dictionary, is impossible. You can still get the function of a pop-up dictionary using one of many extensions, but there’s no solution quite as sleek as the Cocoa dictionary.

The new default skin is an improvement over its predecessor, but it still doesn’t match the ubiquity of Safari’s UI. Thankfully the GrApple themes are spot on replicas; so much so that you are bound to mistake a Firefox window for Safari. While the look of the app is more Mac-like, with a prettier interface, improved page rendering and native-looking widgets, the feel isn’t quite there due to the Carbon structure. And with rumors of the next OS X release dropping support for Carbon applications, I would expect Mozilla will soon be stepping up its Cocoa development resources.

Another huge gripe I’ve always had with Firefox is its lack of inline viewing for PDFs, a frustration which seemed to be tied to the Carbon curse. Though Firefox 3 can’t display PDFs within the browser out of the box, it’s Quartz PDF Plugin to the rescue! This extension alleviates one of the biggest turnoffs of Firefox on the Mac.

In terms of speed, Mozilla has really made leaps and bounds. From a nearly instantaneous app launch and much improved memory usage to blazing fast page rendering, Firefox easily keeps stride with Safari and Camino, Firefox’s sister browser built in Cocoa. Firefox 3 also improves JavaScript support, now a staple in Web 2.0 development. Though with Safari 4′s new, much improved JavaScript engine on the way, we are about to enter the browser speed race, where every user will benefit.

Anti-phishing and instant site ID verification are seamless additions that will keep you browsing safely. And to keep your children safe as well, Mozilla has caught up to the party by adding parental controls. However, they failed to copy one of Safari’s better features: private browsing, which enables you to mask your searches and history for a period of time.

Out of the box, Firefox 3 has just as many features, if not more, than any other Web browser on the market. Throw in the seemingly endless sea of third-party extensions to add additional functionality, and you have one super-powered browser. The fact that it’s written in Carbon is really the only significant drawback, leaving your passwords at the whim of Mozilla’s own manager instead of in Keychain where the rest of your OS X login info is kept. Firefox now holds a world record for a reason: it’s a great browser. Give the free download a spin, and let us know in the comments how you think the new version stacks up to the other browsers out there.

After installing the System Preference pane, the small TapDex application runs in the background, consuming very little system resources, and is ready to spring to action when the user invoke its hotkey (F1 by default). When initiated, the TapDex search window pops to the front, allowing you to type search criteria. Press enter and a list of matching contacts is displayed.

Though TapDex is a snappy way to access your Address Book, in reality, so is the Address Book app itself. With newer Macs, I find Address Book launches in a second or two anyway, fast enough for most users. With Spotlight’s universal robust search, Address Book’s Spotlight-powered instant search and Dashboard’s similarly speedy widget, TapDex seems a bit overkill.

But if you really need to get to your contact info as absolutely, positively, 100% as quickly as possible, the free version of TapDex should suit most people. Yet, users can get the pro version for $4.95, allowing removal of the app’s one-line advertisements and enabling Vonage voiceover-IP dialing.

Using the “home” network, previously called MSN and now Windows Live (even Mac users cannot totally escape Microsoft’s operating system branding), you can send messages or transfer files to friends. Messenger 7′s updated interface, with its unsparing use of glossy aqua variants, is little improvement. It still shows some fundamental design weaknesses common in Microsoft products for Mac, a surprise considering Office 2008 almost looks like it actually belongs on the Leopard OS.

New features in this version include an updated app icon, Bonjour network support and contact list search, which would only come in handy for those with massive amounts of Windows Live contacts. Also, you can now add nicknames for your contacts, and for users with display names or personal messages too lengthy to fit in the contact list window; a mouse-over tooltip shows the full info.

Unlike the popular multi-protocol chat client Adium, Messenger 7 supports personal messages and custom emoticons, but Messenger still lacks support for sending or receiving offline messages. The good news is that the developers of Adium are currently testing a build that supports personal messages and offline messaging. Microsoft Messenger is a free download, though you might be better off going with Adium. And for video and audio chat, iChat and Skype have got Mac users covered.

Once you’ve recorded yourself ranting about politics, playing the guitar or trying out your standup comedy routine, your video will show up in a list of others you’ve recorded or added to the Vidnik library by dragging it onto the app. After it’s recorded, just set its title, description, category and tags, and click upload to have it blasted to your YouTube account. Vidnik offers very basic video editing features like cutting and deleting sections of a clip. You can also take videos recorded using the software to another post-production app like iMovie or Final Cut Pro, but that somewhat defeats the purpose of taping in Vidnik.

Vidnik is freeware, but it’s still in the early stages of development. I’ve experienced a considerable amount of lag in playback during recording, and many people have reported a discrepancy between the sound and picture timing when uploading to YouTube. However, Osters says he is actively working to fix these issues and improve the software. Vidnik’s simplicity has a lot of potential to become the standard for Mac users who regularly produce YouTube content. Give Vidnik a download, and you could already be on your way to becoming a YouTube celebrity.

The winners of the licenses are Janko Lauterbach, Maria and systek.

If you won, you should be receiving your license shortly. Thank you to everyone who entered, and congratulations to the winners. For those that didn’t win, VideoDrive costs $14.99.

The winners of the Mac license are Colby G, Alex J. and Dan. And the winner of the full license is Keith Sheehan.

If you won, the developer has been notified with your email addresses, and you should be receiving your license shortly. Thank you to everyone who entered, and congratulations to those who won. For those that didn’t win, Master Kick costs $19.95 for a Mac license and $29.95 for a full license, usable on all platforms including Windows, Linux, Windows Mobile and Palm OS 5.

VideoDrive can stick just about any video into iTunes without the hour-long re-encoding process. Any video that can be played in QuickTime (and that’s pretty much anything, thanks to MacApper’s handy “Play Almost Any Video File On Your Mac” guide) can be added to your iTunes library within seconds. The application can even fill in metadata and cover art automatically using online databases to retrieve the information.

Simply select video files from VideoDrive’s interface, or drag a file onto the app’s dock icon, and the software goes to work. For iTunes-compatible codecs like MP4, M4V and MOV, VideoDrive fills in the movie type (movie or TV show), description, genre, year and art, and adds it to your library. For those pesky AVIs, VideoDrive quickly builds a small MOV video container that is placed in iTunes, linking to the original video file. Once linked, you can feel free to rename or move the original AVI file, and thanks to the wonders of OS X, iTunes will have no problems finding it. However, you must keep the original on your hard drive in order for iTunes to access the movie.

In reality, everything about VideoDrive can be accomplished manually: creating movie containers in QuickTime, filling in metadata, finding album artwork and adding to iTunes (with a nice little Growl notification when everything is done). Even its re-encoding feature hands the file off to QuickTime to do the heavy lifting. But the all-in-one convenience may be worth the price tag for some.

While VideoDrive does save a ton of time by doing just about everything for you (and even provides a nifty option to add processed videos to a playlist), it doesn’t do anything flawlessly. It’s good at pulling all the relevant information from IMDB to properly label a movie based only on the file’s title (and some of the ones I tested were pretty messy). When it comes to TV shows, though, it seems to have more trouble. Episode titles have to be filled in manually, and date info is rarely accurate. But even with these shortcomings, it saves a decent chunk of time, leaving you having to just fill in a few things later.

Cover art fetching is one of VideoDrive’s most attractive features. While iTunes features built-in album art fetching for music, I’m left scouring the Web to find images for my videos. It’s really a shame that this feature comes up short. VideoDrive grabs a few relevant images from Amazon, allowing you to flip through and choose the best one, however the picture quality is usually very poor. The low quality film posters don’t do the beauty of CoverFlow justice, forcing me back on my journey through Google for decent quality covers and dragging them onto the VideoDrive window.

“In some cases, the cover art is not of great quality,” says the lead developer for Aroona Software. “We are currently looking to additional/alternative sources for covers (e.g., Get Video Artwork) that offer better quality, but no decisions have been made. However, adding new sources can happen quite rapidly.” A nifty feature confirmed for version 1.5, which will be available Thursday, is the ability to add metadata and cover art to videos already imported into iTunes using VideoDrive, the developer says. Hopefully they also fix the irritating bug that opens QuickTime whenever I quit VideoDrive.

While I like the idea behind VideoDrive, I’ll be sticking to iSquint for conversion (an app that is in many ways a better encoder than Apple’s QuickTime), and manually fill in my tags and art. I keep all my media on my MacBook’s internal hard drive, and it’s no mystery that notebook computers don’t have unlimited storage space. Converting videos in H.264 can shave off anywhere from a quarter to half the file size with little quality reduction, and so I’ll try to save space any way I can. Sure, this way takes much longer, but you get a smaller, more compatible file in the end.

With VideoDrive, incompatible videos that were processed with the container method can only be played in iTunes, Front Row and QuickTime and cannot be transferred to an iPod, iPhone or Apple TV. But if hard drive space isn’t a problem, and if you only plan to watch the movies on your Mac, VideoDrive is a great option for anyone who downloads a lot of videos and wants to get them into iTunes in practically no time.

Aroona Software has given MacApper three licenses to give to our readers! If you want to enter the giveaway, comment on this review with a feature you would like to see implemented in VideoDrive. The giveaway will end on May 7th. And remember, if you don't win, VideoDrive costs $14.99.

In the game, players choose from five teams representing cities around the world and from a list of arenas that include grass, mud, snow and indoor (the terrains are simply for aesthetics and don’t affect play in any way). Games can end either after five goals are scored or after three minutes, though it would be nice if you could set the game length. Finally, you can set your squad’s formation and the difficulty level of your computer opponent. Sadly, none of these options are saved after the application is closed, so you’ll have to reset them every time you play. Play modes include single match and a league mode, which is a nice idea but doesn’t save your stats or progress if you quit the app.

Anyone familiar with foosball or the sport of soccer should be able to instantly pick up and play Master Kick, and since the game supports nine languages, everybody can join in. You control a team of 11 virtual plastic men on four horizontally movable bars. The bars can be controlled using the mouse or the arrows, and shooting is done either by clicking the mouse button, pressing the control key or using the left or right arrow keys. You can hold down the shoot button to get a more powerful spin, and it designates which bar will shoot when the button is pressed by whichever is closest to the ball. Unlike actual foosball, all bars move together, meaning you can’t control them individually. If you’re playing with the keyboard, you’ll probably want to use the arrows to shoot instead of the control key, which doesn’t play well with Spaces on Leopard. There’s no option to customize the keyboard layout.

The relatively simple gameplay resembles a more advanced version of Pong, and its graphics are almost as outdated. The sprites, static terrain and cutely animated crowd gives Master Kick the look and feel of a Super Nintendo title. Its sound effects, like the ever present “hrah” crowd noise, are equally retro, which can be good if you appreciate the nostalgic feeling games like this offer. However, there’s no defending the incredibly annoying techno music that blasts while browsing the game menus. When I booted the app up for the first time and heard the hair raising theme song, I immediately quit out and curled into the fetal position. Fortunately, I found the volume slider buried away in the options menu, thus solving my most pressing concern. In testing, I ran into a bug that muffles any sound on your system that’s not generated by the Master Kick app when using an M-Audio sound interface, but it works fine using a MacBook’s built-in speakers or through the headphone port.

Developer Industry Entertainment’s first foray into Mac gaming is not bad but does have room for improvement. In the current version, Master Kick boots up in a small window with no option to resize or play in fullscreen, but fullscreen support is coming in the next version, says Nemanja Bondzulic, the game’s lead developer. Master Kick is only compatible with Intel Macs, but the next version should be a universal binary, Bondzulic says. Industry will also add local and network multiplayer supporting all platforms.

“All versions of the game are identical, even the mobile versions and they are [built] from the same code base,” Bondzulic says in an email. “Players using, for example, Palm and Mac will be able to play one against the other.”

Industry Entertainment has given MacApper four licenses to give to our readers! Three of the free licenses unlock the Mac version, and one works on all platforms, which also includes Windows, Linux, Windows Mobile and Palm OS 5. If you want to enter the giveaway, comment on this review with a feature you would like to see implemented in Master Kick, and mention if you would prefer the master license, stating which of the supported platforms you own. The giveaway will end on May 2nd. And remember, if you don’t win, the Mac version of Master Kick costs $19.95, while a full license unlocking all platforms costs $29.95.

Like most social networks, each user maintains a network persona by creating a profile page, listing personal info such as name, age, gender, location and occupation. Where a Net4Mac profile differs from Facebook or MySpace is in its options for describing your Mac rig, your brand of iPod, your iPhone and your level of Mac expertise. (For my profile, I chose “power user” because I’m just that awesome.)

“Facebook and MySpace are great but nothing special for true Mac fans,” says Greg Barrot, the manager of the dev4mac development team, in an email. “With our concept, people can share information on the subject they like and create groups, for example, about the software they are using.”

How does dev4mac successfully limit its members to only Mac users? In order to signup for an account and edit your profile, you must download the Net4Mac OS X application. In fact, the majority of the network’s features are only accessible through the software; only user profiles can be viewed within a browser window. The app approach to social networking allows for features such as badge notifications in the Dock to signify new messages, integration with Address Book for sending invitations to friends, and snapping profile pictures with an iSight camera.

“The application is better than a website because we can make a better integration with the technologies of Mac OS X, like Address Book, iCal, iChat, etc.,” says Barrot, whose user profile is automatically added to each new member’s friends list  essentially the Tom of MySpace. “You cannot do that with a regular web browser,” he says.

Still, it would be nice to have the option to access more of the network’s features from within a browser for those times when you’re away from home and (cruelly) forced to use a Windows PC. But dev4mac has no plans for implementing a web-based version of Net4Mac. “Actual members love the application,” Barrot says. “We don’t believe in web applications; we believe in applications connected to web services.”

It’s clear that users are excited about the potential of a walled garden for Macaholics. In just four days since its debut, Net4Mac has attracted more than 5,000 members, a number the development team didn’t anticipate it would reach until a month after release. But the servers had no problem handling the load, thanks to its Apple Xserve infrastructure running the Leopard Server OS, Barrot says. And users should be pleased to know that there are plenty of new features in the pipeline, including integration with iChat for viewing a user’s AIM status from within the app.

“We launched the application on April 4,” Barrot says. “The feedback from users is just amazing. They love the idea and the application. … And the growing rate is amazing.”

But I still have some qualms with the whole concept. The majority of the features can be (and have been in other sites) accomplished within a browser, including web cam support via Flash, and the few unique abilities Net4Mac offers don’t seem to be worth keeping the app running and eating system resources. The social calendar doesn’t currently integrate with iCal, but Barrot says the feature is scheduled for a future version. The classifieds section is useful, but there is no way to customize the listing to show only items from your area, meaning you’ll have to wade through listings from all over the world  some of which are not even in your native language.

For some reason, Net4Mac uses an installer instead of letting the user simply download the app and drag it to the Applications folder. Nevertheless, Net4Mac is free for both download and registration, with separate versions for both Leopard and Tiger.

StumbleUpon is like channel surfing for the web. The site, which ranks in the top 500 on Alexa Traffic Rankings, lets you specify a list of categories you’re interested in, whether it be art, music, humor, technology or a slew of others, and then jump randomly between popular sites in those areas. Not uncommon for a social bookmarking site, Stumble features user profiles and friends lists. Once you start Stumbling, you may be surprised at how addictive it is.

Unfortunately Safari users were, for the most part, left out to dry on some of the site’s most unique features. Relying on the SIMBL InputManager that Saft and PithHelmet use to integrate with Safari, Stumbi adds an entry in the menu bar, providing options for surfing to the next random page and for rating the current page. These options can be triggered using built-in keyboard shortcuts or by specifying your own shortcuts in System Preferences.

The $2 shareware application is a great option for Safari users, but those using other browsers, like Opera or OmniWeb, will have to turn to bookmarklets. By placing javascript links in your bookmarks bar you can create the Toolbarless StumbleUpon. Users can pick and choose which ones they want to bookmark, with features including logging into the Stumble service, giving a site a positive rating, submitting a new page to the directory, displaying page reviews and switching content filters. The Toolbarless StumbleUpon, dubbed “bookmarklets for surviving without the toolbar,” is free.

The eJamming software is like Skype for musicians. It allows you to connect with fellow rockers over the Internet and jam  even if your drummer lives a few states away. And because you can do this all through a set of headphones, you won’t have to worry about the police knocking on your door after your neighbors file a noise complaint.

Developer eJamming was faced with the obstacle of having to transmit high quality audio while avoiding latency transmission delays. While AUDiiO has successfully achieved this, there are a few requirements: you need a good Internet connection and the distance between your fellow musicians shouldn’t be more than a few hundred miles (you can still use it at a further distance, but there will be a noticeable latency).

With AUDiiO you can play in sync and even record your live compositions with its basic sound editing software. The software can interface with your current audio input setup so there should be no additional hardware required to get it up and running. As musicians know, subtle facial expressions are necessary for a successful performance, so the eJamming team is working on video support.

eJamming AUDiiO is beta software and can be downloaded after signing up for an eJamming account (free while in beta). You can also check out a video demo of AUDiiO.

However, not everyone is so lucky, which is probably why iTunes controller applications are so popular and plentiful.

An iTunes controller is a companion to Apple’s jukebox that allows you to play, pause, skip between tracks and adjust volume using either keyboard shortcuts or buttons in the menu bar. As more people listen to music while surfing the web, with a recent survey by Olswang finding about one in five computer users listen to music on their computers daily, there’s a big market for these apps.

Application launchers like QuickSilver (free), Butler (free), LaunchBar ($19.95) and ClawMenu ($19.95) offer basic iTunes controls via customizable keyboard shortcuts. Firefox users also have the option of installing the FoxyTunes extension, which places a bar along the bottom of the browser with buttons to control iTunes.

There are a ton of options in the realm of dedicated iTunes controllers. I’ll start by breaking down the freeware options (because everybody loves free). But for a small price tag, you can find some really solid apps that can be worth the purchase if you use iTunes as often as I do. More advanced features can include support for system-wide Growl notifications, album art fetching and syncing with Last.fm, so if you can’t live without these extras, you might want to skip to the end of the list.

Free Controllers

Bytecontroller – This is a fairly no-frills menu bar controller. When opened, it places a set of three small buttons for advancing the track, select the previous track and play/pause, with a list of decent skins to choose from. It also supports keyboard shortcuts and Growl notifications, but it’s a basic controller that does what it sets out to do.

GimmeSomeTune – With hotkeys, album art and lyric fetching, remote control support and Last.fm syncing, GimmeSomeTune has more features than most of its peers. If it weren’t for the optional, hideous menu bar buttons and the lack of Growl support (it uses an oversized, cluttered bezel notification window instead), this would really stand out as one of the best controllers out there.

iController – The controller is very simple and optionally scrolls information about the currently playing song in the menu bar. It’s got hotkeys and its own notification system, which automatically switches to Growl if you have it installed. Sure, iController hasn’t been updated in more than a year, but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

iMote – Hotkeys, Growl notifications and a menu bar with iTunes controls make this a useful app. And for those of you who still haven’t installed Growl, it has its own floater  no additional software necessary. iMote also has a feature called StepBack, which lets you specify an amount of time for the app to rewind when playing a song that was paused. It doesn’t seem very useful for music listening, but for podcasts, I can see it really coming in handy.

Maestro – Especially handy if you use a lot of playlists, Maestro is a compact app featuring controller buttons and a small list with available playlists and the songs within those lists. But it doesn’t provide much advantage over iTunes’ own mini controller, so unless you switch between playlists a lot, it’s hard to recommend Maestro.

Menuet – Standing as one of the strongest free options, Menuet places a small image of the currently playing song’s album art in the menu bar. You can click on it to get a larger version of the artwork as well as next, previous and play/pause buttons. It’s got Last.fm scrobbling, Growl notifications, keyboard shortcuts, controller skins and a sleep timer for stopping iTunes after a period of time. It even comes packaged with Art Collector, a nifty app for retrieving album artwork. Previously freeware, Menuet has since become charityware, meaning if you use and like the app, the developer encourages you to donate to a charity.

Play MiTunes – It has a nice little controller window interface, but it’s main attraction is the “type-and-play” feature, where you can type the first few letters of a song and play it. Unfortunately you need to specify whether your search applies to artist or song, so it makes the search feature somewhat less useful than opening iTunes.

QuickTunes – It’s certainly not the most attractive app, but it’s got some useful features. It can do hotkeys and places the name of the currently playing song in the menu bar, with additional controls when clicking in the menu bar. Some great options it offers is to play another song by the currently playing artist, play another from the same CD or play another from the same genre. Of course the pastel controller is hideous, but if you don’t care about aesthetics (but you probably do if you’re a Mac user) give this one a shot.

Radion – According to its developer, Radion was the best of its kind when it released. With a skinnable control window, artwork downloading and hotkeys, it has plenty of nice features. But the app hasn’t been updated in quite a while, although developer Ninja Kitten promises version 2 is in the works. In order to use the app, you’ll need to punch in the following details into the registration: Name – Ninja kitten / Email: kitty@ninjakitten.us / Serial: RADION-XkUmXF-WeDEE-hFCwY-kwEHz-wazc

Sizzling Keys ($5 for Pro version) – If you’re all about the keyboard, Sizzling Keys is a great option. It doesn’t offer a menu bar or window controller  it’s all done via customizable hotkeys in System Preferences. It even lets you add shortcuts for some actions unrelated to iTunes, like accessing the login screen. It also has a bezel notification feature and a search and play popup. My only complaint is that I keep running into a bug with the search, where I have to restart the app for it to recognize my keystrokes.

You Control: iTunes – You Control places the control and rating buttons right in the menu bar, with access to recent tracks and a ton of other information right within the contextual menu. It also has hotkeys and a notification bezel. I found You Control eating up quite a bit of memory in my use, but you might want to give it a shot to see how it runs on your system. You’ll need to register for free at the You Software web site to get a license.

Not Free Controllers

Barquee ($10) – Elegant and customizable are what defines Barquee. With a combination menu bar controller/song info marquee, which can be command-clicked to access the song’s progress bar, Barquee is a nice option whether you plan to use the menu bar controls or hotkeys. It’s also skinnable.

CoverSutra (14.95⚬) - As the most expensive app on the list, it’s ironic that CoverSutra happens to be one of the best. Complete with sexy pop-up alerts, Growl and Last.fm support, and a really nifty menu bar music search feature, this one is really hard to resist. One unique feature is a CD case that can be dragged around the desktop, showing the currently playing song in iTunes. With all the other options, it’s hard to justify the price tag, which works out to about $22 at the current exchange rate, but it really is a full package.

Synergy Classic (5⚬) – Synergy has long been one of the most popular iTunes companions. Recently the app has been completely rewritten for the Leopard version, which brought with it a number of random bugs. It offers all the basic features you would expect from a shareware controller, hotkeys, floaters and menu bar controls, but not really much “wow.” Fortunately Synergy is one of the less expensive shareware options.

TuneBar ($12) – This is probably the most attractive controller on the list. Sure, it has Growl support, hotkeys and playlist access, but it’s the interface that makes it truly shine. Everything is skinnable, from the floating controller to the incredibly well executed library search popup. TuneBar borrows one excellent feature from WinAmp  a thin controller, called SlimBar, that sits just below the menu bar, providing all the basic iTunes controls including a track timeline and search.

TuneHound ($9.95) – Put simply, TuneHound is bad. With an ugly controller window, lack of full hotkey support and an unintuitive rating system, TuneHound is a worse option than most of the freeware apps on the list. The only thing it really has going for it is the ability to edit track information from within the small TuneHound interface.

iRed Lite makes it possible to control just about any application using an Apple Remote and lets you customize the function of each button. Switching between selected apps you want to control is simple. You switch between iRed Lite and Front Row by holding the menu button on the remote for a second. A window pops up allowing you to choose between “layers” (apps), and, once activated, a crib sheet showing the functionality of each button is displayed.

The app comes packaged with some presets for apps like iTunes, QuickTime, VLC, PowerPoint and Keynote, but it’s real power is in the ability for the user to program any app to be controlled by a remote, allowing coders to trade layer files. It even supports AppleScripts, meaning you could do just about anything with a remote. However, tweaking iRed Lite for other apps, called creating layers, is not for beginners. If you plan to take on the grand task, be sure to read through the manual on the software’s website and the creating layers tutorial.

For obsessive email checkers, Vic Shih has created a Gmail layer that can be downloaded from his blog. You can browse between conversations and messages and even increase or decrease text size. Unfortunately you won’t be able to reply to messages using the remote, so your boss probably won’t approve your request to work from your couch at home.

Unlike its brethren Mira, which offers nearly the same functionality, iRed Lite is freeware. For Macs without infrared receivers  those that didn’t ship with a remote  developer tin:b Software has iRed (minus the “lite”), which is included with the IRTrans USB receiver, retailing for 99 EUR.

So while we wait impatiently, why not brush up on the basics by playing the original StarCraft in the mean time?

Unfortunately there’s a big obstacle: the game was initially released for Mac OS 9. While this isn’t a big deal for older PowerPC-based Macs that can run archaic software using the Classic emulator, the newer Intel systems are left out in the cold. So how can we relive the glory days of low-resolution, last century gaming?

Luckily Blizzard has got us covered. Buried away on the developer’s support site is a link to the Mac OS X Native Installer. Using this application and your dusty, old StarCraft disc, you can get a Carbon version of the game running on any Mac. Intel systems will use Rosetta emulation, but you won’t notice much slowdown since the game isn’t very processor intensive. This trick, however, won’t work for the StarEdit campaign editor, so budding creators should turn to the more advanced editor found in WarCraft III  or you could just wait out StarCraft II’s release.

StarCraft lets you choose from three armies, each with unique fighting abilities. The Terran is the basic human group, complete with traditional marines, tanks, aircrafts and nuclear missiles. The Protoss is a powerful race whose buildings and many of its units require battery power to operate at full capacity. Finally the Zergs spit green acid and normally travel in massive groups due to their ability to produce units quickly.

I was pleasantly surprised to find I could still jump on Battle.net almost 10 years since I first played and find people to compete against online. Granted the majority of them only spoke Korean and devoured my Terran army in a few minutes, but it’s still a fun way to relive years past.

Blizzard also offers an OS X installer for Diablo II. If you have trouble running it on an Intel Mac even after using the native installer, hold the Option key when launching the app, and set the video options to “software.” Now you should be good to go to Hell and battle Satan. Just make sure to watch out for high-level bullies who try to smack down newbies.

Recent releases of StarCraft and Diablo II include the native installers on the disc, so if you bought your copy recently, hopefully you can look forward to going online and seeing new players, who dug their old copies out of the closet.

EA announced the Mac release at MacWorld last week along with a demo on display at the expo, and it somehow slipped under the radar.

Spore is a simulation game on steroids. Will Wright, the game’s chief designer, is a pioneer in the genre, having developed the city planner’s dream game, SimCity, and the bestselling life simulator, The Sims. Spore lets you craft a universe. From creating life, watching it evolve and building civilizations to customizing entire planets, players have full control.

“We couldn’t be happier to bring Spore to the Mac at the same time as the PC version. Spore is a highly creative game, and I look forward to seeing what the players come up with to fill the universe they design,” Wright said in a press release.

The game begins with a comet crashing into the player’s chosen planet. This spurs the earliest form of the evolutionary process, where players guide cellular organisms through a tide pool in an eat-or-be-eaten Pac-Man-like scenario. Once the microbes evolve, creatures take to the land, and you have the option of customizing nearly every aspect of the wildlife.

Species eventually form tribes and entire cities until they advance far enough to explore space and to colonize other planets. EA will be porting the game to the Mac using the Cider Portability Engine by TransGaming, which the publisher has used to bring much of its PC library to the Intel Mac platform.

Spore is expected to hit stores in the spring and will be joined by modified versions of the game for the Nintendo DS and mobile platforms.

If that previous sentence sounded weird, let me enlighten you. The Wiinstrument is a nifty application that lets you use a Wii remote and a Nunchuck controller to play drums on the Mac.

If you have a Bluetooth-enabled Mac (and all current models are), you could be well on your way to setting up a relatively inexpensive MIDI controller that could give your music career a boost to superstardom. Disclaimer: Wiinstrument may not actually make you a rock god.

Once the Wii remote is synced to your Mac, you can jam by smacking the remote and Nunchuck against the air. You can switch instruments by pressing the buttons or directional pad, choosing from bass drums, electric and acoustic snares, hand claps and hi-hats. The software even recognizes velocity, producing different sounds depending on how hard you swing the controllers.

You can even record your beats into GarageBand, allowing you to create some pretty realistic sounding drum loops. Screenfashion, the software’s developer, provides a comprehensive tutorial on its web site.

Screenfashion leaves room for daring coders to tweak. The developer offers the source code for download, and you can also modify the app to use the Wii remote to trigger custom loops, clips or videos.

I had a little trouble syncing the Wii remote with the my MacBook the first time, but the installation instructions list a number of troubleshooting methods, so I got it running after a few attempts. Apparently Leopard remedies many of these issues, so if you have the new operating system, you should be in good shape.

The Wiinstrument is free software and is currently in beta.