FlyTunes: Streaming Music Channels on Your iPhone

Apple is close to releasing the SDK for the iPhone/iPod Touch, but with native applications potentially months away, more and more developers are finding ways to improve mobile Safari web applications without the need to jailbreak your iPhone/iPod Touch.

One of the current application gaps is the ability to play internet radio on your device. Fortunately, FlyTunes fills that gap by offering the ability to stream high quality music channels direct to you iPhone/iPod Touch.

Taking advantage of the ability to drag and drop applications onto the home screen (requires firmware 1.1.3), FlyTunes operates like an individual application which launches in Safari and provides many genre based music channels to choose from:

VisualHub: Keeping Up With Apple

With many different video codecs and formats available today, it is hard to find a device that supports not just them all, but even a reasonable subset of the most popular.

When Apple released the 5G iPod with Video in Oct 2005, the push to take your video content on the road began and new tools started to surface to convert many of the different codecs over to iPod format.

AppleTV Take 2 – First Impressions

Apple being Apple took advantage of the 2-week extension to update AppleTV and released v2.0 (take 2) of the AppleTV software on Tuesday afternoon. To many, this has been a highly-anticipated release with many people (myself included) running Software Update on their AppleTVs a couple of times a day for the past 2-4 weeks. Twitter feeds, blogs and podcasts (Adam@The MacCast has been pulling his hair waiting for this update) have been yelling for the update. Well, now these people are rejoicing since they started to update their AppleTVs last night.

So was it worth the wait?

Leap: A More Natural Finder?

With the release of 10.5 Leopard, Apple enhanced the Finder with smart folders and Coverflow eye candy. Unfortunately, Finder is still the same old Finder when it comes to navigating through folders and finding files. Spotlight continues to improve the finding of files with its ability to index file information and content, but its display is limited, as is the ability to filter search results.

Leap, from Ironic Software, is a new Finder-like application for finding files in a more natural manor. What isn’t Leap ? First and foremost Leap is not an extension or replacement for Finder or Spotlight, but actually a utility to enable a greater depth of search when seeking out those hard to find files.

ProfCast: Record and Publish Lectures as Podcasts

As businesses and schools move more and more into the digital age, presentations and lectures are more commonly being recorded and stored electronically for future use.

I personally attend many presentations at work where someone is at the back of the room with a video camera running to capture the presenter, his/her presentation on the overhead and the delivery that goes with it.

While this adds immense value for reuse of the presentation, the quality is often poor, and in many cases, the presentation itself is illegible. ProfCast, from Humble Daisy, is a great application for capturing live presentation content and audio in a format that can be easily published and distributed via a number of open channels.
ProfCast is able to record either PowerPoint or Keynote presentations in-time with the presenters audio.

Todos: A Simply Beautiful (free) Application Launcher

Stacks, Apple’s latest enhancement to the Dock in 10.5 Leopard, provides a limited pop-up view into folders and their contents.

With Stacks you have the choice of folder contents ‘fanning’ out from the Dock or displaying in a grid. But if you’re someone that likes easy access to all your applications from the Dock, then Stacks may not be right for you.

Enter Todos. Todos has been around since 10.4 Tiger and although not a Dock extension of any sort, it provides a single view of all the applications in multiple folders similar to the single folder view provided by Stacks.

Mac Blogging Tool: ecto 3 Beta

Recently MacApper had an open call for new blog contributers which got me thinking, what’s the current state of some of the best Mac blogging tools? In today’s world of online web apps, many rely on the hosted UI of blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger, but on the Mac we are proud of the high quality, low cost, offline desktop tools at our disposal.

In this article I’ll review the latest beta version of ecto, an offline blogging tool that I’ve personally used for nearly 2 years now.