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We have learned by now that Apple iPhone will sport a new unique feature called Visual Voice mail when it ships, hopefully in June 2007. But why wait until then, when we can enjoy it now on our desktop? Callwave Free Visual Voice Mail Widget is a dashboard application that allows you to see and hear your mobile phone mail messages, not in the order they were traditionally received, but in the order they are important to you.

There are countless photo modification apps out there, from resizing to flipping images. But what makes Photo Drop truly unique is the ability for you to make the tiresome tasks of modifying multiple images or folders of images into a simple drag-and-drop operation via droplets.

A Droplet in essence, is a small application (weighing in at less than 150 KB) that delivers the usual image functions, like resizing images to new dimensions, rotating photos, adjusting compressions, format conversions, and more. Best of all it does this when files or folders are dropped on it. In other words, Photo Drop itself does not work as a regular application where you can directly edit your images.

We live in a world dominated by Windows machines and hence, we often find ourselves faced with the need to connect to one. Sadly OS X has been pretty much devoid of any Windows remote connection apps that work well. Enter CoRD an open-source, lightweight, cocoa based remote desktop client for Microsoft’s remote desktop and terminal services. CoRD was ported from a unix program called rdesktop, and allows you to connect to multiple windows machine simultaneously.

If you own an Airport Extreme Base Station, the old AEBS, or Airport Express Base Station, Apple just rolled out 2007-001 compatibility updates and general fixes for the following applications:

• Airport Utility
• Airport Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow Base Stations.
• Airport Disk Utility
• Airport Disk Agent

It’s about time Apple made this move since many owners of the new Airport Extreme Base Station (802.11n), including myself, have been unhappy with some of the connection problems and administrative issues. It’s important to note that this download does not update the actual firmware on the AEBS’ unit, it simply upgrades the aforementioned applications residing in your Mac. As always, make sure you backup your Mac first before getting the update, just in case. You can get the 12.7mb update either by running software update or straight from Apple.

Apple has just released an update for its iTunes multimedia jukebox on March 16, 2007 for both Mac and Windows. The new version 7.1.1 addressed stability issues as well compatibility problems on 7.1. Hopefully this update will fix some of the corruption setbacks some users experienced. Go and fetch the free 28MB update and make sure you are running Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.

Apple described iTunes as the world’s best way to organize and enjoy your personal digital music and video collection with your Mac. iTunes is also the easiest way to sync music, videos, and more with your iPod.

Thanks to the people who have posted helpful comments on last week’s Xslimmer review. Your feedback is very much appreciated and will be very helpful to the developers at LateNiteSoft. The winners for 2 copy of Xslimmer are Daniel and James Wong. I have notified the developers and your licenses are on their way.

For the rest of you, don’t lose hope. We will have other rounds of giveaways soon on applications that you’ve probably been eyeing for, so check back soon.

Although Apple transitioned the Mac to Intel’s platform, there are still countless PowerPC based machines out there. From any Mac software developers’ point of view, releasing separate format applications to meet the need of both architectures does not make any financial or production sense. Thus Universal Binary or “fat binary” was born. Essentially, a UB application is a hybrid consisting of codes for both architectures in an unary package so that it can be installed seamlessly on both platforms.

If you own any new Apple laptop, your machine is equipped with sudden motion sensor technology to detect locomotion. Hence, for instance, should you drop your laptop while it is busy writing or reading data , the sensor will instruct the built-in hard drive’s read & write heads to park themselves in a designated safe spot to alleviate data corruption, loss, or failure in mere milliseconds. This innovation occasionally comes with a price. If you carry your laptops around while it is dozing, there will be times when it wakes up on its own without your knowledge due to perhaps strong vibration or juggling. This constitutes a problem. One, it drains your battery and second, the accumulated heat generated while it’s cocooned inside your bag is not a good thing thermally.

When Apple transitioned its portable line of Macintosh to the Intel platform, a lot of Macbook and Macbook Pro users experienced rampant heat issues, especially those early adopters who ordered the “first revision”. Despite Apple’s progressive efforts to curb heat complications via software patch on Core Duo laptops, heat is still public enemy #1 even on portable machines running Core 2 Duo processors.