Update: Added HD (720p) version below for comparison.

Above is a sample movie I created 100% on the new iPhone 4. I used the iPhone 4′s built in front and rear facing cameras to capture stills and video. I used Apple’s new iMovie for iPhone App to edit and assemble the clips and add the transitions, titles, and audio. Finally the video was exported to the Camera Roll and uploaded directly to YouTube via the device. The whole project took about 2 hours or so to complete and was actually quite simple to put together. As you can see the final results are pretty good, but there is room for improvement. First. I don’t have steady hands and I think a tripod or something to stabilize the phone as I shot the video would have been a great help. As for the audio, I used the built-in “theme” track. In the app there was no indication of the length of the track. When enabled it simply created a green “tack line” under my video timeline and the line extended the full length of my video project. I naturally assumed it was long enough or would loop to cover my whole project. When previewing in edit mode in the app it even played the audio throughout the project. It was only after export that I discovered the track simply faded out at the end, around a minute or so in. There is no option to loop the track and you can only have one such “background” track per project. You can however also include the recorded audio from each clip over the background audio if you choose and it will even auto-duck the background track. Finally, the video exported to the Camera Roll on the iPhone is output at 720p (1280 x 720). Unfortunately, uploading to YouTube directly from the iPhone only yields a maximum resolution of 568 x 320. I assume this is why the YouTube above maxes out at 360p. Even so I think that all of this can be done on a phone. Just so you can get a comparison, I do plan to upload a 720p version polished up in iMovie on my Mac so you can see what the iPhone is fully capable of. Stay tuned.

Here is the 720p version as promised. It is still exactly the same version produced and exported entirely on the iPhone. The only change is a new music track I added in iMovie on the Mac since the iPhone version couldn’t be looped.

10:04:20.5. I would say that is meeting Apple’s stated tech specs. I did have Wi-Fi on the whole time and I did a variety of tasks from reading books and watching video to surfing the web and reading RSS feeds. As a bonus I also wrote this blog post using the WordPress app for iPad. Typing on the on-screen keyboard is amazingly good (if not a little messy). So, in addition to the amazing battery life I’m finding that the iPad is also a very capable alternative to my Macbook Pro when I want a more agile and lighter weight alternative.

And oh, in case your wondering about charging time. Using the included 10W USB Power Adapter I was able to go from 0 to 100% charge in approximately 4 hours.

A quick video unboxing the new iPod nano.

Nova Media today announced introduction of a new version of their FoneLink app, version 2.0, which gives Mac users a really nice tool to keep their mobile phone in sync with contacts, calendar, and media—in ways that iSync can’t. If you know how iTunes lets you sync with your iPhone or iPod, this is the closest thing to it.

FoneLink encapsulates a suite of useful tools beyond the traditional syncing that iSync provides. If your phone supports it, you can sync your contacts, calendars, bookmarks, and notes, and FoneLink allows you to fine tune how you’d like each to sync, separately. This info pulls in from your Address Book or Entourage.

Also synced are your text messages, as the app lets you archive old messages and enables you to send new ones through your mobile phone via FoneLink. Remember when Apple’s own Address Book used to let you do that?

FoneLink has a simple Finder that lets you browse your phone’s contents, as well as memory cards that your phone might have plugged into it. You can drag and drop files and folders to the phone and back.

The Media Center lets you sync music, photos and video to your phone, from iTunes or other files that you drag and drop into the app. The Media Center lets you pick from iTunes playlists or your entire library of songs and videos. Well, what if your phone doesn’t support a specific kind of file type? Media Center seems to know the capabilities of each supported phone, and, with your permission it can convert the files to compatible versions for your phone. You can also instruct it to just sync the ones that are playable, without converting, and leave it at that. I haven’t tested this out, but I don’t think that the Media Center will convert any iTunes DRM’d content, so unless you’ve got all iTunes Plus tracks or stuff you’ve ripped from elsewhere, you might hit a snag here. But blame DRM, not Nova Media.

Photos sync as well, and you can have them automatically resize to match the resolution of your screen—FoneLink already knows the right size for your specific phone.

Media Center also has a ringtone creator. I know I’ve heard from a lot of people that wish they could make snippets of songs into ringtones and save them to their phone—this functionality of Media Center might be worth the price of admission alone for some.

Last but not least is the Time Tunnel. Nova Media wants you to think of this like Time Machine for your phone—and they even embrace celestial background. Essentially what Time Tunnel does is saves snapshots of your phone’s contents—everything including contacts, events, media and your SMS inbox. You can go back and find specific files that you had on your phone, and restore them back.

There are some great screencasts that do a better job explaining FoneLink’s functionality than I ever could.

Some phones FoneLink will support over bluetooth and USB, and if you’re synchronizing a lot of media files, you’re going to want to do things over USB. Some phones have varying compatibility as well, and you can check specifics out here. But generally, if you have one of the following phones, you’re in luck:

Motorola:
KRZR (K1), RAZR V3, RAZR V3x, RAZR V3xx, RAZR V6, RIZR Z3, SLVR L9,

Nokia:
2600 classic, 2760, 3109 classic, 3110 classic, 3120 classic, 3250, 3500 classic, 3555, 5200, 5300, 5310 XpressMusic, 5500, 5610 XpressMusic
5700 XpressMusic, 6021, 6085, 6086, 6110 Navigator, 6111, 6120 classic, 6121 classic, 6124 classic, 6125, 6126, 6131, 6133, 6136, 6151, 6165, 6210 Navigator, 6220 classic, 6233, 6234, 6263, 6267, 6270, 6275, 6280, 6282, 6288, 6290, 6300, 6301, 6500 classic, 6500 slide, 6555, 7070 Prism, 7370, 7373, 7390, 7500 Prism, 7900 Prism, 8600 Luna, 8800 Sirocco, 9300, 9300i, 9500, E50, E51, E60, E61, E61i, E62, E65, E70, E90 Communicator, N71, N73, N75, N76, N77, N78, N80, N81, N82, N91, N92, N93, N93i, N95, N95 8GB, N96

Samsung:
SGH-A737, SGH-D840, SGH-E900, SGH-F300, SGH-G800, SGH-i550, SGH-i560, SGH-L760, SGH-P310, SGH-U700, SGH-X830
SGH-Z150, SGH-Z400, SGH-Z720

Sony Ericsson:
D750i, K320i, K510i, K530i, K550i, K610i, K660i, K700i, K750i, K770i, K790i, K800i, K810i, K850i, S500i, S700i, T650, V600i, V630i, V640i, W300i, W350i, W380i, W550i, W580i, W600i, W610i, W660i, W710i, W760i, W800i, W810i, W830i, W850i, W880i, W890i, W900i, W910i, W980i, Z310i, Z520i, Z550i, Z555i, Z610i, Z710i, Z750i, Z770i, Z800i

If one of the phones above is yours and you want to give FoneLink a try, there’s a demo version here. If you decide to keep it, one license will set you back $33.57, three licenses will be $67.14 and five licenses will cost you $100, all plus VAT tax (Nova Media is a German company located in Berlin). A direct link to the purchase page is here.

Today is the last day in My Oovoo Day, which might more accurately been named My Oovoo Couple of Weeks. What is Oovoo? Does the post office deliver mail on My Oovoo Day?

Oovoo is a new video chatting application that is available for Mac and Windows. It allows up to 6 people to have a video chat at the same time in a display that has been compared (by people like me who watched too much TV in their formative years) to the opening credits of Brady Bunch or the grid for Hollywood Squares.

My Oovoo Day was a cleaver marketing strategy to get promotional buzz for the software. The organizers of My Oovoo Day gathered a number of popular bloggers and podcasters and arranged for them to hold a series of chats. You could then sign up for one of up to 5 slots for each chat. As expected the bloggers and podcasters promoted the day. I signed up to chat with John Wall of Marketing Over Coffee, CC Chapman from Managing the Grey (and Accident Hash) and Mitch Joel from Six Pixels of Separation. Because of problems with the My Oovoo Day event, I was only able to get into the chat with John Wall (the email confirmation apparently got eaten by my spam filter and you could neither cancel a registration nor register again to chat with the same person) but these were independent of the Oovoo software.

The event itself was interesting. I had not chatted with John before. The software was still pretty green. I was using a Mac and had to do an update to a new version on the day of the even before anyone could hear me. I crashed at least once so this still seems like Beta software. The audio worked well. The video did not keep up but that seemed to depend on the bandwidth of each user.

Bottom line, Oovoo is worth looking at for a small group video chat. The idea of doing an event like My Ooovoo Day is also worth looking at as a model of how to promote a new product, but… it would be better to wait until the product was a little more ready for prime time.

Chris Christensen is the host of the Amateur Traveler podcast

Liquid Ledger allows you to import/export multiple file times, including Quicken’s Interchange Format and more generic options to make compatibility a strong point. As mentioned earlier there is a great overview feature, included with that is the ability to print out several types of financial report and graphs.

In terms of finance there really isn’t much that Liquid Ledger can’t do, but the real question is if you will be able to make use of the feature set. Liquid Ledger is definitely a great application for those who do a lot of in-depth personal or business finance, but if you’re looking for a more minimal, simplistic application see Cha-Ching, to be featured next week.

The developers at Modeless Software, Inc. have made a 60-Day Trial available for free with minimal nagging that I’d encourage anyone to give a try. You can find it at liquidledger.com.

For those who have hacked their iPhone, Erica Sudun has put together another little gem of an app called Listen, that lets your iPhone identify songs that it hears playing on your radio, on the TV, or where ever.

Listen is in beta, and the version I’m using is “beta 06” which has a nicer push-button interface than initial releases, and some more useful functionality. Because it’s beta, I should say use it at your own risk—but that pretty much goes for any app you’ve installed on your hacked iPhone or iPod touch.

If you haven’t hacked your iPhone yet, directions to help you can be found here. You can download the Listen app from the Multimedia section of the iPhone Installer app, simply listed as “Listen”. After you do so, it’s going to be listen in your Springboard home screen with a purple icon. To start it, just tap on the icon.

Once in the app, make sure you have some music is playing, from whatever source you have, so long as you can hear it and you can put your iPhone’s mic near it. Now, just tap on the big button and Listen will record a sample of the song. Shortly there after, Listen will do its thing and go out to server to compare the sample to a known database that it uses to identify the track.

Within about 30 seconds, you should have a listing of the track’s information, including the track name, artist, and album. New in this version of Listen is the ability to send that information to whoever you’d like in an email.

It’s a clever use of the iPhone’s capabilities and a great display of what independent developers can do on this amazing platform. Never again to you have to go on listening to the radio, not knowing who sings a specific song. Also, if you hear a song on you love the radio but don’t yet have it in your library, you can email the track info to yourself as a reminder to pick it up the next time you connect (or search for it in the Mobile iTunes Store if you’re on WiFi).

Check out the Listen app now and help give Erica some feedback to make it an even better app.

If like me, you have become addicted to Twitter, then you should check out the TwitterPod application for the Mac.

If you have been living in a cave, twitter is a web based server that allows people to “micro blog”. You can enter any text that will fit in a 140 character limit. Twitter updates (or tweets) can also be delivered to your cell phone if you so desire. People twitter about blog articles they have written, what they have had for breakfast or words of wisdom as long as it fits in 140 characters. Many podcasters and bloggers have started to use twitter because you can send updates to a set of people who follow you but follow the updates, potentially, of a completely different set of people. Adam twitters at maccast (sometimes) and I (my podcast is the Amateur Traveler) twitter at chris2x.

The best twitter updates I received (or wrote) yesterday:

acedtect Happy Arbitrary Roman-derived change of annual enumeration.
leolaporte Turkish coffee and a flight to Aswan where we meet the Sun Boat IV. Sarkozy and Blair are in town, snarling the traffic.
chris2x just a thought, when Clark Kent gets new frames, does anyone recognize him?
scottsimpson For the record, a certain part of my anatomy has also been compared to a baby’s arm: my arm.
hotdogsladies GoDaddy’s checkout is like a hallway of Marines trying to hit you with a sock full of pennies. “Ow! Quit it! Don’t need ‘WebSite Tonight!!’”
CaliLewis “When we honor the potato, we honor ourselves.” Just heard it on NPR.
Ihnatko The fonts I bought from Comicraft for $20.08 each (with one freebie plus a $16 discount…details in post): http://tinyurl.com/3d36aq

And if those literary gems make you more interested in Twitter than as a Mac user one program that I would recommend is TwitterPad which has a clean interface and growl notification. It also highlights the last post you read (you can read URLs posted in a pop out panel) so it makes it easy to tell what posts are new.

Let the tweats begin.

MobileCast is a native iPhone app, not a web app. So, at least until Apple puts out their SDK, you’re going to need to jailbreak your iPhone / iPod Touch to install this app. If you’re running a recent version of the Installer.app, MobileCast can be found in the Multimedia category. Tap to install it, like any other app. After you exit the installer, MobileCast’s icon should be located on your Springboard (the home app menu).

When you launch the app, you’ll first need to add some RSS feeds in. Unfortunately, this process hasn’t been streamlined yet, so you’re going to have to manually type in each podcast feed or point the app to an opml file with all your feeds. This is pretty tedious, but hey, that’s what having a full keyboard on your phone is for, right?

After you’ve typed in a few podcasts feeds, save them, and you’ll see them listed by name in the main screen. Tap on a podcast and you’ll get a long list of all the episodes you can choose to download. Select one and tap the “download” button and you’ll get a progress bar showing how much you’ve got downloaded. If you’re running on the EDGE network, this will probably take some time, so you’re probably better off doing this on a WiFi network. But, unlike the Mobile iTunes Store, at least you have the option to get content when you’re out of WiFi range.

After you’ve successfully downloaded an episode, the red dot next to the episode will turn green. Select it and you’ll see the “download” button switches to “play.” When you hit play, the episode plays in MobileCast itself, showing the cover art of the episode. At the bottom you’ll see a time slider and a pause/play button. It’s a lot like the iPod player, but missing some features like volume control (the hardware buttons on the iPhone should work fine, but those on the iPod touch might be out of luck with this version of the software) and the ability to skip ahead to different chapters in the podcast. Also, like many of the 3rd party iPhone apps, MobileCast doesn’t yet respect the mute switch on the side of the iPhone.

The current released version of MobileCast can only playback audio podcasts, however, a beta version is supposed to playback video. Hopefully that feature as well as some of the control issues will be addressed soon.

If you’re dying to download podcasts on your iPhone or iPod Touch just like you download emails or webpages, you should give MobileCast a try. If you like it a lot, you might throw Matthew a few bucks toward Matthew via PayPal so he can continue development.

I thought the website would be terribly ugly, full of ads, and html from the 1990s, but the website is clean, and a little bit ajaxy. It is only spoiled by a few ads here and there. My next reservation would be platform restrictions. I have 9 computers, none of them windows, so that would pose a problem. You can imagine the look on my face when I clicked on a link, and it just worked! How novel! I searched and a lot of my favorite TV shows were there. So far so good, then it came time to watch an episode.

I had many preconceptions about the viewing experience including, but not limited to: the ads, the quality, and the loading time. I found the ads, while somewhat annoying were fine. And the best part about them is that you can see exactly where the ad is in the general time line of the show. There are 2 ads per 30 minute show, not including preroll ads. Each ad is 60 seconds long and is ignorable. The quality isn’t bad either, while it isn’t HD (yet),it is far better than anything that I have seen on YouTube. And yes, the loading time is nice and fast.

Now it is time to tackle the naysayers. And while I have negated almost all of their complaints, I left out one. The issue about downloading. This is a non-issue for me. Whenever I bought a TV show on iTunes, I would watch it once or twice, then I would never watch it again. I would start to notice how much space it was it was taking up on my iPhone/iPod/MacBook/PowerBook’s HD. I wanted to delete it, but then I would feel bad that I wasted money, and besides what if I wanted to watch it again? Now I can rest safely knowing that the content is on Hulu’s servers.
I was never a TV fan. When I was a baby, I would rather read than watch TV. Even now, I don’t have a TV let alone cable. And because of all the mentioned reasons, Hulu is perfect for me.

Crossblogged from my website: http://freecasts.net

This is where GarageSale (http://iwascoding.com/GarageSale) comes in. If you have stuff that just has to go, and you like to use eBay, then this is the app you want to use. GarageSale is an all in one eBay selling app that takes you from the setting up your sale to feedback and completion. To give you an idea, I sold an item for this review and I am going to give you the play by play.

Setting up the application is really simple. Just give GarageSale your eBay information as it is an approved eBay application and needs to be linked, plus you can also link your PayPal information. Now you’re set!

I wanted to sell a video game, so I opened up GarageSale and chose one of the 124 listing designs, and they look fantastic. I chose “Spotlight”, which has a coverflow feel to it. GarageSale will host up to ten free images for my auctions, so I decided that route. You can also put an image up on Flickr or other service. The next part is where I placed the description of the item which will be displayed in the template that I chose. The software asked me for a listing price, category, sub-category, payment details, shipping costs, enhancements offered through eBay which cost extra(but they’re there), auction duration, and more. Finally, the best part, is to click the start auction button. The program gives you the listing fee before going to the next step which is nice, because who wants to pay $3.00 for a $0.50 item. Click again and it’s up and running.

Now say you have more items to sell, well just go ahead and create more. I set up an additional four auctions, and I track them in GarageSale. I never have to go to eBay again (unless I’m bargain hunting). You can track EVERYTHING in GarageSale. When you open it up just click the auction tabs, your items will be listed and have a little sticky as to what the bids are at, plus they’ll show you who is watching the item (those are potential buyers). Plus you can see the eBay listing within the program.

So I sold my game, YAY! Now I open up GarageSale and I open the auction that has ended. I want to get paid right? I enter the invoice portion of the screen and here it gives me some e-mail templates to use to send an invoice for the item. It uses Apple Mail automatically or any other mail app that you want and you mail it off. I wait for payment confirmation within the program, which then gives me the mailing address in the program, then I can leave feedback. Did I mention that I did this all within the program? So the sale is complete, both parties are happy and I did the whole thing within the comfort of GarageSale.

There are some really slick features that are once again for the power seller, but nonetheless neat. Here are a couple:
Built in Scheduler – Schedule when you want your auctions to start.
eBay Store Support – GarageSale will upload to your eBay store.
iPhoto Integration – You can pull images from iPhoto directly within GarageSale.

This is a great application for the power seller, but not really for the occasional one as the license costs US/EURO $29.99.

All in all this is a neat app that makes the auction selling experience a little less excruciating. I really liked it, and recommend it to anyone who has a lot of stuff to sell and wants to manage it.

I tried the program on recommendation of a friend and at first found it nothing more than a “neat” app, but after making use of all its features I don’t see why they aren’t built into OS X already. If you do online banking, bill paying, or have any sensitive information stored on the web you’ll quickly see why 1Password is an essential component to the operating system.  

The problem with passwords is that they really should be complex, but we often are willing trade off security for something easy to remember. It doesn’t get any easier when you have more than one account on a website. 1Password not only remembers your existing passwords, but has an amazing GUI for creating insanely secure passwords. You can access all of these with a single master password.

  .Mac, iPhone, and Palm syncing allows you to bring these passwords with you easily wherever you go. And the security features include prevention from phishing scams and keyloggers. Even if these features may not at first look appealing to you, a use of the demo will almost surely sell you on it. Check out 1Password here, and don’t forget to watch the excellent Video Introduction.Available for $29.95 USD at 

1Passwd.com

I attended a class by New York Times technology columnist David Pogue on the new features in Leopard recently. Mr. Pogue is a dynamic speaker and the enthusiastic crowd was rocking. No, really, I mean the room was literally rocking. Of course the room was located on Holland America’s ms Volendam so the rocking was fairly easy to explain. This class was part of Insight Cruise‘s (formerly Geek Cruises) MacMania 7 cruise.

A MacMania cruise is like a Mac conference at sea and more than one of the attendees had their attendance at conference paid for by their company (although only the most generous company will also pay for the cruise itself). The speakers on MacMania 7 were: Richard Dreyfuss (the actor), Janet Hill, David Pogue, Randal Schwartz, Jason Snell, Sal Soghoian, Derrick Story and Robin Williams (the Mac author not the actor). One of the wonderful perks of the cruise is being able to meet, talk with and generally shmooze with people who are well known in the Mac community.

The classes offered on MacMania 7 included:

• Introduction to Lightroom
• Introduction to Aperture
• iPhone: The Missing Manual
• Maximizing iPhoto
• Photoshop for Photographers
• Integrating Photoshop with Aperture, Lightroom, or iPhoto
• Which Is Best for You — Aperture, Lightroom, or iPhoto?
• iDVD and iMovie
• Apple’s Latest and Greatest
• The Ground Floor Guide to the Macintosh
• Extreme Googling
• Inside Mac OS X “Leopard”
• Leopard Power User Tips
• Introduction to iLife
• Pushing iLife to the Limit
• Amazingly Cool Utilities
• Personal Podcasting Primer

The classes are not held while the ship is in port so that attendees and speakers alike can enjoy shore excursions or just generally explore. MacMania 7 stopped at a prvate island in the Bahamas, Aruba, Curaçao, Panama and Costa Rica with the highlight of the cruise being the Panama Canal.

The cruise had more than 4 days spent entirely at sea. If you enjoy the normal ways to spend your time on a cruise: shuffleboard, bingo, art auctions, shopping, etc then a geek cruise may not be right for you. If you can’t imagine entertaining yourself on a 10 day cruise and think that spending the time with 150 other Mac fanatics would be fun, then you might want to look into MacMania 8.

Insight Cruises also ran Shakespeare at Sea on the same cruise (which is what I was officially attending but I was allowed to attend either program). More information about the cruise can be found in Amateur Traveler Episode 113 – Theme Cruise to Panama (Shakespeare at Sea / MacMania).

My pre-ordered new Wireless Keyboard arrived, and I can say easily that my first impressions are very positive.

I have owned a Core2Duo MacBook for about a year, and become very accustomed to the keyboard style and layout. As a result, more and more when I sat down at my iMac to do some work I became annoyed at the bulky, blocky keyboard that came with the iMac. I even replaced it with the Wireless one that was previously released, which had little effect on my appreciation of the keyboard.

When Apple announced the new keyboard design I felt as if my mind had been read- for awhile now I had been thinking that it would be great if the keyboard for the imac was identical to that of the MacBooks. In fact, I’m considering an upgrade to a MacBook Pro, but am waiting for it as well to be upgraded to the recessed, square key design of the MacBooks and now iMac keyboards.

The New Wireless Keyboard is very, very compact. I don’t think it’s clear in the photos just how small, thin, and well-designed it is. It’s width and profile are exactly that of the MacBook’s- to a tee.

It’s height is a comfortable incline, one which is reasonable and not too daunting on the wrists. It’s understandable that the reason for the lift is due to the requirement of batteries, something that is a draw back for some people. I however use rechargeable batteries, and found that with the previous Wireless keyboard, the batteries lasted for months- and I imagine this keyboard will be no different. It takes 3 AA batteries, which are included (they’re Energizer batteries).

Another criticism of this Bluetooth version of the new Apple keyboard is it’s lack of a numeric keypad. And again, coming from the MacBook, I have both no worries about that and no need for it for the work I do. I can see however that some people are displeased because, to have the new design they’re left with the wired version, something that didn’t happen with the previous generation of Apple keyboards.

The typing experience is nearly identical to typing on my MacBook, something that’s warmly welcomed. Additionally, the extra Expose and Dashboard buttons, as well as brightness, volume, and playback controls are welcomed.

I’m giving it a 4.5 out of 5- the missing numeric keypad will be a deal breaker for some, while the portability, MacBook size and feel replication will also be a beacon of joy for others.

The concept behind their software is to allow all of your iLife content to be streamed directly to the 360, and it works as simply as it sounds. Requiring minimal setup and only $20 USD for the full version, Connect360 is a must have for Mac and 360 owners. The only notable downsides are not the fault of Nullriver, but of DRM and Microsoft’s limited codec support.

There is a generous free trial version available that allows you to stream a limited number of photos, music, and videos at a time. For more information about supported content see this blog post from msdn.com

As of late I’ve been trying to solve the ever-worrisome issue of efficient and effective data backup for my personal information at home. I recently purchased and installed a product that’s put my mind at rest – at least for now. It’s the D-Link DND-323. This is a dual SATA drive NAS enclosure that allows you to configure the drives as a redundant array (RAID 1). I was able to pick up the D-Link product, and 2 500GB drives for about USD$400. This gives me just about 500GB of total storage space. The D-Link site does not show Mac compatibility for this product, but I’ve had no trouble managing and connecting to it from my MacBook Pro. The device is simple, runs pretty quiet (mine’s tucked in a basement) and has some pretty useful features:

• Easy to use web interface for management
• Gigabit network jack
• Built-in USB print server
• iTunes server (iTunes shows a Shared library)
• Email alerts for things like drive failure, overheating, etc.
• FTP server that can allow you to access your files remotely over the Internet (some security issues if you’re familiar with FTP)

All in all I’ve been very pleased with the device. It’s comforting to know that my family videos and pictures, as well as my digital music and important documents are being stored safely. It’s not bullet-proof, but honestly, you could ramble on forever in perinoia over backups if you let yourself. This offers a relatively low cost & simple solution to data backup. It runs the EXT2 file system and does not support NTFS – so don’t plan on using something like this in a Windows business environment where you need to set specific user permissions. The device, however, does support embedded user accounts that you can setup and manage from the web interface.

Checkout a full in depth review of the D-Link DNS-323 at ExtremeTech

Update
Editors note: I received an email from a listener in Japan who uses this also and had a note for any international listeners who may be dependent on a solution with double-byte character support.

I read the review on D-Link DNS-323. It’s a nice neat device except one thing… It does not work well with double byte character sets (or Japanese UTF-8). It doesn’t recognize Japanese file names using OS X (it works with XP, though…). Since I’m Japanese, this is very critical… I ended up creating a huge disk image on DNS-323, and coping Japanese files to the disk image…

A quick rundown of the specification of the Z5fd will help you to see just how featured packed this camera is. As previously mentioned you get a 6.3 megapixel resolution, a 2.5-inch LCD screen, picture stabilization and natural light modes, face detection, up to ISO 1600, 3x optical and 6.2x digital zoom. The camera has 26MB of internal memory, but no xD memory card supplied. It also has 14 quick scene modes, for things like portrait, night, and sports shots.

The Good
The z5fd has a lot going for it. The size is a massive selling point of this camera, it is not the thinnest on the market, but easily fits into a shirt pocket. The design is pretty much spot on too. The front cover slides to turn the camera on, and at the same time reveals the lens and flash. The 2.5-inch LCD is gorgeous, and make framing up an viewing photos a real pleasure. The focus is very quick and the pictures right up to ISO 800 are more than usable.
There are also some nice features for getting images ready for a website built right into the camera. When viewing photos, pressing the ‘F’ button presents you with a menu for ‘Trimming for Blog’ and it does just that. You can crop your image and then transfer it to your communication device or laptop over infrared. This is a nice feature that some users may find invaluable.
Picture quality was very good, with nice colour saturation and detail. The face detection is also a nice feature which ensures that faces are correctly exposed when taking group shots. I tested this out on more than one occasion and it actually does work, it is not a gimmick.

The Bad
There really wasn’t anything to put in this category, other than something that effects most cameras of this type. The lack of optical viewfinder is a shame, I am sure with the technology available these days Fuji could have squeezed one in. It is not essential, but something that I personally like on ALL my cameras.

The Ugly
On first use, I put the battery in the camera and connected to the main power to charge. A few hours later, when I went to switch on, the unit would not turn on. After a quick bit of investigation I found that the battery was in the wrong way. Now, I should emphasise that I put it in the way the arrows printed on the battery indicated, but this battery fits and clicks into place both ways. Turning the battery round corrected the problem, so no big deal, but most manufacturers make their batteries so they are fool-proof and only fit in one way around.

Overall I was very impressed with the Z5fd. It fits into the compact sector of the market and is a very good quality digital camera that you can carry everywhere you go. You will have no excuse of missing that chance photo again.

Product: Finepix Z5fd
Price: $190.00 (Amazon)
Supplied by: Fujifilm UK
Contact: +44 (0)870 084 1310

Okay, I’m just about all iPhoned out. I know many of you are sick of it. Sorry for all the jazz…I’m posting this here mostly because I think many were expecting some sort of review from me. DONT READ IT if you don’t care about the iPhone. ;-)

A little more (EDIT- actually a LOT more) on the phone itself: A friend grabbed mine from me at midnight and wouldn’t let go of it for an hour last night! The interface is intuitive enough that he only had to ask me once or twice how to walk through the features.

Set-up

Setup was too damn easy. I’d planned on a couple of hours setting it up, getting contacts synced and all that, even though I knew it was just iTunes easy. It took 5 minutes to walk through the setup, a few more to get the activation email, and a few minutes for my contacts, calendars and music to sync into the phone. Almost boring! LOL I had no problems with activation like I see some are complaining about on the news.

Video playback

Video playback is fantastic looking. Sync’d videos from iTunes are great looking. YouTube videos are smooth, you can tell it’s heavily compressed video…but it looks better on iPhone than on the computer.

Web surfing

Yep, on EDGE it is less-than-peppy, only time will tell if this is an annoyance or not. My friend last night said it was slow – but I reminded him he’s never surfed on a mobile device and while it was slower than he’s used to, he’s comparing cable broadband to cellular…never going to be the same experience. Personally, I think it’s slower than my Treo on Verizon, make that noticeably slower, but it is so much easier to use and so much better to look at – repeat that – it is so much easier to use and so much better to look at that it’s worth the wait. As the novelty of the real web on the thing wears off, I may be less forgiving.

Voicemail

Visual email is totally cool. I think how it works is that copies of voice messages left are pushed to your phone and stored locally, so they just appear as sound files you can pick or choose from in any order to listen to, play back, pause, whatever with the media player type controls. Well done and very useful. No need to listen to a sales pitch voicemail to get through to a friend’s call.

Sound quality

Sound quality as an iPod is stunning! And loud! At just half volume it’s very strong, I think on full volume I could damage my eardrums.

Sound quality as a phone is good, as good as any mobile phone I’ve owned including the Treo and Razr. Sound volume on Speakerphone is very disappointing…at max volume it’s not loud…I don’t think you’ll be using the speakerphone in the car. I’m a big speakerphone user, so this is a hard hit for me. Holding it up to the ear, still could use a volume boost, though I used to work on jet fighter aircraft, and I do have some slight hearing loss; your mileage may vary here. Using the supplied headphones is a whole different story. Just like the iPod function, it’s a very strong loud signal. A+ there. Also, I bought one of those Jabra Jawbone bluetooth noise canceling earset things. Wow…that’s a well-fitted, very good sounding bluetooth headset. GET ONE!

Interface

Very very very intuitive. And it only takes a few minutes to get used to it. My friend last night was in the settings playing with ringtones (Editor’s note: Built-in ones only, at the moment no customer ringtones on the iPhone) and wallpapers with no guidance from me…this same friend on his LG flip phone took several days to remember how to get into his settings and change a ringtone.

Multitouch

AWESOME. Really. As I’m writing this, I just thought of a tip on how to think of using it. Just imagine your index finger is a mouse pointer. You select things by tapping with your finger…just like you click with the mouse button your finger. You get other actions if you double tap your mouse button/pointer…same with the iPhone interface – just double tap the screen to zoom in or zoom out. You move things around the screen with the mouse by tapping and holding the mouse button on the item and then dragging it around. Exact same thing on the iPhone.

Photo albums

Look good, well organized…can really zoom in deeply…they’re full resolution pictures.

Applications/Widgets

Widgets
The Stocks, Weather, Clock, Calculator, and Sticky Notes applications are all just “widgets” from OS X…if you have a Mac, you will recognize all of these applications from the Dashboard. They look, feel, and configure the same.

Applications
Calendar
Looks great, all the normal views (day, month, list). Much nicer than on a Treo or Blackberry – mostly due to the big screen on the thing. Sync’d perfectly with my desktop.

Email
It’s good. I’ve got a dozen different accounts on my desktop. They all sync’d automatically to the device, and are listed on the screen. Yahoo was supposed to be “push” but I can’t even get IMAP to work on my Yahoo accounts. In fairness to the iPhone on that issue, I get flaky imap access to them on my laptop as well. Gmail pop and AOL imap work flawlessly, though. And of course .MAC email imap works perfectly.

Camera
2 megapixels. Acceptable for a cellphone. Nokia’s 5 megapixel sets the bar higher, though. The camera takes good pictures, but with virtual buttons on the screen…taking a self portrait was difficult. I had to guess where the button is. Self portraits weren’t in mind apparently, though, as there’s no mirror (ala the Treo) or video screen on the camera side to see what the viewfinder is.

Camcorder
There is none. Big disappointment for me. I’d made a little hobby of video recording interesting people in public. I guess my voyeurism habit will be broken now. ;-)

SMS Text Messaging
Works well. Looks identical to iChat on a Mac computer. No picture messaging built in, but pictures work as an attachment to emails. This will be annoying for many until they get used to email rather than picture messages.

Virtual keyboard

This is going to be the biggest complaint about the thing I am sure. It will take getting used to. It’s not as bad as I’ve heard some say, and it will never be more than one-finger typing. With the Treo keyboard I could two-thumb type pretty quickly…but the Treo doesn’t predict and correct your text like the iPhone. It will be interesting to see in a few weeks how speed typing a message competes. Without real keys, I can see trying to type on this while driving will be impossibly dangerous. Considering that typing while driving (c’mon, you’ve all done it) is so dangerous in the first place, I’m going to try to think of this as a positive (even though it sucks).

Battery life

Between my friend and I playing with the phone with a dozen phone calls, an hour of web browsing/testing, some music playing, several videos played and generally putting the phone through its paces, we used about half the battery’s indicated charge. Too soon to tell for every day use, but battery life looks like it will be okay, but not stellar if I do a lot of video or web surfing. Keep in mind, all smartphones pretty much need to be charged daily unless you’re a very light user of the things. Only time will tell on this one.

Medical features

Touching the iPhone cured my arthritis, improved my vision, regrew my hair and generally restored my youth . LOL. Just kidding, even though it made me feel like a kid again waiting for one all week. Does that count as restoring my youth?

Final thoughts

So, to sum it up. Is this the Jesus Phone? Nope. Is it a major revolution…nope. Is it the first skirmish in what will be a major revolution…definitely. Lots of innovation here in interface and design. If you’re not a technophile, you may not appreciate some of the features, but this is a big step forward unlike any we’ve seen yet in a cellphone.

Holding out for version 2 might still be a good idea…it will be better. Holding out for lower prices…don’t hold your breath. Apple’s top of the line product will always be this price level…it will have more features and better performance, but it will always be $600. When the new ones come out, maybe the old ones will be marked down, but at that point, will you want the older model. Maybe someday, ala the iPod nano model and really dumbed down version will come out, but that might be a few years in the making.

Re: the actual buying experience

Apple did a very good job of handling the mob at the Northridge, CA Apple Store I was at. They were handing out water or coffee to the people in line. When they opened, they let 20 people in at a time, and only people who were looking to buy the iPhone. They had about 10 employees just working registers for iPhone sales and another dozen guiding the line and selling accessories…you snaked through a line around all the computer stuff, with two employees just holding one for you to touch while in line, you got directed to a register…bought your phone(s) only and paid. Then you were free to browse the rest of the store for accessories or other products. There was an assumption (accurate of course) in that setup that if you were there, you were buying, because unlike normal Apple play-with-it-all-you-want, you were buying this thing pretty much sight-unseen. Sooo, I’d have been smarter to just go several hours later and probably just walk in and make it a five minute affair as many have reported they did wen going in the latter half of the evening last night, but, I’d have had a far less interesting afternoon, less story to tell, and I wouldn’t have met the interesting people I did – a college kid studying to be a minister, a classic car collector, a website developer, an autobody shop owner, and I got “the digits” from an attractive latina ;-) – part of the fun in all this was buying into the hype and acting out on it. And hey, if Steve Wozniak and Spike Lee stood in line for one, who am I to not be part of the crowd.

Adam already posted that iTunes 7.2 and iTunes Plus went live, but I don’t think the actual functionality was live when he made the post. Here are a quick look and a few points I’ve noted with the new iTunes features.

After you’ve updated iTunes to 7.2 from either downloading it separately or running Software Update, when you fire-up the iTunes Store in 7.2, you may not notice much change. To setup your preferences for future iTunes Plus purchases, you’re going to want to hop into your iTunes account settings (which can be found in the quick links on the right column or by clicking on your user name just below the search field in the iTunes window). From there, the first option you should see is labeled “iTunes Plus.”

Click on the “Manage iTunes Plus” button, and you’ll have the option to have iTunes always show iTunes Plus tracks (whether music or music videos), when available. Note, that these Plus tracks are limited to music and music videos, at least for now (read: no unDRM’ing and burning your iTunes movie or TV purchases to a DVD, yet).

After you check the box, save changes and go back to the store, you may start to see select tracks (presumably from EMI) identified with a little “+” next to the check-out price. It seems that those tracks are limited in availability, and I haven’t checked this extensively, so your feedback would be useful to share with the rest of the MacCast community.

Also, when you go back to the main page, you should also see a box for iTunes Plus, below New Releases.

After clicking on it, you’ll be taken to a page that gives you the opportunity to “upgrade your library,” and it will show the number of songs and albums (and probably any music videos if you have any—I didn’t), along with the price of the upgrade. I didn’t have many downloaded songs in this Mac’s iTunes library, so my upgrade is fairly inexpensive.

The drill down into the specifics of the charges is interesting. The specifics show that charges are as follows:

• $0.30 / song

• 30% off the current album price

• $0.60 / music video

The page is also supposed to update when more tracks from your library become available as unDRM’d/higher bit-rate iTunes Plus content.

The biggest question I had about all of this is what I’m going to call a iTunes Plus / Complete My Album cross-grade. There’s a real value-opportunity here for consumers, but the question is: After enabling iTunes Plus, when I use Complete My Album, will the album completion give me the unDRM’d / upgraded version?

In investigating this further, it would appear that you can only upgrade your library via the Upgrade My Library page, and only all at once. Meaning, it seems that if you only want to upgrade specific tracks, you’re going to have to re-purchase those individual tracks for full price, unless you upgrade your complete library (at least those now available in iTunes Plus) all at once. This is confirmed by the iTunes Plus FAQ:

”You cannot choose which songs, music videos or albums to upgrade individually.”

Don’t worry, though, once new songs from your library become available via iTunes Plus, you can return to this page and upgrade those songs at a later date. For testing purposes, this was a bummer for me, but might not be a big deal to the rest of the upgrading public—but you can be the judge on that one.

When upgrading your account, you’re also asked if you want to keep the old tracks (which will be saved to a folder on your desktop) or trash them. When downloading a Plus’d album, I thought it was interesting that iTunes decided to re-download the album art. It’s still downloading so I’m not yet sure if it’s somehow enhanced or less protected :-)

After completing my library upgrade, I transfered a Coldplay track to my Nokia 6270 mobile phone, which I now discovered cannot play files with the extension .m4a (even though it correctly identified it as audio), but renaming the extension to .aac, the song played just fine. With your new freedom, keep the renaming trick in mind if you try to play music on non-iPod devices. During this extension renaming, I also discovered the new option in iTunes for the new unDRM’d Plus tracks: convert selection to mp3.

That’s about it for right now. Please add your comments below with your experiences of the new iTunes Plus features.

Chances are that if you’re an Apple fan, you’re also heavily into some form of media. Whether it be music, movies, games, or books you probably have a couple shelves of boxes and discs scattered throughout pouches. Then there are always those friends borrowing your stuff though you know neither of you will remember who has it and if they gave it back. Delicious Library manages what you have, keeps track of where it is, makes recommendations for new content, and looks cool in the process.

Depending on how much content you have, it can take quite some time to get your entire library scanned. This process can be more enjoyable than you might think, as Delicious Library offers you several ways of scanning in your media. The fastest, but probably the most boring way of going about it would be to type out the UPC or title of your product. A more interesting way would be to set up your iSight or webcam and hold the product’s barcode in front of it. The seemingly coolest, yet most expensive way scan your content would be to order their Flic® Wireless Laser Barcode Scanner (US $174.95 and only available while buying a license). It connects via Bluetooth, works up to 50 feet away from your Mac, and can store up to 500 unique barcodes if you’re out of range. Finally, you can also use a USB barcode scanner. In fact if you have an old USB CueCat laying around you can modify it to work with Delicious Library in under a minute.

I went with the webcam method, seeing as I have been wanting an excuse to plug mine in for some time. To my surprise my old Veo Stringray worked perfectly the majority of the time, and when it didn’t I just typed in the UPC or title manually. Hearing the barcode scanner sound effect is a great touch. The developer included a great Easter egg in the software, fun sound clips that play after scanning certain products. The only things I owned that triggered them were Star Wars items, but the developer says there are more Easter eggs to be found. I was expecting a “whip crack” when I scanned Indiana Jones, an “Adrian!” when I scanned Rocky, and an “Engage!” for Star Trek. I was let sorely let down on all accounts. Game covers as provided by Amazon are often incorrect or missing, so I kept pulling them manually from GameFly. That wasn’t a problem since I only own a dozen games, but it would be nice if searching in places other than Amazon was built into the software. Not being able to scan in your boxed PC/Mac software is inexcusable.

Other features include a Widget for quick searching in the Dashboard, Spotlight integration, Address Book integration for “lending,” Voice Search, and the application’s ability to speak the name of the product you just scanned. I didn’t find myself using them too much, and after a while I was glad they gave me the ability to turn off the vocals. However, they are there when you want them and I’m sure for massive collections they can be quite useful. Customization of the look and feel of the program is lacking. The third column shows information pulled on the product from Amazon or other custom details, but there is no way to hide or resize it. While that may sound like a small problem, when you’re attempting to manage your library on a modest 17-inch monitor it can become an issue. The software’s background is a tiled woodgrain image that I wanted to make a solid adjustable color as in iPhoto.

Once you’ve scanned your library in you’ll seldom be using Delicious Library, sometimes forgetting it’s there until you need it. But that’s just the thing, it is there when you need it and can be very handy. When you are letting a friend borrow a bunch of CDs you can just scan them in so that in a few weeks you aren’t ripping apart your house looking for them. Whether or not that makes it worth the US $40 is what you’ll be debating before you give them your credit card. Because you only scan your library once, it feels meaningless to purchase the Bluetooth Scanner. After the initial phase of scanning in your entire library it’s easiest just to type in the UPC of new products, so using a webcam may be the better choice. The application itself is nearly flawless, it’s merely missing a few of the aforementioned features. I suppose I would never have gone out and bought this application my own, but after using it for a month or so I don’t think I could let go of it easily.

Let me say that there is nothing fancy graphics wise about the game, but it makes up for it in the game play. The version that I reviewed was a drag and drop situation while I wished for a right click on the Mighty Mouse to speed up the betting process.

The game is great when it comes to stats, there is a history pane in the right side showing the history of the rolls that have been made. Also is a running count of how much cash you have, how much are you up, or are in the hole. One stat I wasn’t expecting but what is neat is the Points Made(In Craps the Point is the number you want to roll in order to win), and the Sevens Out(If you roll a seven after the Point is made you lose). This gives you an idea on the tide of the game.

You can pick this via download for $15 USD, $29 for a CD. And for those on Windows, because we can, they also offer a Windows version. If you buy the CD you get both versions, so that may be a route you may want to take.

For the money this is a lot of fun, and it’s not too heavy on the gaming budget. With a rating of one to ten it get’s a solid seven, no pun intended. Great game play, though nothing flashy. But still a great item to pick up.

I donated to the cause (the widget is donationware), and poked and prodded them to continue development despite facing a major setback: Apple had released their Extreme ‘N’ Enabler, and blown a hole through the development of a widget that was initially just trying to grapple with the new Intel Macs, let alone a new unratified wireless protocol.

As it turned out, I was of considerable help, having an Intel Core Duo iMac, a Core Duo MacBook, and a Core2Duo MacBook, coupled with both a b/g Airport Extreme and a new Airport Extreme N wireless router. Installing the then newborn beta widget on all three computers, I set to testing and reporting console logs and screenshots for the developers.

Of course, I had a vested interest in all of this: There was no other widget nor application that could accurately display the Core2Duo’s wireless signal strength and scan for networks at the same time.

There are several applications which have since been updated to better work with the new Core2Duo Macs, but I wasn’t interested in an application- I wanted a widget that I could pop open when I’m roaming and traveling to scan for open networks and find the strongest connection areas.

Air Traffic Control has been around for awhile, sporting a few different looks, but its latest incarnation is extremely slick, and still functions as well as it looks even for a beta. Currently at 2.0.1 beta400, Air Traffic Control runs flawlessly on the three Macs I have here at home.

Though updated to work on all new Intel macs, the beta is Universal and works fine for older Macs as well. It’s feature set includes the ability to:

• Scan for closed networks
• Scan in ‘active’ mode, scanning more frequently to find networks
• Prevent unauthorized users from changing your network settings
• Connect to any type of network (a,b,g,n – if your airport card supports them)
• Check for AirTrafficControl updates automatically
• Use the Keychain to store, retrieve and update WPA or WEP passwords
• View current connection details including network speed
• Sorts networks by signal strength

There simply isn’t a better Airport widget available which includes both the functionality and the style of Air Traffic Control. It’s one of the handful of widgets that I consider essential for a mobile Mac user, and one in which I had no issue paying for.

Two of the “killer” applications that led to wide adoption of personal computers were word processors and spreadsheets. There are many different projects from Christmas letters to personal budgets that can be created with these applications. The two most popular applications on the Macintosh in this area are Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel, but if you want to buy these applications they can be fairly expensive. The latest Mac version of Microsoft Office (which also includes Powerpoint) costs more than $300.

So what if you could get a word processor and a spreadsheet for free? Better yet, what if I could share those documents with my mother in Cleveland? What if I could help her with her monthly budget spreadsheet by both of us going to the same website with an internet browser? What if I want to work on a novel with a friend in Paris? What if my mother or my friend could see as I made changes in the shared document in real time? If that sounds too good to be true then you have not yet had a chance to use Google Docs.

Google bought a shared document product from a company called Writely and then also created internally a spreadsheet application to create Google Docs. These applications work surprisingly well. They even have revision control so that you can roll back changes that your friend makes to the novel. I could have used this when my best friend from high school and I “collaborated” on a story (He kept killing off characters I introduced).

You will need to use the Firefox browser (or other modern browser) on the Mac as these applications will not work with Internet Explorer or Safari.

I’d like to share some brief thoughts about an application I discovered about a month ago (via the magazine MacUser here in Britain) called Scrivener. You can find it on the web at

I’d been using Word or Pages to write my essays for some time, but was always aware that I didn’t feel entirely comfortable writing in those environments. But then I happened to read a review in MacUser UK for Scrivener. It is a brand new app from Keith Blount, a writer who learned Cocoa and became a developer so that he would have an application he could enjoy writing in. Naturally I was intrigued, so I downloaded the trial copy.

From the start, it was obvious that Scrivener had a very different philosophy to the staple word processors. In some ways, it isn’t even a word processor; it’s a draft-builder. Instead of worrying about formatting, Scrivener lets you work on your draft—the actual text—and manage the whole book/essay/play as a large project rather than a continuous flow of paragraphs and pages.

The program’s interface is built around the binder, which displays all the documents in your project, and allows you to organize them hierarchically, into folders for example. This allows you to split up your piece into chapters if it’s a book you’re writing, or the points you want to make if it’s an essay. For viewing all these sections, Scrivener gives you the Corkboard or the Outliner, two views which allow you to see the broad outline, if you will, of your project. I know so many people who find it useful to use real index cards to get a feel for where their writing is going; with Scrivener you do this on your computer, using virtual index cards on the Corkboard.

One of the features I find most helpful is the full screen mode. It’s just you and text here, with a black background to hide the desktop (though you can vary the transparency). For me it has been so useful to just be able to concentrate on the text, with no distractions in sight. I’m sure it’s not for everyone though, and the blank white page can be quite intimidating at times.

When you’ve completed your first draft, Scrivener lets you export that draft to a number of formats, including RTF and Word format. There are a wealth of options for tweaking exactly what parts of your draft you want to export, and for users who prefer no formatting at all, Scrivener supports MultiMarkDown. After exporting your draft, you open it up in another word processor, make sure the formatting is all right, and print away.

It’s worth mentioning too that Scrivener may be very handy for playwrights or those who write for the screen. It has the ability to format your draft as a script as you go. Not being either of these, though, I haven’t tested it out for myself, but it looks well thought through and seems, again, unobtrusive and very handy.

It didn’t take me long to buy the full license for Scrivener (which is very affordable, incidentally at USD$34.99). The application’s new approach does take some getting used to, and this may put some off. But as I’ve looked deeper into Scrivener’s features I’ve found so much evidence of careful thought and consideration in its development, and the dedication of the application’s developer is astounding. It has all the hallmarks of a great Mac application, and amazing attention to detail. I would warmly recommend Scrivener to any writers out there who are looking for a new way to write on their Mac. It (almost) makes my essays a joy to write!

Have you heard the old joke?

When a person speaks two languages we call them bilingual, when they only speak one language what do you call them? American.

Now that joke may not apply to you but odds are that you don’t speak as many languages as your Macintosh. And if you don’t happen to speak Azerbaijani, Breton, Croatian, Esperanto and/or Tongan then those languages are taking up space on your hard drive. Even if you remember Spanish, French, or German from high school you may not ever plan to look at an application with the user interface set to that language. If you could delete those language files then you would save disk space. How much disk space you will save will depend on how many applications you have installed and how many of those applications come with a multilingual interface. On my computer I saved 2Gb of storage space. A friend saved 4Gb by deleting those files.

One tool that makes it easy to delete the unneeded bulk of both language files (as well as binaries compiled for a processor chip that you computer does not have) is the free application Monolingual. Select what you want to keep and what you want to delete and then press a button and what. Of course, before you do something like this a backup is always recommended.

Editors note: I will second Chris’ recommendation for having a good full backup prior to running Monolingual. You may remember a time when I recommended Monolingual on the Maccast prior to them adding Universal support. Needless to say some Intel Mac owners were not too happy. The application is Universal now, but still caution is always smart when modifying your system at this low a level. I personally avoid the need to use a tool like Monolingual by doing a custom install and only loading the desired dialect when I re-install OS X (which I will do when Leopard is released).

The SIMS 2 USD $49.95
Website: aspyr.com

Ok, before you say, “A game on my Mac, you can’t be serious!” Well my friend I am serious. Yeah working with your digital music, pictures, and videos is great but under the hood of that Mac is gaming power that has been unleashed for your pleasure. I am a big supporter of gaming on the Mac. Ever since switching from my PC to the Mac I have found that games just look better on the Mac. The computing power whether it’s a Power PC or Intel based Mac, you will find Mac bliss.

If you are asking yourself, “Will it run on my Mac?”. You will be pleased to know that it runs very smooth on my iMac G5. If you are not sure, Aspyr has a game agent which will tell you if the game will play on your Mac. You can pick it up for free at www.aspyr.com.

The Sims 2 is like crack to the PC gaming world and the folks at Aspyr have ported it to the Mac. It’s been a big hit for EA on the PC and this reproduction for the Mac has been faithfully executed and does not disappoint. The sequel completely blows the original away(as it should). The graphics are phenomenal. You get extra neighborhoods, places to visit, and houses that would make Frank Lloyd Wright drool.

Putting together your character is like making a virtual you by controlling the characters traits, personality, you name it, it’s all up to you. You can live in posh surroundings or the Nevada dessert where the neighbors resemble failed projects from Area 51. Move wherever you want.

The best part is that if you get bored with all the goodies, there are expansion packs available to add more content, the game is very addictive. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. This game is well worth it, you will not be disappointed. If you like to control people or make life and death situations for your little virtual world, get it.

We’ve reviewed iTunes Store alternatives on MacCast before, so I thought I’d take a look at a new and innovative music service that incentivizes indy music discovery while compensating artists—all without DRM.

Coming Out

Last Monday, all the world was aflutter about AMIE Street. It’s an online music service that does not wrap its music in DRM and employes a unique monetization model that encourages its users to find discover and recommend otherwise unknown music. The big deal on Monday was that AMIE Street signed a deal with “Canada’s leading privately owned record label and artist management company,” Nettwerk Music Group. One of the big name acts under Nettwerk’s label is (are?) the Barenaked Ladies. The big-name group instantly added credibility to the new site and traffic swarms ensued; AMIE Street quickly buckled under the server load, but recovered by the end of the day.

What’s so Special about AMIE Street?

So, what sets AMIE Street apart from iTunes or a service like eMusic, which also provides DRM-free indy-artist music? The community atmosphere and REC incentive system. Here’s the rundown of how things work…

1. Artists/Labels upload their songs to AMIE Street and receive 70% of the sales proceeds. AMIE Street just sells the songs, without taking exclusive rights from the creators/owners.

2. All songs start at a cost of $0 (free! I know, kinda weird, but stay with me). As more people buy the song, the value of the song increases, to a maximum of $0.98 (once cent less than an iTunes song). The idea is that initially, songs uploaded to the site will be promotional. As more users buy, there’s more demand and this drives up the value of each track. There’s a calculator here for artists or users who want to try to understand this better.

3. Users can sign up and add pre-set amounts of credit to the account (credit is set in “cents” making it feel more like actual money as compared to the point systems of other music stores). Along with this credit, comes a limited number of “RECs” which is a “unit of recommendation” that the user can assign to a particular song she likes and has purchased. The system uses RECs as a method of promotion in an interesting way: not only can others see what songs each other RECs, but the AMIE Street system incentivizes users to seek out songs that they believe will be popular by giving them a cut of the song’s success. If a user RECs a song when its cost is free, and the song becomes so popular that it eventually maxes out at $0.98, AMIE Street will credit the user’s account with $0.98. Otherwise, AMIE Street will give the recommender 1/2 the difference between the value of the song when a user REC’d it and the songs highest value. So if I REC a song at $0.10, and it eventually earns $0.60, then AMIE Street credits me with $0.20, and I can “cash-out” that credit at any time during the increasing price.

4. A definite sense of community, in a combination of Digg and MySpace sort of way. The MySpace aspect comes from adding friends, chatting with them via a little Meebo embedded widget; the Digg side comes from promoting and getting others to promote songs to the top. The difference is that the incentives are a little more tangible than either of the others.

Getting Around

AMIE Street is all web-based. Users can browse artists songs on their own, other songs users have bought, other songs users have REC’d, etc. Users can listen to samples of songs in a pop-up audio-player browser window, which can also be used as a streaming-radio-type player, that you can listen to personal presets of songs you bought, recommended, and that friends have recommended. You can also listen to the newest songs that have been uploaded to AMIE Street, as well as genre-based stations. The genre-based channels are however only song samples, not the full versions of the songs (but the lengths of those samples, from my experience, have typically been longer than the iTunes 30 second standard). Users can buy songs directly from the pop-up window, just by clicking the buy button next to the song’s name. The pop-up audio-player window can also be embedded into your own website or blog, to give others something to listen to while they browse your own site, I suppose (see below).

When users buy songs they show up in the “My Purchased Songs” menu, and songs can then be downloaded by track (as an mp3) or multiple tracks (as a zip file of mp3s). The mp3s are formatted various bit rates—one I bought was at 160 kbps and another was at 192 kbps. Depending upon the track you by, the ID3 tag may be a little lacking. That’s Cool by Adam and the Couch Potatoes, for example, didn’t have album art, date, album artist, or composer listed, but tracks from the Barenaked Ladies had more info provided, so it may be up to the artist as to whether that info is filled in on a track-by-track basis. Once you download the songs, drag them to your favorite music app, mine is iTunes, and they they’re imported just like any other mp3 file.

Conclusion

I really liked this new experience of an incentivized community model provided by AMIE Street. In my day job, we’re often talking about how the music industry has to compete with free downloads. I think the pricing structure (providing a quality product at a reasonable price) and the REC system really speaks to this in a new way. What they’re doing is incentivizing early adopters, when typically, early adopters are used to paying more. And like Digg, it also allows users to be rain-makers as they gain more “street cred,” by promoting artists that gain value. This is interesting because it speaks to the usefulness of the traditional role of the record labels—which beyond distribution is promotion and hype of an artist. I think this system shows that users can be promoters, and that both the artist and the promoter can be compensated for it. It also shows that all songs don’t have to be over-priced, can even be free, and prices don’t have to stay the same all the time.

AMIE Street is aimed at the indy artist, but would this system work for a label-recorded artist? Sure. Assuming it’s a popular artist, like the Barenaked Ladies, their music is going to sky rocket to $0.98 immediately. Those users that get their RECs in when the big artists are still listed at 0 are going to earn credit to buy more music down the road. Its a system that invests in itself, which I think is really interesting too.

If there’s one thing I would complain about, besides the obvious server growing pains the site is currently having (which they seem to quickly be sorting out), is that it’s a web-only service. It may be fine for me or you, but that extra step of having to load music downloads into an iTunes like app may be too complicated for some. Whether or not it’s easy enough for the users, to me AIME Street is screaming for an iTunes like all-in-one app, where you can browse the store, listen and organize your library, and chat with friends, all in one easy to use application. Maybe that’s down the road for AMIE Street, and since they’re just using unprotected mp3s, there’s no reason that app couldn’t sync with everyone’s favorite mp3 player, the iPod.

Regardless, AMIE Street is a site you can get lost in for days and discover new music. You should definitely check it out.

Let’s say you’re serious about kicking Microsoft Office off of your Mac. Getting rid of something like Microsoft Entourage can leave a void that is not easily filled. Whereas Microsoft offers an integrated, all-in-one solution with Entourage, Apple gives you a three-pronged approach. Replacing Entourage requires Address Book, iCal, and Mail. Now, these programs are simple to use, and with creative arranging the three applications can be placed on your desktop for simultaneous viewing.

Maybe you’re not a fan of having three applications open. Maybe you like having everything in one window. What are the available personal information managers (PIMs) software out there? This list is not exhaustive, it’s just the best I could get using Google.

Chandler 0.1 by OSAF
First off, I tried out Chandler from OSAF. It is a free alternative to Entourage and looks pretty good. It runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. Inputting data is similar to iCal — however, to add a new item, you must use the “Item” menu option. It is not under the “File” option (I’m trained to go the “File” option). I had some trouble using the product and could not figure out a simple way to display a simple calendar in month view instead of a list view of tasks. I am sure that with patience, the month view is achievable, but I tested a bunch of these PIMs so I couldn’t spend that much time on it.

SimpleDays by TTP Software
Here’s what I know about SimpleDays. It is $15, is PowerPC-based (there is no Universal version) and I couldn’t get it to load on my Intel Core Duo iMac.

Now Up To Date & Contact by Now Software.
Now Software does not have an integrated PIM solution just yet. Now has two different apps — “Now Up To Date” and “Contact.”

Now Up To Date 5
Now Up to Date (“NUTD”) is the calendar program from Now. Visually, NUTD is very cool and has a more modern Mac OS X look. No brushed metal look here and plenty of Web 2.0-ish rounded corners. Now Up To Date shows information cleanly and clearly (unlike Chandler). Creating a new event can be done similar to selecting something in imaging software (the mouse cursor becomes a crosshair). Times are denoted with numbers and tick marks.

There is no drawer to show detailed information about an appointment like iCal. A double click reveals all the information. NUTD includes a year view where you can look at the entire year at a glance. This feature has limited utility. Clicking a certain date will take you to that date. I do not think iCal has this option. This program also lets you handle many calendars at once and can organize calendars from many people.

This program makes iCal look like a toy.

Now Contact
Very professional look. You can add keywords, attach notes, attach documents, urls to your contacts. It also supports different Contact files for separate contact lists. One of the most interesting features of Now Contact is its “Web Services” feature. If you take a look at a particular contact, you can click “Web Services” and find nearby places to that particular contact. As an example, if you were going to take a prospective client out to dinner, you could click “Web Services” and click the “Find a Restaurant” option. Your web browser will open up displaying Google maps with restaurants near the address of your contact. Now Contact is vastly superior to Address Book.

These two applications are expensive at $129.95 but are like the “Pro” version of the Apple apps iCal and Address Book. There is no Mail software.

Scrybe by iscrybe.com
I haven’t been able to get my hands on this new PIM, but I took a look at their promo video. Scrybe is an online calendar web application that you can use offline and also syncs when you get online. Clicking on a day makes the the day get larger, the rest of the calendar smaller — it looks kind of like Expose for your days. It has the ability to drag and drop appointments Its layout is similar to Microsoft Outlook.

Scrybe also displays time zone information. It will let you know what time it is depending on contact information for a contact. Additionally, you can turn on a “Secondary Timezone” that puts another list of times on the left of your window in case you work with someone in another time zone often.

Scybe has a feature they call “Thought Pad.” If you find something online, Scybe lets you add things with bookmarklets. Your clippings are placed into a newspaper layout. You can scroll through pages of this newspaper. On the bottom of the screen is a “thought stream” which shows the page you are viewing in context, as in Scrybe shows you the previous, current, and next pages in thumbnails.

Also, there is “PaperSync.” Scrybe can print easily foldable booklets of your calendar similar to the hipster PDA.

Daylite by MarketCircle, Inc.
Daylite is visually very similar to Entourage. However, it doesn’t do e-mail. It is very easy to use and is what Chandler wants to be. It also can deal with group calendars and has a nicely designed contact data display.

Daylite also has a project view which can show a “Pipeline” of your events. If you have a project that has steps, Daylite can display which steps have been completed, which step you are currently working on and your future steps. It hooks together with Apple Mail and its calendar program.

It’s pretty pricey at $189.00, but Daylite looks to be super-powerful and may deserve a feature article on its own. It does so many things, it may be easier for you to watch the video over at MarketCircle.com. Here’s the link. Leo Laporte talks about the program on Call For Help.

Downsize by Stunt Software, now… what can I tell you about this clever little application? Well, so that I could give you a really good insight into what it offers, I have been using it for the past month. You may well have noticed that all of the images on the Geekanoids site changed. They now all have borders, with rounded edges and a nice subtle shadow, a nice uniform look… all courtesy of Downsize.

The application window is just so easy to get to grips with. On the left hand side you select the source of your images, this can be from iPhoto, a particular folder for batch processing, or you can just drag a single image into Downsize. You can also set a destination folder for your finished images. The right hand panel consists of three tabs, resize, watermark and frame, each determining how your image will look.

In the ‘Resize’ tab you set the maximum width and/or height that you want your finished image to be. You can also choose a sharp or smooth quality and a compression quality. Just using these settings alone give you a useful way of resizing your images quickly and easily, but there’s more…

The ‘Watermark’ tab allows you to add either a piece of text or an image file to the images you are processing. You can control the placement of the watermark, the opacity and the distance that it will be from the edge of your image. This is a great way of adding some copyright protection to your files. Again, this is so well implemented, and a very useful feature.

The last set of features are found in the ‘Frame’ tab. This is where I played to get the settings I liked for the Geekanoids images. You can add a frame to your images, with adjustments for thickness and colour. Rounded corners are easy, with a slider control to adjust the corner radius. You can even alter the background colour of your images. Shadows are also controlled in this tab, where you can tweak blur, distance, opacity and the angle of the shadow. When all you settings are made, a simple click of the ‘Process Images’ button and Downsize springs into action.

There are many applications available for OS X, but the ones that count are those that make your day-to-day tasks easier, and Downsize is one of those applications. It found its way into my dock for this review and it will remain there, now an integral part of my workflow. The only minor omission is that you cannot save your settings, so if you want to change them for a different project it is important to make notes beforehand. I mentioned this to Stunt Software and they acknowledged that the ability to save settings is in the pipeline and will appear in a future version.
Downsize really is the best image processor that I have found, not only is it quick, but also very easy to set-up, with just the right amount of features. The fact that it is only $19.95 makes it a total bargain.

Product: Downsize
Price: $19.95 (free to try)
Supplied by: Stunt Software
Contact: info@stuntsoftware.com

I just saw this cool little app over on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and tried it out. Desky is a little application that makes it super easy to change your Mac’s desktop in the Finder. All without having to take the usual route of going into the System Preferences. I love simple little apps like this, especially when they work unobtrusively, and Desky does. What makes Desky “click” for me is that you have the choice to place it in the Dock, Finder sidebar, or the Finder toolbar (which is how I have it set up). Then it sits there ready and waiting for you to want to change your desktop background. Once that mood finally strikes, simple drag an image file onto Desky and presto-changeo, you have a new desktop beaming back at you. Sweet! Well worth the asking price, which is free.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

For the past few days I’ve been playing around with the social site twitter.com. It’s an oddball kind of thing. The idea is to post little snippets of what you’re doing or thinking.

Then, anyone can subscribe to your “twitters” and follow what you’re up to. And you can subscribe to others’. It has hundreds (thousands?) of regular, everyday people twittering about their days. But it also has a fascinating smattering of tech celebrities.

I was turned onto to it by MacBreak Weekly regulars Merlin Mann and Leo Laporte (I’m following their twitters, sadly they’re not following mine).

There are many other tech celebs, too. There’s someone claiming to be Steve Jobs, and two people claiming to be Woz (there’s even a slight chance that one of them is real).

You can follow people’s twitters on the twitter.com website. But most people set it up to have them sent as text msgs to their phones, other mobile devices, or to their computer IM client. You can post twitters from each of those too.

The Macintosh connection here is an excellent twitter “client” called Twitterific. It’s an app that runs in the background, and pops up anytime one of your “friends” makes a comment. You can also use it to post your own twitters. It adds an item to the right side of your menubar, so you can easily open its window when the spirit moves you to tell the world that you’re headed out for a dentist appointment.

Anyway, the whole thing is oddly addictive. It’s a new way to be part of a distributed community.

If you decide to give it a try, put your twitter name in the comments, and I’ll add you to my list. And if you want to add me as a twitter friend my name is jackhodgson.

One of the coolest apps that sets the iPhone apart from any other mobile phone is visual voicemail, which displays who left you a message and allows you to listen to each in any order. It’s a new way to answer your mobile phone voicemails, but now you can do the same on your Mac with the CallWave Visual Voicemail widget.

Setup on your Mac and Mobile Phone

CallWave has setup this free service to allow you to receive your mobile voicemail on your computer. Just download the Apple widget (Yahoo! Widget and a Vista Gadget users can play too) to your Mac, install it in the usual way. Then open your Dashboard and click on the CallWave Visual Voicemail widget to set it up.

The widget will ask you for your mobile phone number, your email address, and to create a PIN. It will then ask you to choose your mobile network provider (mine is Cingular) and give you instructions for setting up your mobile phone to work with the CallWave voicemail service.

What’s happening here is that you’re reprogramming your phone to use a different voicemail service, instead of the one originally provided by your mobile provider. What that means is that when someone calls me and leaves a message, it will be through CallWave instead of Cingular. When using the system, the first time you access your voicemail on your mobile phone, you’ll go to CallWave’s service, and have you create a new voicemail greeting. After that, everything works as usual.

Oh, and if you just want to try out CallWave, uninstallation is as easy as installation, and the widget gives you precise instructions on how to do it.

Using Visual Voicemail

After setup, when someone calls and leaves you a voicemail, you’ll see it pop-up in the widget’s list. The new message will list the person’s name (if it can be identified from the caller ID), the date and time when they called, and the length of the call. The widget gives you the opportunity to “tag” or identify the call properly with a name and the kind of number it is (home, work, cell, and unknown).

Clicking on the little play button streams the audio of the message thru the widget. I’m still trying to track down if the audio files are saved locally on my Mac, but if they are, I haven’t found the files yet.

You can delete each message from the widget as easily as closing a tab in your favorite browser, by clicking on the “X”. If you delete a message the traditional way, via your mobile phone, the message eventually de-lists itself from the widget.

Costs and Parting Thoughts

CallWave offers this service via the widget (or via email) for free. Via their website’s FAQ, they make it clear they don’t intend to charge for this basic service, but they do have other more advanced features (including call screening and toll-free telephone support) for which they will gladly charge you.

I only have a few gripes with this app. The first deals with security and notification—CallWave could to a lot more to explain what’s going on and assure the user that the service is secure; the thought of my private voicemails floating around the Internet is off-putting, to put it mildly. I’m not saying that it’s insecure, I’m just saying that it’s not clear from CallWave’s website. The second deals with the caller identification—since I’m using my Mac, it would be nice to have this information pulled from the Address Book, instead of CallWave’s own database. Maybe for ver. 2.0 of the widget?

I think CallWave’s Visual Voicemail service is significant for a few reasons:

1. It’s a pretty cool VOIP-like service provided through your mobile phone.

2. It provides a competitive and compelling service to the traditional mobile service providers’ voicemail.

3. It makes you wonder if this is how Cingular will be providing the visual voicemail service to the iPhone.

4. It also makes you wonder if 3rd parties like CallWave could develop for the iPhone, could they provide a competing service to Cingular’s exclusive “network-only” visual voicemail with Apple’s iPhone.

I seem to be the kind of person who insists on using “Pro apps” despite largely non-professional, or perhaps semi-professional, usage. So, for example, I have a lot of graphics apps though I’m neither a pro designer nor professional photographer, and really, I’m not harming anyone (well, permanently at least) by fiddling outside my core domains, right?

So I guess it’s no surprise that I am totally enamored of Gaucho Software’s Seasonality application, despite the fact that I’m not a true weather geek, and I don’t really know why I might want to be able to see independent graphs of wind speed and direction, and even more, wind direction modelled in two different charting styles.

Seasonality is a gorgeous OS X application, a distinctive Cocoa app that makes people stop, look and ask questions when they walk by a display showing its exotic weather maps, satellite imagery, forecast data, and charts of recent weather in your region.

You can enter multiple locations and Seasonality grabs data from a variety of online weather services to assemble its impressive display for each location. The mapping is zoomable and the maps will display your locales — so you see your hometown on the maps, right near the big metropolitan landmarks. The US data seems most robust, but international data is available for many geographies. Seasonality’s data is typically the same data and information provided by the major online weather sites, but without the surfing required and without the ad presence.

Once you’ve entered a few locations, their data is updated on a user-defined interval, and you can change locations to compare your weather with other weather you care about. How are my friends in San Francisco and London faring today? How much colder is Bangor than Boston this week? How much longer until I actually get a life? (It doesn’t answer that question, actually.) If you’re a more serious weather geek, there are many statistical features to explore in order to support your Fever Pitch-class obsessions.

Seasonality is a standalone Universal application. It might be nice to have a dashboard version of some of these features someday, but it’s easy enough to leave it minimized or just load up when you’re organizing your day or planning an outing. It’s shareware, and you can download and try it out with your favorite locales; non-US users may wish to test their locations to see if the data is robust enough. Registration is $24.95USD for a single user, $29.99USD for a family license good on up to 5 machines.

You might give it a download even if you’re not a meteorologist.

The Nokia N800 internet tablet landed on my desk today, and having previously tested the N770 I was a little excited to see what had changed and/or improved. More importantly, would I now find a use for the device? Last time around I was left mystified as to how useful it would be for my day-to-day use.

Out of the box the design has improved a great deal. Gone are the slab-like looks of the previous incarnation and you can say hello to some smooth curves. The device has a nice contoured back and a pleasant silver finish to the front. The buttons are a bit odd, sort of set off-center and a little non-tactile, but you won’t find this a problem as they are not used too much. The touch screen is the same as before with a glossy finish and very high resolution (800×400). Everything is really colorful, bright, and pin-sharp (more on this later). Around the back of the unit is a small flip out stand, which is great for when you are watching videos. The stand is also useful when you set it on your bedside at night to wake you in the morning. A small hole on the top right side of the unit holds the triangular shape stylus and on the top left side is a click-n-pop-out web camera, which is a nice touch.

Back to the 800×400 pixel widescreen, and you will not be disappointed, unless you are a fussy bugger like me. The backlighting is not very even, with noticeable dark patches down the right hand side. To make up for this shortfall the screen is really nice and sharp with colors that are really vibrant. The clarity of text is pin-sharp, which is great for viewing websites and emails. The coating on the screen is impressive too and seemed to be really scratch resistant. The gloss finish is not what I would say is really high gloss, so reflections are not really a problem. Brightness is adjusted via and on-screen slider and for most of my tests I found the setting to be good around the halfway mark.

The back of the unit has a cover that comes off nice and easily. Underneath this you install the battery and there is also room for one SD memory card up to 2GB in size. Also around the back is the stand, which when not in use fits nice and flush to the unit. Lifting the stand out also reveals the second memory card slot, which again is for an SD card up to 2GB, so the N800 supports a total of 4GB which is pretty impressive. During our tests we used Secure Digital cards supplied by Transcend UK (more on this later). Notice that I did not mention a SIM card slot, well this N800 is no mobile phone, which would have made this a world beating device in my book.

Buttons on the top include one for powering the unit on and off, plus a +/- zoom button, which is great when surfing the internet. There is also a full screen button, which does what you would expect, it hides all other on-screen icons and just shows the web page you are viewing. If you are playing a video back then this same button hides all the Media Player controls and plays the video full-screen.

The main use of the N800 is as a fully connected Bluetooth and Wi-Fi internet communication device. If there is no wireless hotspots around then you will need to connect the N800 via Bluetooth to your mobile phone. Checking your email, looking at internet sites, instant messaging (with GoogleTalk), RSS news reading, and internet based chat (again GoogleTalk) is really where this device excels. I had my email account set up in no time and connected the N800 via my wireless network in about five minutes. Looking at internet sites was also pleasant, with the nice clear high res screen serving up the content in a very nice stable Opera based browser.

Internet based audio chat is also possible with the Gizmo project, which I already use. I downloaded the N800 version and was making calls over my wireless network in no time at all. Gizmo also supports text based chat, so this became my application of choice. Gizmo works in a very similar way to Skype, but for some reason I prefer the latter. The goods news is that Skype is coming to the N800 mid-2007 and I think this will boost sales a great deal.

Playing back some media files was also surprisingly good. MP3 files played back really smoothly, with the built-in speakers doing a good job. Other formats supported include AAC, WAV and WMA. Video playback was really clear, though with some content a little jerky. In defense of the N800, the jerkiness may have been due to some files being encoded with a higher bit-rate than the N800 was designed for. Overall though the playback was more than acceptable, almost on par with the Sony PSP, but not quite as good an experience. I did notice a considerable improvement when playing back video files from the high-speed Transcend SD Card. We had two versions of SD card to test, an 80x and a 150x card. Both performed admirably, with the 150x showing quick save times and helping the N800 deliver the video files with less stutters. Video formats supported include MPEG-1, MPEG-4, AVI, and H.263. Streaming internet radio (M3U and PLS) is also supported and a nice feature, though I could not seem to set internet radio as a wake up alarm, which would have been great. You can also view photos on the device (BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF) and the screen really does a grand job. Remembering that this is not a dedicated image viewer, the quality really will impress.

So, just how useful will someone find the N800? Well, that depends on what your day-to-day activities entail. For me, I am glued to my laptop and wherever I go my laptop follows. I would find that the N800 would be left behind, so it is not for me. If you find that you only attend meetings or do business where you can always use a laptop, then save your pennies.

On a positive note, if you are a business man or find yourself out and about still needing to check your email or fancy making use of VOIP based calls with Gizmo or the forthcoming Skype, then the N800 is a real boon. If you are already into the Skype scene then the N800 could save you a fortune, once this app becomes available. The RSS news reader also allows you to subscribe to your favorite feeds, so you will never miss that latest headlines. On top of all the communication uses, you also get a great MP3 and video player, plus some built-in games, and a community of open source developers making great apps for the device. For USD$399.99 you can buy an N800 direct from Nokia, which is a pretty good price. You really do get a lot for your money. Whether or not you can make use of such a device is up to you, but even if you only use half of them, I would still say it is good value for money.

Product: Nokia N800
Price: USD$399.99
Supplied by: Nokia UK

I have a podcast that includes an interview almost every week. None of those interviews have been done face to face and some of them have not even been done from the same continent as the interviewee since my show is a travel show. I record all of my interviews using Skype. Sometimes I am doing a Skype to Skype connection or sometimes I am using Skype out to call a normal phone number. My hardware setup is a headset microphone (Plantronics) and a laptop. I do not have an external mixing board.

One of the problems I have had is that if I don’t set the sound levels correctly balancing my sound level and the guest’s sound level then I can create a lot of extra work for myself in post production. In the worst case while the guest is speaking I am doing my Darth Vadar breathing because my sound level is two high relative to the guest.

At MacWorld I picked up a new program that helps solve this problem: Call Recorder from ecamm network. Call Recorder installs itself in Skype and allows you to record a Skype connection or call but to put each side of the conversation on a different track. So later on when you are editing the conversation you can change the volume of the two tracks independently.

First the good news. It works and seems to work reliably from my experience with the program so far. It records the conversation to a Quicktime .mov file with two tracks.

Now the bad news. It does work, but will only record two tracks even if you are in a Skype connection with 3 people. Your voice will get recorded on one track and all other users will be recorded on the other track.

If you want to add the audio to a sound editing program like Garageband you have to first split the movie into two different movies (one per track) using an included utility program. Then you will need to convert each of these movies to mp3 or aiff using yet another utility program.

But, if you want a reliable software solution to do dual track recording you might want to check out Call Recorder. The software has a free demo and currently sells for $13.46.

Title: Toast 8 Titanium
Price: $79.99 [after $20 mail-in rebate]
Availability: Now
Publisher: Roxio

Recently we talked about the TiVoDecode Manager which enables Mac users to download television shows recorded on TiVo over the home network. Now Roxio with its latest version of its award winning CD and DVD burning software, Toast 8 Titanium, has decided to try its hand at it. The difference is Roxio is officially endorsed by TiVo to provide this TiVoToGo solution for the Mac.

For this review, I’m only going to focus on the TiVo Transfer side of Toast 8 Titanium, but will take a look at the rest of the application in a later post. If there are specific questions you might have about Toast 8 that I should address in later posts, please leave a comment below.

User Interface

TiVo Transfer is a separate application in suite of applications that comes with Toast 8 Titanium. As you might guess, after entering your TiVo account’s Media Access Key, the application finds all the TiVos on your home network (using Bonjour, I assume), and shows you all the programs you’ve recorded on each. Selecting a show gives you two choices: Start Transfer, which puts the show in a download queue; and Create Auto Transfer, in TiVo speak, is something like a Seasons Pass for downloads which will automatically download shows with the same title that your TiVo records.

The other options that the GUI give you are to view all the shows that you’ve downloaded to your Mac in the TiVo Recordings Library, view the Active Transfers currently flowing to your Mac, and view and remove the Auto Transfers. That’s about it.

How it Works

After downloading a show, double clicking on it from the Library pops up a rebadged and specialized version of the Elgato EyeTV player, dubbed the Toast Video Player. The player works nicely, with a window playing the requested show and a virtual remote control. It works well, and fast-forwards and rewinds quickly. In this application, if you poke around a bit, you’ll find that the saved .tivo video files are MPEG-2 files, with a reported 480×480 resolution. I tried playing the files back in VLC, iTunes, and QuickTime, but the only app they’d play back in was the Toast Video Player.

To get these shows into your iTunes library, playback on your iPod, or playback on external media like a DVD, you’ll need to click on the “Toast It” button from your Tivo Recordings Library and Toast 8 will launch. From there, you can export the video to convert the shows into the appropriate file type for iPod, iTunes, PSP, etc. Perhaps the developers were thinking because of the time it takes download the file alone, some users might not want want to wait longer to encode the file, so they kept the file transfer and the encoding processes separate. It should also be noted here that the maximum resolution TiVo will allow the video to transcode to is 320×240.

Likes and Dislikes

The TiVo Transfer app works really well and is nice to look at. Like the great iLife applications, it seamlessly and without user intervention, uses Bonjour to discover all the TiVos on your network. It uses the same icons your TiVo does, to display the shows that are newly recorded, ones that TiVo recorded based on your individual preferences, ones that are currently being recorded, and those in danger of being deleted. It shows the details of each show, just like your TiVo—episode description, channel, duration, and time recorded. Along with the points noted above, that’s about all TiVo Transfer does on its own.

However, there are a number of features missing and / or limited, that I think an app like this should offer. First off, shows transfer to your Mac in about real-time, so if a show is one hour, it takes about that long to download—no watching the show before it’s complete. Instead of doing the transcoding during the transfer like TiVoDecode Manager, at least two more user-activated steps are required just to get the show into your iTunes library. Toast 8 Titanium, in TiVo’s name, limits the resolution size of the video when exporting. TiVo Transfer is only a one-way transfer app, from TiVo to Mac; too bad the app can’t push videos from Mac to TiVo. An in-app online scheduling interface would have been nice as well.

Wrap-up

The TiVo Transfer app included with Toast 8 Titanium is a great step-forward for Mac users who want the TiVoToGo functionality that PC users have had for some time. It has stiff competition from open-source programmers whose applications already provide Mac users with more functionality than this 1.0 version. I’m hopeful that using the resources available to them, Roxio and TiVo will provide later versions of TiVo Transfer with a feature set that is complete and more innovative.

I find dealing with money boring, but at the same time if I have a spending spree my online banking access is not always bang up to date. This can sometimes cause me a problem, as I have all my fresh shrunk wrap purchases on the table, but don’t know if I have enough left for a steak ‘n’ chips or if I will have to manage with cheese on toast.

This is where Cha-Ching steps up to the mark. This superb money manager from Midnight Apps promises to breathe some fun into managing your money. Well, the title gives it a good start, as do the icons within the app. Everything has a feel good factor.

Most of the time the app is split into a three pane view. The vault on the left gives you quick access to your paid and pending transactions, as well as an account list. Setting up an account is easy, you name it, assign a bank name to it, starting balance, and type of account. You can choose from checking, savings, credit or online. There is even space to enter the URL of the bank, which can then be viewed at any time using the ‘online’ tab, instead of having to go into your internet browser. Within the aptly named ‘Vault’ you can also set-up budget accounts, along with folders and smart folders for organizing and sharing across a network.

Getting my test account ready took me about two minutes, and this is where the fun starts. Entering a withdrawal from my account was really easy, with all the details input through the right hand pane. You also get the option of taking a photograph of the item purchased, which is great fun. I snapped the photo of my DVD purchase using the MacBook’s built-in iSight camera. This could prove useful for companies who may need proof of purchases for insurance purposes.
It is also possible to enter pending transactions for forthcoming expenses, and also if they are repeating you can choose between daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly and yearly repeats. So what started out to look like a simple app, is full of very useful features, but remains easy to use.

I have only just touched the surface so far, so stay with me. At the top of the Cha-Ching application window when in accounts view, there are three tabs. ‘Overview’ is just that, it shows you your latest incoming and outgoing money, as well as upcoming transactions. The ‘Transactions’ tab again shows you a list of what is happening with your hard earned cash, but also provides a third pane showing more details about each entry. This third pane is also where you enter new transactions. The final ‘Online’ tab, which I mentioned earlier is a built-in browser, where you can view your online account. This makes it very easy to cross-reference things, without having to switch ot of Cha-Ching and into Firefox or Safari.

Well, now managing my money is fun again. Cha-Ching is in beta form at the moment (version 0.5) and already it is shaping up very nicely. The only thing I would like to see are some sound effects, like the cha-ching sound when I put money in, and maybe a discouraging arrrgggghhhh sound when I take money out.
Overall, I am really impressed, Cha-Ching offers lots of features, a very clean and easy to use layout, and that all important Mac feel. If you want to manage you money without it seeming like a task, then breathe some fun back into your banking and check out Cha-Ching. A 30 transaction demo is available from the link below, with a single user license costing $14.95.

Product: Cha-Ching
Cost: $14.95
Supplied by: Midnight Apps
Contact: support@chachingapp.com

Things that save me time are always high on my list of priorities. When presented with a device that could turn typed documents into useful pieces of text I was up for taking a good look. The product is the IRISPen Executive, which is a small handheld pen type scanner, with a small scanning head that captures three or four lines of text at a time.

From the offset, the IRISPen may not sound that impressive, but it is the usefulness of this little device that wins me over. More often than not I find myself reading something in a magazine and wanting to quote it in an article I am writing, or perhaps email it to a friend or colleague. Under normal circumstances I would have to type it, or scan it and send as an image. With IRISPen I can slide the scanning head over the text and, voila! The text is transferred into MS Word or my email application (for example). This alone saves me so much time.

The pen itself is very light and compact. It connects to your PC or Mac via a USB connection and after a quick install of the included software you are good to go. The printed Quick Start Guide talks you through the simple installation, followed by calibrating the pen scanner. There is also a proper printed and fully illustrated manual, which is great, as so many products nowadays rely on PDF manuals. This is a nice inclusion.

The pen has two buttons on it that can be assigned to various functions, plus the tip is pressure sensitive, so when you push it onto a page and scroll to start scanning, it senses this automatically. Scanning is simplicity in itself. You position your cursor on-screen where you want the scanned text to appear, then start scanning. The text is pulled straight into the application. It is pretty quick and can handle scanning 3.15-inches per second. Accuracy is excellent. The software claims to recognize up to 1,000 characters per second. I had no way of measuring this, but testing scans from various magazines and books I completed twenty scans. During this test I had only three incorrect words, which were easily corrected.

The software has some great features on top of the simple scanning. Things like the ability to read and retype barcodes, recognition of hand written numbers, and even setting pre-defined characters to be automatically erased or replaced in a document.

Now, I am going to be honest here and let you know my initial impressions before I knew the IRISPen was on its way to me. I thought long and hard about how and why I would recommend such a device. It is not cordless and seemed just to simple to have any real use. Well, what a revelation, the only way I can describe the major selling point of the IRISPen is as follows: If you want a small, lightweight scanner, that will save you hours and hours of retyping material that is already printed, buy one. If you often need to quote things you have read, buy one. If you need a flexible, time saving device, that will not break the bank, buy one. Enough said!

Product: IRISPen Executive
Price: $199.99
Supplied by: I.R.I.S. s.a
Contact: 800-447 4744

When you received your new Mac it included iChat which you could use to connect to AOL’s Instant Messenger service. iChat is a fine application and particularly useful for video chats, but in this article I am going to try and talk you out of using it for normal text based chats and talk you into switching to the free application Adium.

Friend’s List

If you have a number of people that you chat with (I have around 100 people in my buddy list) then I find the Adium a more efficient display. You do give up seeing the current icon for people but most people I know have the same icon day after day. iChat supports groups as does Adium but if you only want to see the people who are online and use groups in iChat you can have all of the friends who are offline moved to a Offline friends group. Adium allows you to group your buddies and also show or not show offline buddies completely independently.

Multiple Services

iChat can connect to AOL and Jabber services (like Google Chat). Adium can also connect to Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, Gadu-Gadu, ICQ, Lotus Sametime, Novell Groupwise, and Zepher. You can also associate that Bob has this Yahoo screename, this AOL screenname, etc. When you connect Bob, you don’t even have to worry about which system is being used to connect to Bob unless you want to. So you are dealing with people in your budding list instead of screennames. You can then make a name for the people to use as an alias so that you don’t have to remember that Bob is really called Qzark2003Hairy on AIM.

Keep Your Secrets

When you use AIM your messages tend to go out across the internet in clear text, unencrypted. If you are chatting about what Kimberly said in Math class this is probably not a problem, but many people these days use AIM and other chat services to chat about their business. Adium can encrypt these messages with much more ease than other chat clients (like Fire) that I have used.

Notification

Adium allows you great freedom over how you get notified with new messages. Want you Mac to speak your messages (hint: this works better if you are not at work chatting about what stupid thing your boss recently said)? Adium can do that.

The other type of notification that Adium supports is Growl. Growl needs to be downloaded separately and installed. But when Growl is installed Adium will automatically detect it and use Growl notifications. If Adium is in the background when you get a new message a small translucent window will pop-up on the screen with the content of that message and then fade away. That is often enough information to know that you don’t need to respond and interrupt what you were working on.

Transcripts

Have you ever had someone send you and instant message that simply said “yes”. Now you know that you must have asked them a question, but it was probably hours ago and you have closed that window and lost the context of the discussion. In addition to keeping transcripts for archival purposes Adium also allows you to see your last conversation with a person whenever you open a new conversation with them. I set this by default to show me what we have been talking about over the last day. That might not be the right setting for you but Adium will let you choose. For someone like me, who increasingly walks into rooms without remembering why I went there, this feature alone would be worth the switch.

I wanted to bring something a little different to my readers, because I felt it would be the right thing to try and entice you away from your screens for a little while. Spending hours in front of your Mac is a fine way to spend your day, but can induce back ache and eye strain if you overdo it. So, why not pick up a copy of ‘How to Get Rich – by Felix Dennis’.

Now, I am not a massive reader, but two things drew me to this book, firstly the title, as I wouldn’t mind a bit (or a lot) of extra money, but secondly the man behind the book. We have all heard of the publication ‘Mac User’ and some of us may have seen ‘Personal Computer World’ on the shelf, well these are just a few titles by Dennis Publishing, founded in 1973 by Felix Dennis. He sold the two magazines and made millions and continues to do so in various ways.

The book is not one of those awful ‘bible’ type books, that lists what you must and mustn’t do, complete with diagrams, rather it is written in a light hearted and frank manner by the man himself. He really drills home why you must not let opportunities pass you by and I found myself engrossed in reading for the first time in years.

“Making money is a knack, a knack that can be acquired. And if someone like me can become rich, then so can you – no matter what your present circumstances. Here is how I did it and what I learned along the way,” writes Felix.

The Fallacy of the Great Idea, strikes home with “Good ideas are like Nike Sports shoes. They may facilitate an athlete who possesses them, but on their own they are nothing but an over-priced pair of plimsolls. Specially adapted plimsolls may be a good idea. But the goal is still to win, and sports shoes don’t win. Athletes do. And yet I have lost count of the number of men and women who have approached me with their ‘great idea’, as if this, in and of itself, was some passport to instant wealth. The idea is not a passport. At most, it is the means of obtaining one.”

I could keep quoting and quoting all day long, this book is just such a great read. Even if you do not want to ‘get rich’ (and believe me, there are those who don’t), the writing is upbeat and it is interesting to learn about the man behind Dennis Publishing, so I highly recommend you give it a try.

Product supplied by Ebury
Retail price: $32.33
ISBN: 0091912652
Pages: 304
Contact: www.eburypublishing.co.uk
Available from: Amazon

The latest build of Parallels Desktop, the Virtual Machine software which allows Intel Macs to run Linux and Windows in a Mac window alongside Mac OS X, has just been released and I’ve been running it all day – so here’s a quick look at it.

For anyone unsure about using Beta software, don’t worry. This is very stable. I’ve been running Photoshop, some video editing software called TMpegEnc and everything worked just great.

If you avidly watch the videos section on Digg.com as much as I do, you know how frustrating it can be when you occasionally come across a video which requires Windows Media Player. And you can guarantee it’s always the video you really want to watch which refuses to work even using the Flip4Mac Quicktime add-on. Before Parallels came along this meant having to either wait for someone to post a converted version somewhere else, or loading the link on your Windows PC (if you have one). Or how about those sites which simply refuse to run in anything other than Internet Explorer, or those which require Windows Java?

It’s such a great convenience now using Parallels to simply paste the link into Firefox on the Windows side, watch the clip and get right back to a proper operating system once you’re done – and now with build 3036 it’s even more seamless because, as with the previous stable version of Parallels, your clipboard is synced to that of Windows. So you copy the link and paste it – but here’s the juicy part.

You no longer have to remember to mangle your hand into Windows awkward shortcut keys, because build 3036 comes with some software on the Windows side which re-maps the keyboard so that the Apple key and option and CTRL keys behave correctly.

The cream on the cake for me though, in build 3036 is being able to hide Windows completely and open Windows applications and Explorer windows right on top of your Mac desktop, so you don’t have to constantly go into and come out of full screen mode, just to save your eyes from having to have that awful bland typical Windows desktop visible when you’re not using it (see screen shot).

If you do run Windows as a visible desktop you can now resize the window as if it where any other Mac application space and the Windows desktop re-sizes as if you’ve adjusted the screen resolution. This is especially handy if you want to use the other great new feature of being able to drag and drop right from Mac OS into Windows and from Windows into Mac OS.

Move a file from your Mac into any Windows Explorer folder and it copies across instantly – which is a really handy thing if you, like me, like to test designs you’re working on in as many different web browsers as you can before going live. It’s also a work around to a bug in Parallels I’m sorry to see hasn’t been addressed yet, where you can’t reliably map your Mac’s shared directory as a network drive in Windows using Samba.

Fingers crossed Parallels tools will soon be available for Linux too, so that this new functionality benefits those of us using Parallels to run Ubuntu as a host environment for various open source video and music editing applications which are proving difficult to port over to Mac OS – such as LMMS.

All in all, if you are still on the fence about Parallels my advice is to get it – it really shows off the power of the Mac OS and has never been easier to use.

Over the years Ambrosia Software has made a number of great games (and utilities) for the Macintosh and the company has done it again with its latest creation Sketchfighter 4000. Ambrosia describes the program this way:

Remember those super-cool space ships you doodled on graph paper in Middle School? Pen strokes furiously waging massive intergalactic battles in History class with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance? Well they have sprung to life in SketchFighter 4000 Alpha!

I know the sketches they are talking about although in my case I drew them on a chalk board and not in my school binder. It is magical to see these sketches come to life. I love the look of the program. I love that when you destroy an enemy it leaves a smudge on the screen as if you had erased the drawing incompletely. I have not mastered the game yet, but look forward to trying.

Some tasks like getting a man to the moon are complicated and the systems needed to accomplish them are complicated. But some things, like keeping track of the things you need to do, are not complicated and the software you need to manage them should also be uncomplicated. ToDo from Omicron Software Systems is just that kind of software, uncomplicated.

The basic functionality of ToDo is simple. Create multiple lists of items. Each item can have a priority from 1-10 or can be marked as done. Lists are kept sorted by priority with different color priority numbers marking high, medium and low priorities. You can quickly re-prioritize or select items using keyboard shortcuts. You can also drag items from one list to another in this clean Cocoa interface. If it did nothing else ToDo would be useful.

But ToDo has just a few more tricks up its sleeve. If you want to see what your top priorities are across all your projects you can click on the ToDo icon on the dock which will display a list. You can use that menu to navigate to the todo items. The menu can be displayed in one of 5 different formats.

You can import your existing todo items from iCal to get started. Registered users (the program is $15 as shareware) can also download “ToDo X to iPod Notes” to synchronize their todo list with their iPod and a script called “Mail to ToDo X” that will allow you to turn an email into a todo item.

One of the programs that I keep on my doc that is very helpful in updating my blog and my podcast with pictures is a simple and free program called ImageWell from Xtralean Software. ImageWell is a simple image editor that lets you resize, annotate, edit, resize and publish images.

Simply drag an image onto the ImageWell icon and it will open up the program’s small main window. This window let’s you rename, resize and publish an image. Images can be published to a folder or a web site. To publish to a web site the web site needs to support FTP or WebDav (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) formats. ImageWell can also publish the image to your .Mac account. When you send the image to your web site the HTML to display that image is added to the clipboard:

<img src="http://chris2x.com/wp-content/test.jpg" width="320" height="240"/>
You can go and paste that code into your blog or other HTML document. If you are adding this picture to a discussion board instead, you can also configure the program to send the bbcode style syntax used by many discussion boards (such as the MacCast forum):

[img]http://chris2x.com/wp-content/test.jpg[/img]

ImageWell will also allow you to edit the image before publishing. You can crop, add text, add comic strip style caption balloons, add arrows or annotations.

ImageWell can also rotate, add shape masks like a heart (not quite as useful for your blog unless you are a 14 year old girl) and/or add a watermark.

ImageWell is not PhotoShop and will not replace it for general purpose photo editing but when you want to quickly publish a photo to your web site and reference it from an HTML document or a discussion board few programs will compete with the ease of use of ImageWell.

Are you the type of person who likes any of the following:

• Tupperware orange peelers,
• the “OpenX” tool for defeating incendiary blister wrap
• a dedicated rice cooker, or maybe
• both a blender and a juicer?

If so, you have the kind of appreciation for specialized tools that will make you like Rogue Amoeba‘s interesting and attractive new Fission utility.

Fission does one set of audio management tasks very, very well: cutting and splitting audio files–including MP3 and AAC files–and then saving the fragments as individual files. One of the big deals about the tool is that when it saves your file fragments, it does so in a lossless save operation, even on such a notoriously “lossy compression” scheme as MP3. It will also easily do fades — to fade audio in or out, blend two clips together in a crossfade, and easily crop sections of an audio file, for example to remove a long silence from a file. It supports AIFF and Apple Lossless files as well as MP3 and AAC, handles stereo or mono files, and supports Intel Macs in a Universal Binary.

Why would you need this? Well, as a specialty tool, it has a small number of specific applications:

• Dividing up audio files such as an entire side of vinyl album tracks recorded in one file,
• Editing podcasts and audio files captured by Rogue Amoeba’s excellent Audio Hijack Pro utility, which captures audio from Skype calls, iChat sessions, etc.
• Removing commercials from audio files, and
• Creating MP3 ringtones excerpted from larger audio files.

These needs are indeed fairly specific, and I suppose you either see the value of a USD$32 single-purpose tool or you don’t. (Fission is also available bundled with Audio Hijack Pro for USD$50). But if you do have the genuine need for Fission, you’re going to love the elegant simplicity of the application, and the thoroughgoing Mac-ness of its user interface.

Here’s a simple example: Track 11 of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Fever To Tell is called Modern Romance, and my CD rip includes the “hidden bonus track” separated by several annoying minutes of silence. I like the bonus track…Karen O chicks out the drum beat with her mouth, the band returns for a little coda, and a slight but enjoyable little pop tune emerges from the mini-wreckage. I like this track, but hate having to grab my iPod and flip past 3 minutes of silence. Fission to the rescue.

Fission has a “smart selection” feature that took a pretty good guess at what I wanted by analyzing the silence between the two songs in the file. By default, it split the difference on the silence between the two tracks, and divided the track down the middle. The next step, then, was to mouse over the silences fore and aft of the new tracks, and select the “cut” command to remove the dead air. A cool, intuitive and easy feature allows you to “scrub” the audio while you’re working in the editor: this means you drag over a selection and hear the audio contained. Use that, along with the easy zoom feature, and you can get as microscopic as you need to be for your audio surgery with a few simple drags and clicks.

Once the file is fully, well, fissured — split into as many pieces as you wish — the Save button figures out what you want. It prompts for a file location and naming convention, and then saves each file fragment, miraculously lossless, into that directory location.

I have, I figure, at least 5 other tools that can do these exact same transformations on audio files, but none of them with the kind of hyper-focused elegance and simplicity of Fission. If you spend any substantial amount of time wrangling with audio and music files, Fission is worth fitting onto your tool belt.

Publisher: Bitcartel
Price: $24.95 | Free Demo

Bitcartel, creators of RadioLover, iRecordMusic, and the Radiotastic dashboard widget, recently released an update to their digital comic book reader/organizer, ComicBookLover 1.2. ComicBookLover is to comic books what the iTunes app is to music.

I didn’t realize it, but comic books are being distributed digitally and online. You can buy 40 years of the X-Men comic books archived in PDF format and saved on a DVD for $39 ($39 for 485 issues, unless I’m missing something, that’s $0.08 a pop). Yes, there are some collections that are distributed via BitTorrent are privately scanned and are likely infringing—but there are also many independent authors and publishers who are selling their wares online for very reasonable prices.

But who wants to read digital comic books in Preview or Adobe Acrobat, let alone organize them just in the Finder? That’s where ComicBookLover comes in. At launch, Mac users will immediately recognize the interface. It has the look and feel of an Apple iLife application like iTunes or iPhoto.

You can import your digital comic books, in the CBZ, CBR, or PDF file formats or even as a folder of images. Once you do that, you’ll see the issues listed much as you would song tracks in iTunes, complete with “album art” generated from the first page of the book. What’s missing from the digital comic book community and/or these file formats is the metadata information, much like the ID3 tag or a service to fill in that metadata like the CDDB. But, if you’re willing to take the time, you can do it yourself and add all the information just like you can in iTunes—even add additional credits and tags to help you search for a particular issue in your collection.

ComicBookLover (or CBL) allows you to create “playlists” of comics or even generate smart playlists based on the metadata you’ve assigned.

page 2 and 3 of Cindi in Space, an educational comic book by University of Texas at Dallas

When viewing an individual comic book, you can view it in a window, page by page, two pages at a time, and Manga view (which appears to be in reverse order). I liked the ability to view the pages by two in full screen mode, which works a lot like a non-automated slide show in iPhoto with controls that float over as you need them when you move the pointer. The Bitcartel website shows how well full-screen mode could work on a dual-screen setup.

If you’re viewing scans of older comic books that might have faded or distorted, CBL has a color correction feature. I tried this on one of the sample comics provide on the Bitcartel website, from 1956 entitled Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, an amazing find. Unfortunately, this feature didn’t quite do the artwork justice, but it might work better depending on the condition of the original scanned image.

Overall, I found ComicBookLover to be a solid and user-friendly application for a kind of content that I hadn’t realized went digital. The only downfall is not the fault of the Bitcartel’s software designers, but of the digital comic book community—because of the lack of metadata associated with each digital file (though the app takes the step of enabling the user to provide this information, albeit manually). Comic books and graphic novels are visually intense and CBL demonstrates that comics lend themselves to more enjoyable reading on a computer screen than say your average text-only book. Because of well-designed apps like ComicBookLover, I wouldn’t be surprised if publishers provided an iTunes-like online store for comic books at some point in the near future.

iLike is a free service that integrates with iTunes that not only helps you discover new music based on your personal tastes, but also can put you in touch with others with similar tastes.

iLike is a service by the folks who brought you Garageband (the website, not the Apple iLife application), a site for indy bands, musicians, and their fans. iLike helps you, the listener, find other like-minded listeners and similar-sounding bands based on your current music library and song plays. I know Adam’s talked about iLike and you’ve written in and provided other examples for similar services, but I thought it would be worth taking a closer look at on the MacCast blog.

The concept is not a new one, but built in iTunes integration (I believe) is. Simply download the “iLike Sidebar for iTunes” (which works on either PC or Mac). Once downloaded to your desktop, double click on the installer and follow the straight-forward directions. Soon, iTunes will launch and relaunch with a new sidebar on the right. I found that this pane actually takes up a fair amount of screen real-estate, but that might just be me and my out-of-date PowerBook.

iLike will scan your music library, play counts for the songs, as well as the songs you’re currently playing and then offer up related songs that the service thinks you might like. Some songs are direct links to the iTunes music store. Some songs are free and legal music downloads by new artists, which are pulled from those artists who have signed up with the Garageband website.

Once you’ve created an account, you can also add iLike friends, which can be generated automatically from others with similar music tastes on the iLike website, or you can bug your friends to join and share their preferences (while creating an account, the iLike service makes it easy to tell your friends about the service). Also during the setup process, to figure out some of your preferences, iLike displays a list of popular artists and asks you to click on the ones you like. After you’ve created an account, the iLike site generates a MySpace-like page for all to see, based on the songs and artists in iTunes and the additional ones you’ve selected. If you’d prefer to keep your musical tastes private, you can do so, or only allow friends to see what you like.

I mainly store my iTunes multimedia on an external drive connected to my Mac mini, so the iLike Sidebar installed on my PowerBook isn’t getting the full sampling of my music tastes, but still, the recommendations work well and help me to find other new artists that I wouldn’t have otherwise discovered. Ah, the Long Tail at work!

I think the iLike concept of promoting new artists based on a listener’s tastes is a good one, and their execution really has the Apple user in mind—it’s easy and well integrated with iTunes.

If you’d like to share your musical tastes (or see my lame ones—don’t judge, it’s not my entire library!), you can find my profile here. Man, I’m asking for it now!

What do you do when you have a lot of little pieces of information: passwords, notes, ideas of what to blog for MacCast, show ideas for your podcast, frequent flyer numbers, receipts, etc. The shoe box under your bed has gotten full and using the Stickies application only gets you so far. One option for managing this collection of information is SOHO Notes from Chronos. SOHO Notes is an updated version of an older program from Chronos called Sticky Brain.

The simplest way to put information into SOHO Notes is to open up the application, choose a folder in your hierarchy and then select new note. You can then find this note again by browsing the hierarchy of folders you have created or by searching for it (very quickly) from the SOHO Notes search icon on the menu bar of your Mac (or using Spotlight). So far so good, but not worth the $40 that this program will cost.

But SOHO Notes will allow you to store and retrieve more than just rich text notes. You can also store bookmarks, web archives, PDFs, images, movies, audio, and other attachments. But, you say, I can already create all of those types of files in the file system and search for them using spotlight. Go ahead say it, I’ll wait.

Here is what SOHO Notes adds:

• The ability to publish to blogs that support the Atom API (e.g. Typepad, Blogger)
• A dock that sits on the right side of your screen in a drawer that can be opened or closed to get pieces of information into or out of SOHO Notes simply
• The ability to sync notes to your iPod and/or Palm
• The ability to set alarms on particular notes
• The ability to sync this information to multiple Macs using a .Mac account
• SOHO Notes can be used as a shared server on your local LAN for a multi-user database
• Notes can be made private to protect them with a password
• Notes can be linked to other related notes
• Notes can be linked to a person or company in your Address Book

SOHO notes is not a perfect solution. It lacks some things I would like in a personal information manager like prioritized lists and integration with the calendar (which Chronos does using a separate package called SOHO Organizer). The interface for linking a note to a person is not intuitive. You open up a Address Book browser and can link or create new notes from that window. But if you need some help getting yourself organized SOHO Notes can be a powerful tool.

So yesterday I went out and bought a Blue, 4GB second generation iPod nano. I am stunned.

The first thing of course was the packaging; dramatic change. The whole thing feels much more finished, much more professional and much more Apple than the really “nice”, but still cardboard, cardboard boxes of the first generation Nanos. The whole thing is encapsulated in a small transparent box which somehow brings to mind the 5th Avenue NYC store. It’s held out by two clasps (top and bottom) from a clear backing which “hides” a fold out cuboid of very silky card, in which the headphones, dock and USB cable reside. Overall the design of the packaging is much smaller (due to it not coming with an iTunes install CD), simple, more elegant, cleaner and more refined.

The Nano itself is wonderful. Harking back to the long gone days of only last year when we all crowded around the iPod mini. The exterior is again a refinement of the era. Rounded sides, white end caps, one piece all aluminum casing… Even the color choices are the same (silver, pink, green and blue). It feels much sturdier than before, much more like it won’t break, dent or squash too easily and the anodized metal doesn’t feel scratchy at all (not that that stops me from being cautious).

In terms of features, it’s fully packed too. Although, I don’t think I will ever use the ever pointless “search feature”. The main thing for me really is volume; the first generation Nano didn’t give good volume. This however does. The new Nano bursts ear drums at a thousand paces, providing the kind of volume at around one third the bar indication that the previous Nano achieved (my 1G was always on max and still I often couldn’t hear it).

Also bundled are the new headphones. I’m not sure if these play a part in the volume increase, but they are certainly more comfortable. While they are ultimately very similar to the original headphones I have been wearing them all day today and my ears are only just starting to hurt; that’s nearly 12 hours as opposed to 12 minutes. I don’t think I will need to buy more headphones for a while at least.

Not the most in depth review, but I will say that overall this is a massive improvement on the original Nano. If you liked the iPod Mini you will be blown away. Great price point, colors, design and features. All that is missing (forever I fear) is the FireWire cable (and of course a couple of small software upgrades). Very impressed, well worth the money and wish they had had the PRODUCT (Red) in stock because that’s what I went in for (couldn’t resist).

This is the personal music player for those who don’t need 2TB of songs at all times. Well done Apple.