The other day I needed to run to my local Apple store in Oak Brook, Illinois (The one in Orland Park is not open yet, but I digress) to pick up some A/V cables for the good old iPod and of course drool at all the new Mac stuff.

I have been in a few Apple stores and they are generally set up the same with the high end production software to the left of the register and the games, GarageBand loops, etc to the right.

I was perusing the latest additions to the Mac gaming world and over heard one teenager complain with a friend about the price of a game that is at least two years old, the name of the game I cannot recollect. He stated that the game was two years old, was already in the bargain bin at a local “Big Box” store, and was more than fifty percent cheaper. The question was; “Why should I pay more for something I can get for less?” His friend, who obviously was a Mac owner, looked around the store like a person who had just been publicly humiliated as his friends tone carried throughout the store. The Mac owner quickly retorted that playing on a Mac is better than playing on the PC.

At this point I was pretending to be interested in a foreign language teaching app so as to be discreet and not be seen being nosy. I had to hear the Mac owners reasons, I have my own but thought they would be different.

He said, “They look great with the Mac displays! Nothing looks better than an LCD screen.” He was arguing the case very good so far. “Did you know that the Macs have Intel chips in them?” The friend at this point looked like a deer in the headlights, he obviously didn’t have a clue about the new Macs having not only Intel chips, but Core 2 Duos. “That means you can run Windows, if you really felt the need, and play your PC games.”

I’m not going to say at this point that the friend went right up to the register and bought a Mac, but I will say that he was intrigued. He at least went up to one of the Mac specialists and asked questions about the graphics cards that came with them, and other options that could be had.

He may never own a Mac, but he will at least know why it’s fantastic to play games on the Mac. Think about it this way, the game you are purchasing may be two years old, but it’s has had patches and has had bug fixes that were not done at the very beginning, so in most cases you are getting the best product and not worrying if the program will crash. Because our PC friends have done all the beta testing for the Mac version for us.

Delicious Library US $40

Website: delicious-monster.com

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.
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If you have any interest in Craps then this is your a neat app at a price that won’t make you flinch. “My Craps Game” is great for the beginner and the advanced player. For those that don’t know their way around the table, the game helps you out by giving definition to different types of bets. For those who have played it endlessly, you will feel right at home.

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.

A few months back I started assiting the fine developers over at SpinTriplet in doing bug and beta testing of their revamped and sorely needed Air Traffic Control dashboard widget for Mac OS X 10.4.

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.

Finally, some good news to counter the unfortunate news on the Leopard-front, albeit on the 10.5 Server side of things. I guess beggars can’t be choosers, right?

If you’ve been keeping up with all the new (non-surprise) features of Leopard, you probably have heard about the new iCal Server. It’s an open-source, open-standards server that promises to help users publish, schedule, share, collaborate on events, instead of simply posting and subscribing to events through the iCal client today.

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by James Alguire

I’m reporting this week from the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas (www.nabshow.com), where cool things are happening in the world of video editing and podcasting. NAB hosted it’s second Podcasting Summit, further establishing podcasting as a legitimate and viable content delivery method. Sessions held Saturday and Sunday covered podcasting essentials, encoding tools and techniques, demystifying RSS, distribution strategies and metrics, marketing your podcast, and the legal issues of podcasting. Serious podcasters should consider attending this event next year.

On Sunday, April 15th, at the Venetian Ballroom, at the Venetian Hotel, Apple hosted a special event, basically a keynote presentation followed by a finger food reception. During the keynote given by Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of Applications Product Marketing, Apple announced a brand new product, Final Cut Server and an updated version of Final Cut Pro Studio (FCPS 2). By now there are many web sites commenting on the new products and features, so I’ll just summarize here and provide links to the appropriate pages at Apple’s Web site.

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CNet.com reports:

For once, the rumor mill was right: Apple will be delaying Leopard, the next release of Mac OS X, until October.

The company said in a statement Thursday that because of the push to get the iPhone out by June, it had to pull engineers from the Leopard development effort and reassign them to the iPhone. As a result, Leopard won’t be finalized until later this year, and only a preview version will be available at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

Looks like maybe Apple should have named it after a slower cat.

Apple’s official statement

iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

Editor’s comment: Has Apple been having their water imported from Redmond? Seriously, they couldn’t just use some of their vast cash reserves to hire some additional developers? I guess Steve was really serious about the dropping of the whole computer from the Apple name. I love iPods, the Apple TV, and the iPhone as much as the next Apple fan, but come on. Apple’s roots and the heart of company are in the OS and in the glorious systems we get stuff done on each and everyday. Has Apple lost sight of that in lieu of the consumer success of the iPod? Leopard has already had the longest development time of any OS X update to date. I don’t think Apple is giving us the whole story here. Let’s just hope they don’t pull another play from Microsoft’s rulebook and start ripping announced features out of 10.5 just to try and make their new ship date.

If you’re like me, your desk is a tangle of cables amidst a swarm of hubs and docking boxes. Now Belkins has a solution for at least part of this problem.

Beginning in May, Belkin will be offering a family of desktop USB hubs, and an iPod dock, which go into that round, cable access hole that is cut into many desktops.

The “Front-Access In-Desk USB Hub” fits into a 3-inch access opening. It features a stylish, angled column of four USB ports for easy connection of your digital camera, mouse, or any other USB device.

Belkin also offers in-desk USB hubs which have the ports flush with the surface of the desk. A 3 port unit for the 2-inch access hole, and 4 ports for the 3-inch.

Finally the “In-Desk Dock for iPod” provides a convenient docking port for a wide range of iPod devices.

Each of these Docks supports USB 2, and has a suggested price of US$39.99.

by James Alguire

In the last episode on saving filters and effects I missed one cool option for saving several filters at once. I did mention organizing several related effects into one bin, but Final Cut Pro can do that for you, at least with multiple filters. Simply load the clip with the group of filters to be saved (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: A ciip with several filters loaded in the Viewer Window.

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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.