Now 1.0 has been released and several performance issues have been fixed. Will have to give it another go and see if it could beat my player of choice.

Anyone interested in a good music player should check it out.

There has always been one torrent software for me and now it is available for the Mac: µTorrent. I think it's the most fastest, simplest and most reliable peer-to-peer app there can be.

µTorrent is in beta stage but I didn't find any problems with it. Downloads seems to be even faster than with it's Windows version and - of course - the user interface is neat and preferences are human-understandable.

If you are wondering what to do with it, you could download a copy of NeoOffice.

Have fun!

Oh, if torrents are jamming up your internet connection, remember to turn DHT (Distributed Hash Table) and Peer Exchange off - works for me every time.

Today I tried to burn a MP3 CD with iTunes for the very first time. I dragged all the albums I wanted to a new playlist. Then I hit the Burn Disc button and waited. Then it said: 56 songs out of 102 songs cannot be burned since they are in wrong format. Well yeah, they are in MP4 format but so what? Why can't it just convert them temporarily into MP3's so it can burn the disc? Turned out it just can't.

So, I had to find a way to manually convert them into MP3's. I wanted to sort the playlist in a way I could easily select all songs that are in wrong format. I hit the secondary mouse button over the playlist's title bar and checked Kind. They all say MPEG Audio Format. Nice. I decided to burn those MP3's first, remove them from the playlist, convert the MP4's into MP3's and burn them to the same CD.

I found a Create MP3 version from Advanced menu. iTunes started to convert the songs. When finished, it kept the MP4 versions so I ended up with duplicate songs! Burning a CD hasn't ever been this hard.

Now I had to select all the MP3's from the list that contained both MP3 and MP4 versions of the same songs. Remember the MPEG Audio Format info that didn't help previously? So I checked Date added from the title bar meny and re-sorted the playlist. I removed all the MP4's from the playlist - and then from the library - and hit the Burn disc button. iTunes ejects my CD and asks for a blank CD. Whoa, this sucks - big time.

Dear Apple, if I want to burn a MP3 CD, could you automatically do all the converting so I don't have to spend 1,5 hours to burn one disc?

Of course you could store all your songs in MP3 format for the first time, but what's the point when there's a newer format available?

How do you burn your MP3 CDs?

Songbird.

Cult of Mac and Webmonkey are wondering if iTunes suck. They're stating that Songbird is worth checking out. And so I did.

I waited for 40 megs of disk image to download and dragged the 160 MB application to my applications folder. 160 megs? It's not that much nowadays, but iTunes takes up "only" 130 megabytes.

To make you comfortable switching from iTunes, Songbird asks if you want to migrate the iTunes library. My 3 gig library imported in few minutes. It even maintained my ratings and play counts, which is nice.

Songbird has quite the same user interface that iTunes has. There's a sidebar with playlists and you can browse library by genre, artist and album. There's actually nothing new to iTunes, except for the back and forward buttons.

Integrated browser

Songbird contains an integrated web browser and I'm wondering why is that. Isn't my Firefox or Safari any good for browsing? It doesn't offer an option to use my favorite browser and it is quite big let down for me. In my opinion the browser could be removed from the package and keep things simple as possible.

Songbird is offering something iTunes user's only dream of: add-ons. Similar to Firefox, you can browse Songbird's site to get user generated add-ons for playback and library management, appearance etc. There's is a quite nice list of add-ons but I didn't find an add-on for controlling the playback from OS X's menu bar, just like with You Control: Tunes available for iTunes.

Songbird takes up approximately 70 megs of system memory while iTunes takes up only 40 megs - so I have to wonder why they claim that iTunes takes up too much system resources.

The best part is that Songbird is completely open source, which iTunes certainly isn't. This means that someday it might be far better than iTunes will ever be. They got it almost right, but I think I'll wait for a while and see how Songbird is developing and have it another go later on. Now I'm staying with my iTunes.

(Updated Oct 22, 2008)

It's yesterdays news, but the new MacBooks are here. I've been waiting for them to arrive for several months. Wait began when my PC laptop's screen started to flicker, hard-drive started to click and applications started to crash. I even got blue screens of death, which I hadn't seen for several months.

I watched how Apple's CEO Steve Jobs walked up on the stage with the same black shirt and the same worn-out oversized jeans that he always wears. He started to talk about the new MacBooks, finally. My wait was over. Or was it?

The new MacBooks ships with new casing, precision aluminum unibody enclosure, they call it. The other improvements contains such as a led-backlit glossy display, buttonless touchpad and a better graphics chipset.

MacBooks are now made out of one solid piece of aluminum, which is supposed to make the laptop more durable and robust. Though, single piece is not entirely correct: casing still contains two major parts that are put together with screws, the top and the bottom. One solid piece? Well…

Led-backlit display is told to reduce power consumption by 30 %, which is always nice.

Glossy screen. It divides user opinions: some users love it with the brighter colors and better contrast, but some users hate it with all the reflections. I'll have to go with the last mentioned ones. We have one laptop with glossy screen and it's almost unusable in direct or almost-direct daylight. Screen has to be perfectly clean and lighting conditions must be close to perfect to suite for my needs.

Buttonless touchpad. Touchpad that is a button. What? Never heard of tap? Tap to click? Anyone? I wonder how much dirt is travelling inside the casing everytime you press the pad. Hope they've taken care of that. Multi-touch gestures are quite nice. Maybe they next announce the five-finger gestures. Seven-finger gestures would be remarkable. Eleven-finger gestures will rock your world.

Nvidia 9400M graphics chipset brings better 3D-graphics. Up to 5 times faster 3D performance. Up to 5 times as much stuff, that I don't need. If I want to play, I'll play with my Xbox 360.

1066 MHz frontside bus. Great. There's more numbers than in the last gen one.

Lack of FireWire connectivity. Stop whining. If you need it, don't buy it. Stick with the old one or get a PC - or even a MacBook Pro.

Not exactly the updates I was waiting for but, really, how much better or revolutionary you can make the MacBook? It still is just a computer - computer with a screen, keyboard and a mouse.

So I was up to purchase my new MacBook. But… Which MacBook to buy? MacBook Pro with a larger screen? Too expensive for my budget. 2,0 GHz or 2,4 GHz MacBook? Or even the last generation white one? Mixed feelings. Can't decide. Help!

For two days I waited and read reviews and other posts about the new machines. Then I made my choice: I ordered the last generation 2,4 GHz Black MacBook. And why?

• It's not revision A - (problems like these are about to be discovered)
• It's few hundred euros cheaper than the new 2,4 GHz model.
• It performed really well in benchmarks compared to the new ones.
• It has better battery life (see battery test)
• It's still a perfectly good piece of Mac.

Next year when they are supposed to update the processors I might get the new one - or not.

I recently set my Dock to hide automatically and instantly I noticed that I'm not able to see if I've received new emails. Altough at most times this ain't a bad thing (for productivity's sake), but when expecting an important email a notification would be nice.

I found a plugin for Mail called Mail.appetizer. Mail.appetizer displays a neat transparent notification of incoming emails. It's currently in beta for Leopard (and Tiger) but I haven't noticed anything special about it.

Try it out.

Before I switched to Mac, I had a PC running with 3 displays. I really got used to having all that screen space and after switching I had only one display again.

Few weeks ago I got bored and put my PC up and running again. Currently I use Synergy to share Mac's keyboard and mouse with the PC, but I've always wondered, if you can move your mouse cursor over the other screen, why can't you move application windows?

I came up with a concept where there would be a software that uses Synergy and perhaps VNC-like features together. This software would trick the Mac believing that it has two displays attached when the other display would actually be a software that transfers Mac's other screen view all over to the PC with the client software.

I really don't know if this would be possible, but if Synergy is, why this couldn't be? You might know something that I don't, share your thoughts.

If you've recently switched from Windows to Mac, you might have noticed that switching applications with cmd+tab doesn't behave like in Windows.

Windows displays all open windows in the taskbar so you could browse through them with hitting alt+tab or clicking the desired taskbar button. Unlike in Windows, Mac swaps applications - not actual windows. If you have for example Mail and few emails opened in separate windows you have to first open up the mail application and then click on the email windows or access them from Window menu. You can also press cmd+shift+´ which is possibly the weirdest key combination ever.

Fantasktik [via Macworld] tries to "correct" this behaviour with bringing a new window menu below the top menu and  bringing OS X's application switching closer to Windows's way of handling it. They actually made the same thumbnail preview that is in Vista. As much as I would like to switch easily between windows, I wouldn't use Fantasktik to take up valuable screen space, I would try to learn the keyboard shortcuts even how difficult it is.

The reason I'm writing about this is that cmd+shift+´ doesn't work in all applications. For example in Terminal you can change terminal window only by cmd + terminal number. The second reason is that the key combination could be a lot easier by default.

Another annoyance is that you can't browse through dialog buttons with hitting tab unless you enable it from System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts by setting the "Full keyboard control" to "All controls" - and even if you do that, it doesn't work in all applications.

You always could use your mouse and you probably have used to this by now but when doing highly repetative tasks even underlined letters in dialog buttons (displaying shortcuts) would be a blessing.

Or is this utter bull's crappings? Do you think the Mac OS X style is better and faster than in Windows? Or do you think that there could be room for improvements? Let me know, thanks!

Password Safe SWT

Some times you have lots of passwords to remember and you need to store them somewhere. Best place for passwords ain't in Post-Its sticked to your screen or written in the corner of your morning magazine. You might think storing passwords in your cell is safe, until someone steals it. Even Excel-sheet with password protection doesn't seem so safe to me.

If you need that extra security maintaining your passwords, try Password Safe SWT, which is a clone of PasswordSafe for Windows.

All your passwords are stored in .psafe-file and are locked with master password and therefore kept relatively safe. You can copy single password to clipboard with two clicks (in Windows with a one doubleclick). You can transfer the .psafe-file to any other computer, so if you are using multiple computers this might come handy.

Altough Password Safe SWT is lacking some security features in relation to Windows version, such like "Lock password on minimize" or "Lock password database on workstation lock" (both grayed out in version 0.6), it is more secure way to store your passwords than any other way.

Dashboard

I remember the day I installed Windows Vista and got to the desktop for the first time. Vista has a dashboard floating around in the desktop displaying widgets such as clock, calendar, outdoor temperature, photos etc. I kept the dashboard there for a whole day until I realized it's using up valuable screen space, closed it and never re-opened.

The day I got my first Mac with Leopard, I did just what everyone else does: clicked on every icon, browsed the hard drive and examined the keyboard. When I hit the Dashboard-button I thought I had seen this before…

Again, there's a clock, calendar, temperature, calculator, address book and few other thingies floating on my screen. This time I thought that it'll be great that there's a calculator which I need quite often. One hour later when I needed the calculator I looked for it from my real desktop (a real physical calculator made out of plastic which has a LED display on it, you know?). I didn't find it, so back to the Mac. I clicked on Finder, Applications and started to look for one. I had already forgotten about the Dashboard.

This is my problem with the widgets: they could be useful, but are they really if I don't remember that they even exist?

Today I accidentally got to Apple's Dashboard Widgets gallery and thought if someone out there made one single widget that could help me to remember the Dashboard. I installed iStat Pro just for fun, PHP Function Reference to speed up PHP function look ups but didn't really find any super-useful widgets. I was still amazingly satisfied.

I just wonder when the day comes I really need to look up a PHP function, I'll most definitely open up my browser… I'm even more certain that the day when I want to see how fast my Mac's fan is spinning, will never come.

Do you use your dashboard? How often you use it? What widgets you have there? Do you actually use every single widget? Or are most widgets there just so you actually have something in your Dashboard?