I recently reviewed music player Songbird that was then in beta phase.
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.
Previously I wrote about whether iTunes suck or not. Conclusion is that it doesn't suck but the MP3 CD burning sucks big 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.
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 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.
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.
TextWrangler
Some tasks require to use a simple text editor that doesn't have all the unimportant Word-like features (font styles, margins, headers, footers etc.). In most cases I don't have to add pictures of my recent holiday trip to mom's, videos complaining that I have a bad hair day or even calculations about my weight gain in previous 6 months. Just text editing, no more than that.
In Windows I used Notetab Light for many years but unfortunately they don't distribute a Mac-version. TextEdit is shipped with OS X and can be used for most tasks but if you need text editing in daily (or even hourly) basis, I really recommend TextWrangler.
TextWrangler has all the features you'll probably need:
Give it a try.
First time I grabbed my mouse to move the cursor on my recently unwrapped Mac, I noticed that the cursor didn't behave like it used to behave in my previous life. Somehow arrow movement just wasn't so accurate, it didn't feel right.
System preferences, I thought, that would save my day. After searching under mouse preferences for some kind of a slider that could allow me to adjust the mouse settings I realized there's no such thing. "Is this what it's going to be? Do I really have to learn how to use a mouse all over again?"
I dropped the mouse and stopped for a while. As in many cases, I might not be the only one suffering from this issue. After some search engine ramble I found a solution.
iMouseFix allows me to adjust mouse acceleration or even disable it. After some testing I turned the acceleration off and got my mouse back nearly as good as it had been for 15 years. I didn't have to re-wrap my Mac and take it back to the store. Greatness.
Ps. If iMouseFix doesn't suit for you, SteerMouse might.
NetNewsWire
Using FeedReader in Windows for a long time I had to find a at least as good RSS reader for Mac. I tried the RSS feature within iMail but it was little too simple for me. I don't want to let my feeds mess around with my emails, work efficiency, you know.
I simply entered "rss reader mac" to Google and after a while I found NewsFire. After one day of "RSS reading" I was pleased with it but somehow it didn't work for me, I still don't know exactly what was wrong but it just didn't.
My all-time favorite Download.com offered me several RSS readers to choose from. One application popped up, NewsGator's NetNewsWire.
After installing I instantly noticed that NetNewsWire's layout is similar to iMail which I hugely like. I imported feeds from FeedReader using a OPML file generated by FeedReader and I was ready to go.
Really nice feature is that by registering as a user reader syncs all my feeds. So if I use the same reader on another Mac my feeds are always up to date. Also a nice feature is that if I open a feed item, NetNewsWire opens up the according website inside the reader and it even displays small thumbnails of all opened items in the sidebar. NetNewsWire started to feel my reader of choice and even more better than FeedReader.
There is only one feature I miss: delete feed items. I like to use RSS readers just like I use my email application. After reading an item I wan't to delete it to get completely rid of it. I don't want the item to appear in my "inbox" no longer, I almost never want to re-read it. Guess I just have to learn how to live with it.
Even though both readers, NewsFire and NetNewsWire, perform the same tasks they are made for, the main reason I chose NetNewsWire over Newsfire was folders: you can place RSS feeds into named folders so I you can categorize all your feeds. Simple but efficient.
Now I've been using NetNewsWire for few weeks and it couldn't be better. Currently NetNewsWire shouts that it has 700 new feed items for me to read - auch, no more spare time, eh?