Apple screen savers are pretty much just Quartz Compositions (graphics created via Quartz Composer, a node based visual programming language), and, while there are some nice ones that come pre-installed, they get old rather quickly. You could opt to dedicate those idle CPU cycles to an altruistic effort (or just put your system to sleep [...]
Part of Google’s reward for the perpetual servitude of their employees is the ability for them to use up to 20% of their time to make cool stuff. John Skidgel, John Grabowski and Brett Slatkin did just that by creating Google App Engine Launcher for OS X.
Google App Engine is a service created by Google [...]
Adobe Systems released Flash Player 10 beta today with a modest set of enhancements, including:
New 3D Effects that make it much easier to position, rotate and animate 2D objects while retaining full interactivity. Plus, new variable bitrate streaming for video between Adobe Flash Player 10 beta and future releases of Adobe Flash Media Server will [...]
freeridecoding announced the release of version 1.0 of BurnAgain FS, a CD/DVD multisession burning utility for Mac OS X. Their software can re-mount CDs or DVDs as writeable volumes just like a hard disk. This means you can use the Finder to perform all operations on the volume and then burn changes (in ISO 9660 [...]
Congratulations to Nico Kaiser for correctly identifying the subtle change in the PGP security contest! See, it literally pays to read “stodgy” security articles.
Nico received a $20 iTunes gift certificate (since Apple no longer offers $15 e-mail iTunes gift certificates) for his eagle-eye (or ability to run diff or use Changes).
Apple updated their PGP product security key as part of their two-year cycle. The new key is valid up through May 15, 2010 and will eventually be posted to their Protecting Security Information page. The announcement was made on their mailing list which you can subscribe to via mail or RSS.
How To Use The Key
Unlike the [...]
Microsoft has been busy today, releasing security updates, announcing a new service pack and committing to restoring functionality to their Mac office suite.
Yep, It’s Patch Tuesday Again
Microsoft released security bulletin MS08-014 today that contains a patch to a remote code execution vulnerability effecting Microsoft Office 2004 & 2008 for Macintosh. Office 2004 is bumped up to [...]
VMware was not the only pre-release surprise this past week as OpenOffice.org launched a beta of their new 3.0 office productivity suite complete with native OS X GUI support (no need to run X11 anymore!) along with a sizable list of other enhancements and bug fixes. TAB put the suite through a series [...]
My picks for the best program updates and new releases from this past week:
VMware Fusion 2 Beta – this popular virtualization tool adds enhanced graphics & printing capabilities plus more diverse import options
OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta – one of the most comprehensive (only?) open source office suites adds native OS X Aqua support plus many enhancements [...]
VMware announced the latest beta of their flagship Mac virtualization tool on Tuesday and I’ve managed to put it through a number of paces with mostly positive results. All tests were performed on a 2.4GHz MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM running OS X 10.5.2. The VM was my Windows XP SP2 Boot Camp partition.
Video Gone Wild!
When [...]
You’d think by now we’d have see everything when it comes to screen image capture software for OS X. While Apple provides basic functionality out-of-the-box there are a plethora of add-ons that vie for your ⌘-Shift attention. One of the more recent contenders is grabUp, a simple enhancement to ⌘+Shift+4 that takes the selected [...]
From Google Reader to NetNewsWire to Vienna, RSS readers have become somewhat of a commodity, with all of them providing a similar feature set and the same approach to getting your fill of feeds. Then, along comes Dustin MacDonald who – not content with the status quo – cooks up a little application called, simply [...]
PC users have long been able to avoid retail prices and save some money on RAM by hitting Crucial’s PC System Scanner site to analyze their current configuration and have the program give upgrade options (then go to deal sites and really save some $$). Mac users can now do the same thanks to the [...]
Apple posted an update to Safari that – amongst other fixes – patches 4 vulnerabilities in the Windows version and 2 in the OS X version of their flagship browser. One of the Windows issues – CVE-2007-2398 – is especially tricksy: “[the vulnerability allows] a web page to change the contents of the address bar [...]
Evernote, which was once a Windows-only, highly-complex clippings database, has re-invented itself with a new 3.0 beta release that combines a feature-smart client for OS X (& Windows) with creative and handy web & mobile functionality to ensure you never forget anything. I managed to wait in the beta line long enough to get an [...]
Apple has posted Quicktime 7.4.5 to Software Update that includes 11 security fixes, three of which only impact Windows systems. Some of the vulnerabilities can lead to arbitrary code execution (i.e. bad people can run programs on your system) by just tricking you into viewing specially crafted content. While that may seem unlikely to you [...]
This year there are a plethora of options for getting your 2007 U.S. tax returns in on time and without spending all of your refund on software and filing fees. Get an overview of what’s out there and don’t be shy about letting us know what worked for you.
Microsoft made no attempt to hide the fact that they would be dropping support for VisualBasic scripting when they released their new office suite for the Mac. While this has caused some serious angst in corporate environments, the uproar was slightly muted due to the inclusion of pretty decent AppleScript support in all of the [...]
A Tumblr post by Truong Nguyen regarding an alternate ending for “I Am Legend” struck a serious chord in me today, and not just because the the ending is a much better one than they showed in the theater. It demonstrated what is still a glaring gap in the iTunes / Netflix-streaming / Amazon Unbox [...]
Dan Benjamin of The Talk Show fame posted a general inquiry to the Twitterverse on how to disable the Leopard open confirmation dialog that comes up when you attempt to access a recently downloaded file.
This dialog is a one of Leopard’s new security features called “File Quarantine” and is primarily designed to protect users from [...]
