Apple’s hardware always returns time in UTC, most PCs update the system clock to local time and won’t require a conversion of that time so of course the default Windows settings aren’t really set up for BootCamp (though you’d think the BootCamp installer could correct this…)

The solution, as it turns out, is a simple registry key change to tell Windows that the system’s clock is using UTC time.  One value in one key, that’s all it takes:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlTimeZoneInformation]
"RealTimeIsUniversal"=dword:00000001

BootcampUtcClockFix.reg

Another solution that I found over at superuser.com is to modify OS X to change the time at startup and at shutdown. To me, this seems like more of a hack than the “unsupported” registry key. Windows 7 has been working well under this configuration and has even successfully interpreted the daylight saving time change.

I’ve been looking for a better way to do my Windows dev work at home for a while now.  I’ve explored a few different options including VMs and Mono, none of which suited the needs that I have.

I’m not someone who has to have the latest & greatest computers to get my stuff done. The things I use my computer for don’t require a whole lot of horsepower. Truth be told, the newest computer in the whole house is my three-year-old Macbook. So when it came to deciding which of the three machines in my house were going to get the Windows 7 treatment it wasn’t hard to decide.

Apple has said that they won’t be providing official support for Windows 7 on any of their machines for another few weeks, and when they do it’ll be on a limited subset of their Intel-based machines, and only for customers who’ve shelled out the extra $30 for Snow Leopard. Admittedly I’m not an expert in computer hardware, but I’ve been around the block enough times to know that “not officially supported” doesn’t mean “it won’t work”.

The first thing I tried to do was just clear some disk space and run the boot-camp wizard to set up a partition for Windows. Once again I ran into the problem of OS X not being able to reorganize the files on disk to create a contiguous partition. This doesn’t usually pose a problem with computers that have a disk defragmenting tool but of course OS X has some redimentary defrag technology built-in and thus the notion that “Mac’s don’t need to be defragged”. I call shenanigans.

Once I resigned myself to the fact that the only way I was getting back to the nirvana of dual booting was going to be to re-image the Macbook again, I backed up the system, procured a copy of Snow Leopard and got started with the process. Reinstalling OS X was about the same as with Leopard. A couple of new options but nothing earth shattering. The Windows 7 installation on the was also nothing special. Smooth and straightforward as we’d expect out of any modern OS, but it did move fairly quickly.

If you happen to be reading this before you do your installs there’s one useful piece of information in the 14 page document that Apple says you need to read before trying the scary installation of Windows on your Mac. That would be that the drivers for Windows are located on your Snow Leopard install disk. I spent about 3 hours trying to find drivers.

Even though Apple says Windows 7 isn’t supported, the included drivers on the Snow Leopard disk (intended for use with Vista) work just fine.  Windows also reports that some drivers fail to install properly, but in my case there’s nothing overtly wrong. Network, audio, video keyboards & mice are all working as expected with the exception of multitouch functionality on the trackpad. Since I’ll be using the Windows side of the machine most often when connected to a full desk setup (KVM) I’m not too worried about it.

Marketing and Markets
Both Windows and Mac enthusiasts love to evangelize about their platform of choice.  It’s human nature, we all want people to know how smart we are for choosing the best of what’s available.

As is often the case with most of these “holy wars” the smaller market tends to be more vocal, and more likely to point out all the flaws in its larger competitor.  This is certainly the case with the Apple community.  From the endless stream of “Get a Mac” ads and their YouTube parody counterparts to news releases and security firms touting the reduced target area of not running Windows, those who have and love Macs are always there to tell you that the solution to every problem with MS Windows is to simply get a mac.

And it’s not like Microsoft hasn’t provided a great deal of ammo for the pundits to use in their PR-muskets.  From the troubled launch of Windows Vista to the sad state of what is the Zune to the rather pathetic I’m a PC ad campaign Apple has certainly made up ground on the Redmond-based software giant.  Since 2001, Apple has nearly tripled their market share.  That’s a very significant jump for any company.  But let’s be realistic about what that really means.  The Mac maker has raised its market share from about 3.5% to somewhere around the 10% mark.  Even with Apple’s huge growth over the past 8 years, nine out of every 10 computers sold is running a version of Microsoft Windows.

As a result, Microsoft for their part shrugs off the attacks of the all things “i” maker, often ignoring the marketing onslaught and focusing on its target market: the Enterprise.  Does anyone remember when Apple launched the 3G iPhone, App Store and support for Enterprise features on the iPhone?  Apple certainly hasn’t made great strides into the corporate handheld market, which is something the Microsoft does better, but that Research In Motion’s BlackBerry does extremely well — but that’s a topic for another post.  Microsoft and Apple both make products which can be used in the business markets.  But time after time, companies are continuing to choose the Microsoft platform over that of Apple, a huge percentage of the 90% that Microsoft controls in the operating systems space is thanks to the purchases of large companies.  If one were to examine only consumer purchases of computers, Apple would fare much better, probably somewhere around the 20% mark in parts of the world.

The consumer market is without question Apple’s strongest.  By developing a series of technologies and services that all work well together, it’s quite possible to change over your entire home to run on Apple technology.  From beautifully designed iMacs that can sit proudly in your living room, to powerful Mac Pros that can serve content for the entire household, to AppleTV which can sit atop your HD digital cable box and serve as an all-in-one media centre, to the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule backup consoles to manage your network and keep everything interconnected.  Add to that Apple’s iTunes and Mobile Me services and you’ve got an entire suite of hardware and software that talks to each other almost flawlessly, and really does make your day-to-day computing experience much smoother.  There’s only one catch, the Apple Tax.

The Apple Tax is what those outside the Apple community call the difference between the price of a Mac, and the price of the most closely aligned (in hardware specs at least) PC.  Often times the difference between a Mac and a PC comes in between 20% and 40%, with the Macs invariably being the more expensive machines.  PC enthusiasts will shame people for wasting their money on “pretty hardware” while the Mac community talks about security, ease of use and bundled software.  Over the past three years or so I’ve come to realize that the reason this debate won’t die is that they’re all right.

My Mac Experience

When I first picked up my Macbook one of the things that excited me about the experience was the new-ness of it.  This was a computing platform that I wasn’t particularly familiar with, and since I considered myself to be something of a technology afficionado I figured I should jump in and see what all the fuss was really about.

Within hours I had posted my first blog post and was happily exploring the features of OS X Tiger.  There were a few quirks of the Mac OS that drove (drive) me nuts but overall it was a pretty good experience.  Much more polished than other Windows alternatives (RedHat, Ubuntu, Fedora) that I’d looked at in the past.  One of the strongest points in the Mac’s favour early on was the Unix-style BSD-based terminal.  This is where, for me at least, some of the magic of OS X came into play.

I’ve always been a command-line geek.  There’s no question in my mind that computers function at their best when they don’t need to worry about drawing a “pretty picture” for us lazy humans.  Command-line applications (and for that matter services/daemons) run better, and more often than not, more reliably than applications with elegant user-interfaces.  Being able to explore the world of the UNIX/Linux command line on my shiny new Mac was indeed a revelation for me.  It even led to me porting the wget application to run on Mac OS X.  This wasn’t something that I’d ever consider trying to do for Windows, though it probably isn’t much more difficult.

As time moved forward I really enjoyed my MacBook. Adding new applications to the computer was as simple as downloading them from the Internet and in most cases dragging the application to the Applications folder.  In other cases I would need to double-click an .mpkg file to run the installer.

But I noticed after a while that all the software I’d been downloading for my Mac Lab Rat segments for the old version of the podcast had really cluttered up my system.  Thankfully OS X allows you to clean up all of that mess from the installations with just the drag of a mouse.  Yep, that’s right. To uninstall an application from OS X, you just need to drag it to the trash can.  That’s much simpler than un-installing programs on Windows, right?  Well, that’s not really the whole truth.

First off, you need to understand how a Mac stores applications.  Each application is stored in a package ending with a .app extension.  This is, in reality, just a folder that contains the majority of the files that the application uses.  Dragging “the application” to the trash is really just a way of deleting the application folder.  But with many applications this doesn’t delete the entire application footprint.

There are two folders where applications store the majority of their extra files and these are the /Library and the /Users/<username>/Library folders.  Apple’s own recording application GarageBand stores over 1.5GB of files in these library folders, removing the application using the Drag-and-Drop method will leave those files on your computer.

Malware & Baddies
There’s no question that anyone who buys a Mac today, or has bought one in the past 10 years has experienced but a fraction of a percentage of the malware, spyware, viruses and badness that Windows owners have to deal with on a regular basis.  Apple touts this fact when they promote their Macs as one would expect, and as they should. The lack of these problems on a Mac is a great reason to use the system.  Mac fanboys would have you believe that the Mac Operating System is fundamentally designed to be more secure. They talk about the fact that because you’re less likely to be infected by problems on a Mac, the Mac OS is orders of magnitude more secure than Windows.  But notice nowhere does it say that there are fewer vulnerabilities in OS X than in Windows.

The reality is that with Windows’ huge market share (remember the 90% number we talked about earlier?) they are the 10,000lb gorilla.  When your next biggest competitor makes up less than 10% of the market, it’s clear who will be the target. (For those in the business of building gorilla killin’ helicopters (malware), the real target is King Kong not Nim Chimpsky.)

If you’re writing malware of any kind, you’re typically doing it in one of two ways:

1. Target companies
2. Target the highest number of people possible

The majority of malware authors choose to go with option #2: cast a wide net and see how many fish you can catch.  If your net is set to catch Windows machines, the sheer math of it will get you more infected machines than if you were to target the much smaller Mac market.  That said, with success comes difficulty.  Mac users are starting to see pockets of activity targeting OS X.  Consider the Pwn to Own competitions that security companies have run for the past few years. Invariably, OS X has been compromised at each of them, and in most cases extremely quickly. Modern operating systems are all susceptible to exploits and security holes. Even linux systems are vulnerable to attacks, they simply have the benefit of a large number of people to quickly patch holes and a user community generally less susceptible to getting themselves infected.  OS X is not an invulnerable operating system.

Software – Included and Excluded

It’s often touted that the software included on Mac Systems helps to justify the increased price tag of purchasing these machines. It does help, to be sure. The quality of the included software is quite high, and allows you to manage photos, music & email, make videos, burn movies, and record audio.  What Apple doesn’t want you to know is that there are lots of applications out there for Windows too, some of which may even be bundled with your system when you buy it.  Consistency is Apple’s strongest point. They can use phrases like “iLife comes with every new Mac”.

I’ve used every application that comes with iLife at least once.  The most frequently used applications being iPhoto and GarageBand; unfortunately I’ve not been overly satisfied with either and the only reason I stuck with them is that they were for all intents and purposes free applications.  iPhoto in particular lacked a number of features, the most obvious of which is the ability to organize images into folder hierarchies.  This has been fixed in the latest version, but I don’t feel like paying $69 for something that free apps like Picasa can do for free.

GarageBand has worked out quite well for the most part, but does leave a few things to be desired.  The interface is excellent, making creating podcasts and other recorded audio quick and fairly intuitive.  It becomes obvious fairly quickly though that this product too is targeted at a consumer audience as there are a number of audio manipulation features missing including fine grain control over cutting and pasting audio, and the application crashes with my podcast files once it gets over an hour in length.

While the iLife suite is touted as being partial justification of the increased cost of the Macs, in many cases I’ve abandoned these applications in favour of free applications that I was able to download from the Internet.  I’m in the midst of replacing iPhoto with Picasa and GarageBand with Audacity (which admittedly is missing a bunch of features too, so I’ll probably have to use both).

Coming from a Windows world, I was accustomed to being able to find software online that did what I needed my computer to do, and the vast majority of the time not having to pay for it — and let me be clear, I’m talking SourceForge, not PirateBay.  What I found in coming to the Mac world is that commercial ISVs (independent software vendors) were far more common for home-use applications on the Mac than for Windows.  Translation: If you want it, be prepared to pay for it.  Third-party developers have done a great job of writing software that has a Mac look & feel.  Apple and Microsoft both publish guidelines on best practices for developing software for their respective platforms.  The ISVs that publish software for the Mac do a great job of creating a quality product the only catch of course being that you need to buy the apps.  There is open-source software available on the Mac, but as with the malware developers. the open-source community prefers to stick to platforms where they can get the most eyeballs on their product.

Getting Things Done
This is far and away the most subjective category in my review.  There is no question that I’ve been extremely productive with my MacBook over the past three years.  I’ve written hundreds of blog posts, contributed to my online forums, remotely managed software on my websites, handled email, instant messaging, twitter, virtualization and managed my online life.  The thing is, most of the time I’m not using a Mac specific application to do those tasks.  All of my Internet activity is done using FireFox rather than Apple’s own Safari browser.  The main reason for that is that I find Safari to be a bit clumsy to use, and above all else, I miss the ability to download tons of free plugins and extensions for the browser that make my online life better.

One task where the Mac has a leg up on Windows, conceptually at least, is the fact that it’s built-in command-line interface is based on BSD.  This means that all of the default tools for handling command-line operations in a Unix environment are already present, and the most important of those for me is SSH.  Native command-line support of SSH makes administering my web servers a more seamless task, and despite the fact that it’s command-line in nature, that may be the most Mac-like feature of my Macbook.  I can get this done on windows without much effort as well, but with the Mac, this truly was built-in from the get-go.

Re-Staging Systems
I’m hard on my computers.  I always have been.  Every system I’ve ever owned prior to my MacBook has been re-staged or re-imaged about once per year.  Sometimes this was for OS upgrades, sometimes because it had become slow and unusable, and sometimes because I wanted to try a major configuration change to make the computer more useful to me.  Something that really appealed to me about the Mac from those I’d spoken to prior to purchasing it was the idea that all of this would be gone once I got a mac.  Never would I need to do the dreaded “wipe and reload” operation that I’d become used to in Windows.  The reality is, I’ve re-staged my Macbook about the same number of times (if not more) than I had originally done on Windows.

1. Bought a new Mac
2. Over the course of the first 6-8 months, downloaded every piece of Mac software I could find. Un-installing them left me with a clutter of junk in the “Library folder” for the dozens and dozens of apps I had removed. To clear this up permanently, I re-staged the computer.
3. About 6 months later, I wanted to try out the pre-release version of Boot-Camp that came with OS X 10.4.  Unfortunately after the previous re-installation I had chosen a “case-sensitive” file system — this doesn’t work well with Boot Camp.  I re-staged the computer.
4. When OS X 10.5 came out, I felt somewhat duty-bound to pick up the new release on it’s first day of RTM.  To put this on, I followed my policy with all OS updates (and the advice I had found online) which is to always start clean. I re-staged the computer.
5. I decided a few months later that I wanted to try dual-booting my computer with Windows and OS X 10.5, unfortunately I had filled up my 80 GB hard drive so much that the OS X couldn’t create a decent boot partition.  I re-staged the computer.
6. Several months later I bought a new 320 GB hard drive and promptly proceeded to load it into my Mac.  Since the Boot-camp thing wasn’t really working out anyway I decided this would be a great time to get a fresh start.  I re-staged the computer.

Over the 32 months since I’ve owned the Macbook, I’ve re-staged the machine five times.  That’s about once every 6 months give-or-take.  That’s a bit more often than my Windows machines annual re-load, but I figure two of them were due to my unfamiliarity with the Mac OS.  So three times in three years, I call that a draw.

Conclusion – Will my next computer be a Mac?
After looking at my Mac experience objectively for a couple of months as I’ve written this article on and off, I’ve come to two undeniable truths about how the Mac fits in to my life.

1. The Mac is an outstanding computer, that does nearly everything that I’ve ever needed it to.
2. For me, it isn’t worth the 30-40% premium over a comparable Windows-based notebook.

I really do love my Macbook, and I’m going to find a way to keep it running and in active service until it simply becomes too expensive to maintain (read: need to replace the battery, or a system component out of warranty).  But I also know that my next machine, which will be a replacement for the desktops in my basement will most likely be an off-the-shelf PC.  The vast majority of what I do on my computer is done on the Internet.  The applications I use on my Mac every single day are Firefox, Thunderbird, MSN, TweetDeck, TextPad and the CLI SSH client.  All of those applications are available on every single computer that I’ve ever used.  So when I buy the next system, the only decision for me as far as operating systems go, will be whether I buy Windows, or install the latest LTS edition of Ubuntu.

After the tutorial, I’ve included a list of applications that you can use to make your computing life better.  The list contains free and open-source software from the original developers that you can trust on your newly cleaned system.  I highly recommend reading over the list, and even trying a few of them out on your current system before installing any of your old apps and tools.

Things you’ll need

• Infected (or otherwise underperforming computer)
• OS re-install disks (and product keys!!)
• External hard drive (strongly recommended) -or-
• Backup media (CDs, DVDs)

Step 1: Backup your data

You should already have a backup process in place to keep all of your data secure.  If you do, good for you but that doesn’t mean you can skip this step.  If you have, or have been able to purchase an external hard drive use that to backup the data. It’s much faster, and far more convenient than trying to backup to external media like CDs and DVDs.  Make sure that you take everything you want to have on your new system. Often overlooked folders include your bookmarks (favourites) and desktop.  These won’t be captured in your Documents folder by default.

Step 2: Reinstall your system

This is the part that makes everyone queasy. The “delete everything and re-install” part.  But fear not, it isn’t as daunting as it sounds.  Once all the data has been backed up, put the Windows (or other OS) disk in the drive and reboot the computer.  Once the system comes back up, follow the prompts.

Select the partition to install Windows on.  In most cases, if you want to restore the system the way that it was, you can select the C: drive where the old Windows  install was located.  If you want to get into partitioning strategies that’s for another post.

If you’re in doubt format the drive using the NTFS system. It’s the default for most contemporary Windows systems and will work for 99% of people.  Yes, Mac/Linux fanboys, I realize that it’s a Windows specific file format.  You guys can use HFS+ (Mac) or ext3 (Linux).

Believe it or not that’s the “tricky” part.  Follow the remaining prompts through the text portion, and GUI portion of the setup to choose your username, password, time-zone settings, network settings etc.  These are pretty well all common sense.

Step 3: Patching and Packing

Unless you’ve learned the secrets to Slipstreaming prior to this re-install (in which case you probably don’t need this tutorial) you’ll need to install all the latest updates, patches and service packs for your system.

The majority of these can be installed through the Microsoft Update (Windows Update) site.  The updater can be run from your Start menu, or by pointing a browser at http://update.microsoft.com/.

It’s really important to get these updates in as quickly as possible because typically the CD you’re using to install the system is a couple of years old (particularly with Windows XP disks) and will be missing a ton of important security updates.  You may need to run this process a number of times before it catches everything.  Just continue the process until the update program tells you that there are no further updates available for your system.

Step 4: Re-install your applications

Here we go. Putting back all that was lost.  The first step is to install your heavy hitters installed.  Office, Visual Studio, Adobe Creative Suite — the things that take up Gigabytes of space on the disk.  After that, the smaller things, utilities, tools, games.  Check out the software list at the bottom of this post.

Once everything else is done, install your anti-virus or security software. This may be a controversial decision for most but I base the logic on the following: AV programs make software installation painfully slow.  The chances you’ll be infected while you’re doing the updates are minimal, so save yourself a bunch of time and do this last.

Step 5: Restore your data

Copy back all of the data you backed up in step 1.  This includes your bookmarks (you did back those up, right?), and anything you wanted to keep on your desktop.  Putting these pieces back is the last step to making the system your own again.

Realistically you’re looking at killing a full day with the whole process, depending how much data you have the backup/restore can take a few hours, but the process is pretty straightforward if you stay organized. 

Free software to help you out

Once you’re in the application re-install stage, there are lots of free tools that you can use to get your system working the same, or better than it was before.  The other reason is that these applications are great alternatives to trying to find pirated applications off the Internet.  Here they are, in no particular order:

• 7Zip – an archiving / compression utility supporting a wide range of formats
• ISO Recorder – Write ISO images directly from Windows explorer
• Avast – Free anti-virus application with regular updates
• Paint.NET – Photoshop-like image & graphic editing program
• Firefox – Alternative (?) web browser
• Thuderbird – Email client
• Feed Demon – Powerful full-featured RSS reader & aggregator
• FileZilla – FTP/SFTP/SCP client
• Open Office – Alternative word processor, spreadsheet, presentation & database
• VLC – Media player that supports nearly every format known to mankind
• Evernote – Note taking/keeping application that sync’s with the web
• Notepad++ – Tabbed notepad application
• Visual Studio Express – Free versions of the Microsoft development tools

I hope this guide has proven informative, and will help you to move forward with your computing life.  Bring back that computer that has lost its lustre and make it uber-useful again.

Photo credits: wysz, S Baker on Flickr.

If you’ve ever wanted to have OS X show file extensions for all files, all the time, it’s a very simple process.

1. Click on any finder (or the desktop)
2. Select Preferences from the Finder menu
3. Click on the Advanced button
4. Check off the Show all file extensions box
5. Close the Finder Preferences window

Voila! All is revealed.  Wasn’t that easy?  It probably took you longer to read this than to actually make the change.

New iPod Nanos — No surprise here, at all.  Announced today, shipping sometime between now and Christmas, a return to the slimmer, sleeker design of the iPod nano.  The screen is much larger than the Gen 1 and Gen 2 nanos, and the ipod is now oval shaped (read: won’t sit flat on a table).  It also comes in about a dozen different colours.

“New” iPod Touches — Though not receiving anywere near the revision that the nanos did, the iPod touch now sports new side-mounted volume controls and a small external speaker.  Both of these will make the App-store games much more fun to play.  I’m sad that they’ve chosen not to integrate a microphone (though the exclusion was one of my predictions), the external volume controls will be a very handy new feature.  I wonder how hard they had to convince Jobs to abandon his “no buttons” policy?

Apple & NBC Kiss & Make up — Again, not a big surprise, NBC is returning to the iTunes store.  All your favourite syndicated NBC crap will once again be available in iTunes.  Meh…

iTunes 8 — The next version of iTunes is out, and it sports a fancy new “genius” feature whereby Apple takes a look at your listening habits and makes recommendations.  It’ll also build playlists for you.

iPod Touch / iPhone Software 2.1 — A revision of the software for the two fanciest iThings to hopefully fix the bugs and constant crashing that have plagued the devices (even 1st Gen iPhones / iPod Touches) since the 2.0 and 2.0.1 releases.  I sure as hell hope it’s stable ’cause I’m planning to get a new iPod touch to replace the one that “disappeared” somewhere in the Minneapolis airport.

So there you have it.  5 things that actually did happen, to go along with the 5 that didn’t.

There’s been lots of ideas floated around, so I figured I should jump into the mix now before the news so I can call these predictions of things you definitely WON’T see

The iPod Touch with a built-in microphone and bluetooth — This would harshly cannibalize iPhone sales, particularly given the cost of iPhone data plans.

iTunes Music Subscriptions — People like to own their music. ’nuff said.

iPhone Revisions — Not a chance, with the 3G iPhone barely 3 months old, there’s no way that Apple can justify a revision already.  The backlash from iPhone early adopters last year will be a lesson.

The “MacBook Touch” — Even though a niche of Apple fans would love to see a Mac tablet to compete with all of the Windows based tablets out there, it just doesn’t make up a large enough piece of the overall computer market for Apple to try to carve out a piece.

Beatles Music in the iTunes Catalogue — Despite recent notions from some pundits that the Fab Four’s music will be part of the “Let’s Rock” announcement, there have been far too many false alarms for this to be the case.  Besides, the music is being remastered right now and will probably go through some kind of digital release next year once that’s done.

So there you have it, the five things you definitely won’t see at the Let’s Rock announcement.  Now we can sit back and see what the all things “i” maker will announce later today.

Have a look at the LifeHacker post, and then check out these other two sites for a few more:

• Mac OS X Easter Eggs
• Windows Easter Eggs

LiteIcon
First up this week is FreeMacSoft’s LiteIcon.  This is a great application for helping you manage the system icons on your Mac.  Apple has a tendency to dumb-down everything for their systems hiding the guts behind nicely designed UIs… most of the time.  Icon management is something that they’ve never gotten right.

LiteIcon will allow you to swap out your  icon set for OS X, and more importantly, swap them back to the originals.  The only thing this doesn’t include is icons for you to use.  You could always get some icons from a site like InterfaceLIFT to pimp out your mac.

LiteIcon is a freebie.

Flash Video Downloader 2
The second app for this week is Tesseract Software’s Flash Video Downloader.  This app will allow you to point any website URL to the tool, and it will scan the source code for the page and find any flash video links and it will automatically download the .flv files.

The app works fairly well and allows you to download batches of files at a time, and has some other “batchy” features like a notification beep, or the ability to shut down the computer afterward.

The only catch with this tool is that it won’t allow you to convert the files from the .flv format.  But for a freebie, not too shabby.

VisualHub
It’s been a long time since I did an app that wasn’t a freebie, but in my search for a really good conversion tool I came up empty in the freebie department.

Techspansion’s VisualHub is an app that will take any format in, and push any format out.  There’s support for pretty much every video format on the market including H.264, DV, PSP, AVI, and the ever ellusive FLV.

The only downside is that the app costs about $25… but like the Techspansion dev team says: “justify it by thinking of the cost per frame.”

And that wraps up this weeks Mac updates.  Join us again next time for more mac apps, and more GGP goodness.

iPhoto Batch Image Enhancer
This application gives you the ability to make changes to large batches of your iPhoto images. This is a standalone application and doesn’t integrate into iPhoto, but it is fairly lightweight and runs at a reasonable speed. There are a couple of little quirks that make it so that you really shouldn’t do much else while you run the batch, but it’s a good free option for set-and-forget operations.

Download iPhoto Batch Enhancer from the feroXsoft website.

Oxidizer
Oxidizer provides you the ability to build your own background… but not just any background: A fractal! I’ve always loved fractals, but the majority of the fractal programs out there require you to enter weird commands from the command line, and/or have a masters degree in mathematics. Oxidizer allows slaps on a fairly usable GUI and allows you to build some interesting fractal images.

Oxidizer is offered as an open-source project.

Download Oxidizer.

DockDoctor

DockDoctor is yet another in the series of OS X Leopard “tweaker” apps. This one is geared specifically toward adjusting settings of the Mac OS X dock, and does so from the Dashboard. I’ve covered apps like this in the past, so I won’t spend much time on it. Suffice to say the widget has options for a 2D or 3D dock, and a button to automatically restart the Dock application.

Download DockDoctor from Inner Mind Media.

One of the most popular photo editing programs for Windows has to be Google’s Picasa.  Though it’s not the most full-featured image editing on the market it’s free and great for managing photos and albums, something that isn’t a strength of more full-featured applications like Photoshop and Paint.NET.

On the Mac, the most obvious photo organizer is Apple’s own iPhoto.  iPhoto does a decent job of organizing photos, though it does have its drawbacks and it’s not free.

A free Picasa would not only challenge iPhoto, but would also channel users into using Google’s online service Picasa Web Albums.  One question raised is how this will affect competing photo management services like Photobucket and industry leader Flickr.  Reality is it will probably do little to the market since OS X users make up a relatively small percentage of the software market, but what it will do is make Picasa a true cross-platform tool.

So now I found by way of a bit of surfing (I started with this post from Knightwise) a page on LifeHacker describing just how to accomplish this magical feat.  Truth be told, I did this last year before the Leopard install, but couldn’t remember how I did it.  This post is as much for me (for the next time I have a fresh OS X install) as for the community at large.

1. Open System Preferences (Apple Menu –> System Preferences)
2. Click on Keyboard and Mouse
3. Click on the All Controls radio button at the bottom of the form

Thank God we’ve got that little mess sorted out.

This is in addition to the other little “hidden gem”… Those cute kids in Cupertino thought it would be cute to paint every non-mac computer with the Blue Sceen of Death… funny… Cobalt (seen below) is running Ubuntu 7.10…..

I wonder what other hidden gems might be waiting for me… a working flash player perhaps?

So why, prey tell, would it be any different on the Mac?

Well, it isn’t.  At least not entirely.  When I bought Leopard last week, there were two software updates for me to do when I installed it… a mere 4 hours after its release!  2 updates in four hours?  That has to be some kind of record.

As I found out last night it makes the uploader *very* broken.  You can select files to upload, but once that’s done the uploader simply does nothing.  Sits there like a bumpkin on a log.  One wonders why Adobe didn’t take the time to test this with one or two of the Leopard Betas / Release candidates…

The DS article does mention a partial workaround, but it’s a HACK.  I would caution against even attempting it.  If you need to upload in the meantime, just use the client application and ignore the issue  until Adobe get their act together.

BrazilMAC over on the OSx86Scene forums has posted a tutorial on installing Leopard on your stock PC hardware. I don’t see any way that Apple would release a more standard version of OS X… the fact that it only has to run on Apple hardware is part of what makes it such a stable platform. The original post is from August, but the author has updated it as of launch day (Oct. 26, 2007).

Photo Credit: dalziel_86 on flickr

If you absolutely must know how the new cat handles, and you don’t want to shell out a few hundred dollars for a Mac mini (and you’ve got several hours of download, try, retry, and try again time to spare) then this tutorial may just be what you’re looking for.