This week the Geeks interviewed Twitter enthusiast JJProjects. This is one of the few shows I’ve missed in the last few months, but sit back and listen to Dave, Cait and JJ telling you why you need Twitter.
And if that’s not enough twitter for you, here’s the Common Craft segment Twitter in Plain English.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o]
The Geek Hits 80!
This week the Global Geek Podcast releases it’s 80th episode! Wow!
I decided to take this opportunity to talk about the iPhone and iPod Touch SDK releases since I don’t plan on talking about them again in the near future, probably not until WWDC in June. So let’s get down to it.
Some have hailed the iPhone SDK as “the second coming of the Jesus phone“, I see it more as a naturally evolutionary step for a mobile computing platform. What company in today’s world of user-contributed social networks would release a computing platform and limit the ability for developers to create “killer apps” for the device? Nobody. And so Apple released their SDK for the iPhone and the iPod touch last week.
However, Apple’s not giving up control of their devices to the open-source community. They will control the ability for developers to launch new applications to the devices by way of the Apple App Store. Yes, that’s right. You can’t just download your favourite new iPhone gadget, you’ll have to download sanitized “Apple Approved” gadgets. Great. Thanks Steve.
Not all the news is bad, though. Venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers has come forward with a $100 M fund to support the development of new and innovative applications for the next-generation media devices. I’m glad to see some investment that will help non-professional developers get their ideas heard. The firm has also pledged to provide support with business expertise and startup information.
Finally the SDK announcement came coupled with a few others. The biggest among them is that Apple has inked a deal with OS rival Microsoft for the use of it’s ActiveSync technology finally allowing the iPhone to synchronize it’s mail, calendar and contacts applications with Microsoft Exchange. This is a major coup for Apple because one of the major problems preventing the device from gaining widespread acceptance in enterprise environments was the lack of connectivity with the 800-pound gorilla of the office. The next few months will be interesting indeed, particularly if the 3G iPhone drops in June as most expect.
I’ll be sure to have a raft of applications up for the next GGP.
Hey everyone! Once again another episode of the GGP has come out, and I’m bound and determined to get these notes up before I have to start prepping for the next show. 
I only had a couple of resources to review this week partly because of content and partly because of time. This week Cait’s away recovering from surgery so I’m back again to help Dave hold down the fort… hey, it’s almost like I’m a regular co-host! On that note, let’s get down to it.
Neon Tango
The first up this week is a really cool game I found called Neon Tango. This is a top-down shoot ‘em up like so many classic games before it (dating all the way back to Asteroids if you wanna go back that far ). The action is super fast and the soundtrack is amazing! The graphics are all line/vector based, no fancy skins on the objects, but they’re still really really good line and vector-based graphics.
The catch: the $25 price tag for the full version. A three-level playable demo is available from the website, give it a try and consider picking up Neon Tango. ((Even if you don’t want to buy it, download the trial and listen to the soundtrack!))
Switcher Keyboard Shortcut Guide The folks over at My First Mac have put together a keyboard shortcut guide for windows switchers. This is a great resource to learn how to navigate OS X more effectively without having to take your hands off the keyboard. This is an excellent resource for anyone who uses both Macs and PCs or has recently switched from one platform to the other. I learned at least one new shortcut for each platform reading this tutorial.
Give the guide a try: Ultimate Switcher Guide: Windows PC to Mac Keyboard Shortcuts.
This week I tried out a solution to my audio problems with a new headset. Give it a listen and let me know what you think. I am still evaluating other options.
A pretty good show again this week on the Global Geek, despite some technical trouble on my end (which you’ll hear was starting to frustrate me), the Geeks got through the whole show but as usual ran over the one-hour mark. :mrgreen: I’m in a tad bit of a rush this week so the notes are a bit more succinct than normal. Enjoy!
Handbrake
Solutions for <ahem> archiving your DVDs have been covered on occasion on the GGP, and this week I’ve got a great option for those of you running OS X. Handbrake allows you to rip archive a DVD to a digital format that can be stored (and played back) on devices other than a DVD player. Handbrake will allow conversion to more than a half-dozen different file formats.
Download Handbrake.
<
p align=”left”>Houdini Houdini is a simple application that allows you to simply manage hidden files and folders. If you need to hide files or documents from someone else who is not overly technical Houdini can help (though I don’t recommend using hidden files as a security mechanism, but that’s a rant for another post). Through a simple GUI you can manage your hidden files and folders and change the from hidden to visible on command.
Give Houdini a try for basic hidden folder management.
<
p align=”left”>PTHVolume Finally this week a menu-bar add-on for controlling the volume of your various audio outputs independently. This application is restricted to OS X 10.5 (Leopard), but does work pretty well. It provides an extra level of control over a system-level function which is something that Apple doesn’t often provide out of the box.
For a wee bit more control over volume, download PTHVolume.
Join Dave and I again this coming week for the next installment of the GGP.
Calling all Podcasters!
Regular listeners to the Global Geek Podcast will know that the microphone I use for my segments isn’t the greatest. To be truthful, it’s a four-year old cheapie that I bought at London Drugs back when I used to actually play games. :wink:
So I’m now on the lookout for a replacement… the question is what to get? I’ve been using this headset-based version for some time now, but I’d really like to get something with decent quality. I know Dave has a higher-end setup with a mixer and stuff because he needs to edit the show together. While I don’t think I need to go quite to that level (yet), I haven’t ruled out the idea of a good, standalone USB mic.
I’d like to come to a decision in the next couple of days and try to pick up a newmic before we record this week’s show. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Dave’s choices in naming episodes not withstanding, we had a great show again this week. I joined the geeks for the latest round of the Global Geek Podcast.
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.
Another week and another GGP. We had an absolute blast on this week’s show. So on with this week’s collection of Mac Freebies:
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.
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.
Time once again for another Global Geek Podcast, and with it another edition of the GGP Mac Lab update. I’ll be your lovable host for the four minute segment, so with no further ado on to the geekery:
iTimeMachine
First up this week is iTimeMachine. This application allows you to connect your computer to network disks to perform TimeMachine backups. Even with the announcement that Steve Jobs made at MacWorld about the new TimeCapsule, there are still some advantages to using an app like iTimeMachine.
Obviously, the freeware application is a good deal cheaper than the $500 1TB TimeCapsule, particularly if you already have the drive. The other huge advantage is that iTimeMachine also allows the use of AirDisks, something that isn’t currently supported even by TimeCapsule.
iTimeMachine is a simple one-button application that works as advertised. Definitely something to try out if you’ve got a spot in your house to stick one of those 1.5TB MyBook drives… 
Twhirl
Twhirl is a Twitter client that runs on the Mac, as well as Windows and Linux. The cross-platform nature comes from it’s use of the Adobe Air framework. Air provides a simple mechanism for installing and setting up the application.
The biggest selling point for Twhirl is it’s ability to handle multiple twitter accounts. This really sets it appart from its peers like twitteriffic. Twhirl uses the Adobe Air Beta 3 platform.
LeopardMod
LeopardMod allows you to tweak settings in OS X that aren’t readily changeable by other means. For the most part it’s a really nice UI to handle command-line plist changes (like this).
There are over a dozen different settings that this application can change. It will allow you to tweak settings in Safari, the Dock, the Menubar and more.
And if you hadn’t figured it out yet, LeopardMod only works with OS X 10.5 “Leopard”.
Caffeine
Caffeine is kinda like a double-shot of espresso for your Mac. When using this program you’ll never again have your screen blank out while you’re giving a presentation (or staring at something).
This application allows you to disable power-management features for your Mac by overriding the default settings and preventing the computer from going to sleep.
The application can be run manually, or set to auto-start in your menu-bar (getting crowded by now if you’ve installed all my great Mac freebies… lol). The menubar icon can be clicked to toggle between normal, and “caffeine” modes.
Hey everyone!
I was able to meet up with the geeks to join them for the recording of the 74th edition of the GGP. We covered a ton of stuff in this week’s show, and as promised here’s the details for this week’s Mac Lab Update.
Net News Wire This was huge news this week. With NewsGator releasing all of it’s personal products as free downloads (FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and a few others) they have taken a huge step towards monopolizing the RSS agregation client market. As regular listeners of the GGP already know, Dave is a bit of an RSS afficianado and he highly recommended I check out this app as soon as it became available.
So on Thursday I downloaded and installed it, and gave it a run through it’s paces. Though it caused me a few headaches as it imported the sixty or so feeds that I had in my Google Reader OPML file, over the next few hours it became less finicky and seems to be working as advertised now.
Using a client instead of a web interface is often a more visually rewarding experience, and NNW doesn’t disappoint in this department. The UI is clean and easy to use, and there are enough options available to make organizing and browsing the articles in your feed a breeze.
Net News Wire is (now) a free application.
MAMP This item came to us from GGP listener Eric Searle. MAMP (Macintosh, Apache, MySQL & PHP) is the OS X implementation of the classic open-source development stack LAMP (Linux).
MAMP is a one-stop shop that brings the Mac usability experience to open-source development. Though it’s possible to install and configure all of these components from source code as is done on other systems, the MAMP package provides a quick and easy way to get a PHP development environment running on your Mac.
The open-source MAMP stack, are free applications.
gDisk gDisk is an OS X utility that gives you the ability to mount a drive to your system that will save files to your GMail account. This is a great way to move relatively small files between different computers or locations, with a backup copy stored in your GMail account.
It’s a simple utility that does exactly what it claims.
gDisk is a free application.
Time for another Mac Lab update, this week for GGP #72.
FolderSplitter The first application this week is FolderSplitter written by Micheal over at QTSync.com.
FolderSplitter allows you to split one large folder into several smaller ones. It’s ideal for backups where you’re going to burn files to CDs/DVDs or media where storage space is limited.
Multiple splitting options:
It’s a fairly simple application that does what it claims. The only thing I think I’d have changed is size presets for CDs, DVDs and maybe the business-card CDs (I can never remember how big those are).
FolderSplitter is a free application.
SharpShooter Second on the block is my Killer-App pick for this week. It’s by developer Isaac Wankerl and it’s called SharpShooter.
This is an OS X menu-bar application that is automatically launched any time you use the Cmd-Shift-3 / 4 screen capture commands built into OS X.
SharpShooter does three things, and does them very well: - Preview screenshots - Rename Screenshots - Trash crappy screenshots
The application also has multiple monitor support including compositing (stitching) frames together.
I’ve only had this app for about a week and it has already worked it’s way into my regular-use arsenal. Between all the above features, the auto-start feature and direct integration with the OS X desktop Sharpshooter is a killer app and it’s a free application.
Lastly today three programs I’m dubbing the Sudden Motion Sensor Time-waster three-pack
These should work on any mac system with a sudden motion sensor (macbook, macbook pro, and some ibook variants.) There are also some iPhone rumours, but hell I’m in Canada where we’re not allowed to own and operate the toy of the year legally…
Tunnel (download) Tilt from side to side, don’t hit the walls or you die. - low-res graphics - no sounds - saves your high score
LiquidMac (download) Particle generator, behaves like liquid - tons of adjustable physics - full screen mode - does kinda look like digitized liquid.
MacSaber (download) <yoda>Seen this before, we have.</yoda> - Tilt move the macbook around to get light-saber sounds - sharper movements produce different sounds - don’t DROP your mac - Jedi certification not included.