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Filed under: Macintosh

Filed under: News, Windows, Macintosh, Linux

Windows market share reaches new low - 89.6%


Windows Market Share
If you gauged the market share of various operating systems by counting the number of Macs vs PCs you see in the typical urban coffee shop, you'd probably believe that Apple and Microsoft were duking it out like Republicans and Democrats in a close US presidential election.

But the truth of the matter is that Microsoft is the dominant company when it comes to consumer oriented computers. In fact, according to Net Applications, a company that tracks these things, Microsoft had more than 90% of the market share. Until last month, anyway.

In November, 2008, Microsoft's market share dipped to 89.62%. Which is to say, Microsoft's Windows operating systems still dwarf the nearest competitors, Mac OS X and Linux. But a slightly smaller percentage of people who visited web sites tracked by Net Applications in November were using the operating system.

Net Applications reports that OS X has also seen a slight jump in usage, and that Windows Vista use is up while Windows XP use is down. More than 20% of computer users were running Windows Vista for the first time in November.

[via Computer World and Slashdot]

Filed under: Audio, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Freeware, Open Source

Songbird 1.0 released

Songbird 1.0
Just over a month after the first release candidate made its ways to the masses, Songbird 1.0 is available for download. Songbird is an open source music player built on Mozilla code.

The cross-platform music player comes in Mac, Windows, and Linux versions, and can handle playback of most music formats. Like most Mozilla-based software, Songbird supports plugins, including a QuickTime Playback plugin that adds the ability to play music purchased from the iTunes store. There's also a plugin that allows you to sync your music with portable media players including an iPod.

Songbird is much more than a music player. It's also an online music browser. You can visit web sites using the built in browser and automatically stream or download MP3 music from those pages. And thanks to the Last.fm integration, you can get additional information about songs and artists you're playing, or stream related songs from Last.fm.

Filed under: Audio, Fun, Macintosh, Freeware

FluidTunes: when iTunes meets Minority Report


FluidTunes is an app that lets you control iTunes from a webcam, using your hands, head or feet. The main screen looks like CoverFlow, with the image from your camera image lightly visible behind it. You can swipe across the album covers to navigate, or swipe the large forward and back buttons for finer control. Play is at the bottom of the screen, and stop is at the top. It reminds me a lot of the display from Minority Report.

FluidTunes can be a little bit difficult to control. It's quite responsive, but it's easy to hit a few buttons at once, or accidentally scroll past the song you wanted. Also, don't rock out too wildly in front of your camera, or you're liable to change songs with your head. For right now, Fluidtunes is an impressive showpiece, but it's not entirely practical for everyday music browsing.

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Commercial

Get VMware Fusion for as little as $9.99 today only


Twitter does have legitimate uses after all! One is finding sweet deals on some of our favorite software. If you happen to follow @vmwarefusion, you know what I'm talking about.

Team Fusion announced in their updates that today only, December 1, 2008, a copy of VMWare Fusion 2.0 for OSX is available for just $39.99! That's 50% off the regular price! The site has just updated to reflect the special price, though earlier, the promo code CyberMondayDeal needed to be entered to take advantage of the offer.

VMWare has a competitive upgrade offer in effect. If you're an existing Parallels or Virtual PC user, you're eligible for an additional $30 rebate.

The 30-day trial is still available for download as well, but how can you go wrong for $10?

[via TUAW]

Filed under: Video, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware

HandBrake now encodes any video file, not just DVDs

HandBrake
HandBrake is a cross-platform utility for ripping and encoding DVDs in high quality, compressed video formats including XviD and H.264. And the latest version of HandBrake lets you use the powerful application to encode any video file, no DVD required.

There are a handful of other changes as well, including a GUI for the Linux version, improved video quality, and more control over audio tracks. Queued jobs are also saved to your disk so that if Handbrake crashes, you'll be able to recover the list of queued jobs without starting from scratch.

HandBrake 0.9.3 is available for Windows, Linux, and OS X with Intel and PPC versions available for OS X 10.5.

[via TUAW]

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mobile

BitPim: Bluetooth syncing for CDMA phones

BitPim isn't a new app, but I've been using it for quite a while, and I thought I'd share. We write a fair amount about the iPhone here at Download Squad, but some of us are stuck with less-than-smart phones that are over a year old, on CDMA networks. Not that I'm bitter, or anything, but how are you supposed to get data like contacts and ringtones onto (and off of) these things? BitPim!

Bitpim is an an open source app that lets you access your phone's data via Bluetooth. I use it to get custom mp3 ringtones onto my junky Samsung dumbphone, and it works phenomenally well. There's a list of compatible phones on the Bitpim site, but chances are that yours will work. Be aware that Bitpim could potentially mess up your phone, although I haven't any issues with it personally.

Filed under: Macintosh, E-mail, Productivity

Mailplane 2.0: desktop Gmail client now supports Gmail video chat

If you use Gmail on a Mac, you should definitely know about Mailplane. It's basically a really fancy site-specific browser for Gmail, getting Gmail out of your browser tab and adding a lot of features you'd demand in a desktop email client. You can drag and drop attachments and sign in multiple accounts at once, just to name a couple. Plus, a release candidate for Mailplane 2.0 just came out, and it adds 37 new features.

You can do anything in Mailplane that you can do in Gmail, including the new video chat feature. The new gmail themes are also supported, and you can add your own custom stylesheet. It feels strange to use Gmail in a browser again after playing with Mailplane. Customizable keyboard shortcuts, dragging and dropping, and iPhoto integration are just a few of the handy features that make Mailplane a joy to use. It also supports one of my personal favorite things, Growl notifications

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Microsoft, Freeware

Microsoft to replace FolderShare with Windows Live Sync

FolderShare
About three years after acquiring FolderShare, a utility for synchronizing files across multiple computers, Microsoft is retiring the application and plans to replace it with a similar utility called Windows Live Sync. You could make the case that what's happening is Microsoft is renaming FolderShare rather than replacing it, as the new version will likely look a lot like FolderShare and have many of the same functions. But it will also have a few improvements including:
  • Ability to sync up to 20 folders with 20,000 files each
  • You can login with your Windows Live ID
  • Integration with the Windos Recycle Bin
  • New clients for Windows and Mac
  • Unicode support for synchronizing files in other languages (beside English)
Why Microsoft is continuing to push this software at the same time as it develops Windows Live Mesh which allows you to synchronize files across mutilple computers, the web, and mobile devices, is anyone's guess.

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware

Free CrossFTP handles basic FTP chores on any OS

Java Web Start apps intrigue me, and I'm still surprised how few I've come across to share - last month's look at MuCommander was the first. If you're interested in an FTP client or server, give CrossFTP a try.

Both apps download and run in a flash. All of the functions I need for most FTP chores are available in the free, basic version: upload, download, site/connection manager, rename, delete, CHMOD. CrossFTP also remembers your browsing history and supports favorites, which makes queueing bulk uploads a breeze.

The server works nicely, and can be set up with minimal fuss. It's extremely configurable and an easy way to quickly provide FTP access to any system's files.

As with MuCommander, memory usage is an issue: the client consumes about 40mb and the server another 70mb. That's substantially more than FileZilla ( 11mb / 5mb ).

The pro version provides additional functionality, like support for SSL and SFTP and the ability to move remote files instead of deleting and re-uploading.

While I'm not going to forsake FileZilla for this one, it's a nice app to bookmark just in case.

Filed under: Design, Fun, Games, Photo, Video, Macintosh

Get the "Obama effect" in Photo Booth with the Obamafy plugin

Although the presidential election is over, Obama-inspired design seems to have made a lasting imprint on American culture. If you loved those Shepard-Fairey-designed HOPE posters that the whole Internet seemed to be making parodies of, you can have the effect for yourself in Apple's Photo Booth. Here's how to do it, using the Obamafy plugin.

Once you've downloaded the .qtz file, move it to Compositions in your Library folder. Once you've done that, open up Photo Booth and click effects. You might have to cycle through to the last page of your effects to find Obamafy, but it should be there. It took a little bit of experimenting for me to find the right lighting to get a result that looks like the posters, so don't give up without playing around a little bit.

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware

FlyCast mobile radio app comes to the PC

FlyCast
Over the last year we've seen a lot of companies race to come out with iPhone-specific versions of their applications. But FlyCast is moving in the other direction. The company makes a mobile application for iPhone and BlackBerry users which provides easy access to hundreds of internet audio streams including music, news, entertainment, and tech podcasts. Now FlyCast also has a desktop client based on Adobe AIR, which means it can run on Mac, Windows, and Linux computers.

The FlyCast Desktop Player appears to be a direct port of the iPhone software. It would have been nice if the company had spent a few minutes coming up with a new design so that you didn't feel like you were playing with an iPod while flipping channels. But the application works as you'd expect, making it easy to find internet audio streams in a number of different categories.

[via Zatz Not Funny]

Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Browsers

Choosy app chooses browsers (in OS X)

If you're a Mac user, you'll probably have noticed OS X's default browser behavior. You choose a default browser, and links from all your other applications are automatically opened in it. But what if you want more control? An app called Choosy lets you pick a browser for each individual link.

You mean every time you click a link in one of your applications, you have to choose a browser? This sounds like it could be a pain, but Choosy can choose a browser for you automatically. It lets you set its behavior based on favorite browsers, or just which browsers you have open.

In any situation where you haven't specified a browser, Choosy will prompt you with a neat little panel that looks like the app picker that pops up when you hit Apple-Tab in OS X. It's an extra click, but at least you know your link will open in the correct browser.

Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Mozilla, Beta, Browsers

Firefox 3.1 beta adds new tab functions


Mozilla has added a tab tearing feature to Firefox 3.1 beta, which can best be explained by saying, "watch the video above." But in a nutshell, what tab tearing lets you do is drag and drop tabs, not just within your browser window, but outside of it as well. For example, you can click and drag a tab outside of your Firefox window and it will open a new browser instance. Or you can grab a tab from one browser window into another browser instance.

Now before you say anything, yes, I know that the Opera web browser has been able to do this for ages, and Google Chrome has supported similar behavior since it was launched. But that doesn't make mean it's not nice to see the feature come to Firefox. It takes more than innovation to make a good web browser. You also have to be willing to recognize good ideas where you find them and be willing to implement them in your product.

[via Mozilla Links]

Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Office, Productivity

MiniTask - light task manager for Adobe Air

MiniTaskMiniTask is a basic cross-platform organization app built on Adobe Air. The learning curve on this app is basically nil, and you'll soon be adding, checking off, and setting alarms for to-do items with ease. There aren't a ton of features, so it's not the greatest for the completely neurotic among us, but if you just need a simple, unfussy to-do list, give it a look.

Let's a take a quick look at what MiniTask can do (fortunately, it's not much!). There's just one window, and you can right-click (CTRL-click on a Mac) to add new tasks and new dividers. You can use the dividers however you like, for different days or different categories of tasks. To-do items have three modes: checked off, not checked off, and alarm. Double-click a task to change the name, and double-click an alarm icon to change the time on an alarm. Seriously, that's all there is to it!

Filed under: Developer, Utilities, Macintosh, Productivity, iPhone, Troubleshooting

What's really on your iPhone? Find out with iPhone Backup Extractor

When you back up your iPhone or iPod Touch, iTunes can use the backup to do a restore, but not much else. It's nice when Apple's stuff "just works," but what if you want to see inside the black box and interact with the data on your phone? This is especially important for developers, who can fix bugs a lot more easily if they can look at a user's backup to figure out what's causing problems with an app. iPhone Backup Extractor is a tool that makes this possible.

With iPhone Backup Extractor, you can convert an iPhone/iPod Touch backup to make it readable by the OS X Finder. This lets developers get access to application resources that there's no way to see in iTunes. It might be of some interested to curious non-developers, too, if you just to figure out what files a 3rd-party app has created on your phone.

[via furbo.org]

Featured Time Waster

Forumwarz - a potentially offensive time waster

I pwn UAfter spending the better part of an hour on Forumwarz I still can't decide if it's just sick or if it's kind of fun. It's a bit like a car wreck on the highway. I know I shouldn't be looking but I can't quite turn away.

It's sick, it's twisted, it's the internet on it's worst level and darn it, it's kind of fun. At least for a little while.

Forumwarz is a parody role-playing game that takes place on the internet - or at least the Forumwarz version of it. Your goal is to complete missions that are given to you through a mock up of GoogleTalk called Sentrillion.

Your first "friend" is ShallowEsophagus who begins giving you missions to pwn various forums by being a troll. Depending on the character type you are assigned at start up, you have tools like drooling on the keyboard or bashing your head on the keyboard that you can use to destroy forum threads and eventually, pwn a forum.

Future missions involve buying illegal software from the Russians, pwning more difficult forums and other internet oddness.

Completing missions gives you cash, called Flezz in game, and items that you can pawn or use in other missions. The game is NOT for those easily offended. It's crass, coarse and there are frequent f-bombs in the fake chat sessions.

This is also a game for a more mature audience as it requires you to shop at the Drugs R Fun store to get various concoctions to improve your playing, engage in certain cyber activities to get more Flezz and just generally use a more adult perspective.

If you can get past that, here are the more enjoyable and time-wasting aspects.

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