Rating: 2.5/5

NewsLife is one of the most unusual RSS readers I’ve used, and not necessarily in a good way. As a positive example, NewsLife’s icon changes to display the number of unread articles in a very large, readable font. Additionally, the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìbreadcrumb?¢‚Ǩ¬ù navigation along the top is very nice. Adding, removing, importing, and exporting feeds is as easy as any other RSS reader. Common features like searching, podcatching, and sorting options are present.

Unfortunately, NewsLife has a number of small bugs and glitches. Sometimes, the badge displaying the number of unread articles in a feed is partially obscured; renaming folders has a number of misbehaving attributes. Besides all the bugs, NewsLife handles marking feeds as read in very non-intuitive ways. Most salient of all the problems in this app is the lack of a ?¢‚Ǩ?ìmark all as read?¢‚Ǩ¬ù button. Feeds can be marked as read with only keyboard shortcuts or drop-down menus. The sidebar on the right is also a mess of non-standard interface placement. The ?¢‚Ǩ?ìQuick View?¢‚Ǩ¬ù section belongs in somewhere in the left sidebar. Instead of taking the approach Apple chose with iTunes, Mail, and Finder 10.5, NewsLife put the widgets for changing some sources of the articles being viewed on the right (as buttons). Worse yet, the last used source item on the left remains highlighted when using either ?¢‚Ǩ?ìQuick View?¢‚Ǩ¬ù source. The ?¢‚Ǩ?ìNews Bin?¢‚Ǩ¬ù is nicely placed, but the rest of the right sidebar is very non-intuitive. NewsLife is cheaper than NewsFire and NetNewsWire, but that does not mean it’s a bargain.

Version Reviewed: 1.0.1

Price: ?¢‚Äö¬¨12 (~$16.59)

Site: http://thinkmac.co.uk/newslife/index.html

Rating: 4.5/5

General Info: Camino doesn’t aim to have every feature every other web browser has, it just aims to do the features it does have right. The Camino browser has one huge, virtually un-touted advantage over other Mac browsers: it’s not resource hungry. Camino has the fewest and shortest lasting of spinning beach balls on any browser on Mac. So what else does Camino get right? Session saving, the automatic saving of web pages left open during a quit or crash, is built in. Automatic RSS detection is also built in. Safari’s method is only slightly better than Camino’s. In Safari, you click the blue button to open the feed in your default RSS reader. In Camino, you have to chose between the types of feeds available. Also in Camino is automatic flash player blocking , spell checking, and ?¢‚Ǩ?ìopen new windows as tabs?¢‚Ǩ¬ù. Unfortunately, a nice feature planned for Camino didn’t make it into this release. This feature spawned at Google’s Summer of Code. Its the best way to manage tabs when they’re too many to show in the window. Little arrows would appear at the end of the tab bar to slide tabs in a certain direction until the one you wanted was visible. One feature that Camino needs, and most other browsers are coming out with, is drag-able tabs. Safari 3’s drag-able/tear-away tabs are just plain useful. Until Safari 3 comes out of beta in October, Camino looks to be one of the best Mac browsers on the market.

Retail Price: Free

Site: http://www.caminobrowser.org/

Rating: 4/5

General Info: As you may have seen in our previous post, Koingo Software recently bought out an app called Swift Share, and I’m here to give you my thoughts on it! My first impression on the software are good, plenty of different tools to use, but still plenty of advice (there is a special help feature at the bottom which explains where everything is). I could easily find my way around, easily setting up one Windows Shared folder (I also set up a Mac one). Everything looked fine, it was telling me what IP address I had to use to connect, but as soon as I tried to connect from my PC, nothing happened, where previously with mac OSX’s built in tool it would have asked me for a username and password. Time to try again. I looked in the System Prefs and decided to connect using the IP address under Windows Sharing, as I had expected, up comes my Shared Folder.

So, although it tried to make me connect to the wrong server at first, I did get my sharing folder set up. The main reason for using this software would be to set up a special folder for sharing, whilst not exposing the whole of your home folder, but if you don’t mind exposing your home folder, you have al the tools built in.

Site: http://www.koingosw.com/

Screenshot

Rating:?Ǭ† 4/5

General Info: For whatever reasons, Macs have not succumbed to nearly any attacks by hackers, be they malware, hacking, or similar. Macs are not invincible though. Some relatively minor attacks on Macs have been recorded, yet this does not mean a major attack will not occur. The sheer number of people who want to anger computer users is disgusting. Little Snitch is an app that allows you to prevent these possibilities, to see virtually every network connection on your Mac. When a new connection is made, a dialog box asks if you want to allow that connection. While, at this point, I believe no virus protection software is needed on Mac, Little Snitch is an app that any paranoid security conscious person ought to look at. Besides the steps of using a non-admin (and certainly not Root) account, strict firewall settings, good passwords, and plain logic, Little Snitch is the best way to boost security.

Unfortunately, Little Snitch, like all security software, has some drawbacks. Little Snitch has one big drawback: it has to put up a dialog if you want to allow a connection with each app. This is especially irritating for a software reviewer who uses new apps on a regular basis. What would be nice is if Little Snitch already had a database of known, good apps. Who should buy Little Snitch? Anyone who’s been hacked before, people with ?¢‚Ǩ?ìmission critical?¢‚Ǩ¬ù need of their Mac, people who use many apps from untrusted sources, and generally paranoid and security conscious people. For other geeky people, try it out the demo to see how many apps use the Internet (it’s cool).

Retail Price: $24.95

Site: http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

The makers of Mac Pilot, Koingo Software, have released a new application called Swift Share. It manages Mac and Windows shares over your local network.

“Koingo Software is proud to announce a new member to our family of products: Swift Share!
Swift Share is a share points and file server management tool for Mac OS X. Available for a free 15 day trial, Swift Share can later be purchased for a small $19.95 shareware registration fee.

Share points are points across the network at which remote users can access your files. Mac OS X gives you one default share point: your home directory. However, if you’re anywhere but home, you won’t want to be giving everyone access to your entire home directory! Using Swift Share, choose only which folders you want to share and which users have access.”

I will try to have a review of Swift Share up this week. You can learn more about it by clicking here.

This Press Release was brought to us by A Media Partner of ours, prMac, which we told you earlier this month, and that we have become a Media Partner of theirs, and we have a link under Media Partners on their site.