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/

Before Safari on Windows, iAppblog looked terrible, but now with Safari 3 Beta on Windows, iAppblog looks just as great as it does on the Macintosh. This does does not mean that youshould all run out to your local computer store and pickup a Windows Vista computer, but it does help those who are using XP or Vista view iAppblog to its fullest.

iAppblog now looks great?Ǭ†amazing on both a pc or mac with Safari!

Apple has released a public beta of Safari 3. The biggest part of Safari 3 is that you can run it on a Windows XP or Vista computer.

?¢‚Ǩ?ìSafari is the fastest and easiest-to-use web browser for Mac and PC. Safari 3 Beta introduces new features to help you find your way and enjoy your time on the web.

Arrange your tabbed windows with just a drag and drop. Instantly and graphically locate any text on the current web page with the new find command.

Safari is also now available for Windows so you can continue to use your favorite browser even when you?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢re not using your Mac.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

The public beta is available for free download for mac or pc at http://apple.com/safari/.

iAppblog will have a full review of it in the near future.

This is the last release under the name of “Democracy Player”, soon to be Mira. Included in this mature beta are several new features. Among them, auto-updating (using Sparkle), “folder watching”, resume playback, better proxy support, improved performance, and more. Folder watching is a feature that automatically adds videos located in a specified folder to your collection. For more, go here.

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

iAppblog now has its own twitter account. To follow iAppblog, just add the account ‘iappblog’ as one of your friends. I have also setup twitter tools, so it should display all of the new iAppblog posts.

I will post a review of Twitter Tools and the Twitter service in general in the next few weeks, once I play with it a bit.

Rating: 5/5

General Info Twitterific is the most popular app for the mac to post to the social networking service “Twitter”. It’s interface is black, as seen on the screenshot at the bottom.

It’s got a whole lot of customization for you to take hold of, and updates almost instantly after you or one of your Twitter friends “tweets”. It’s footprint is very small as seen in the screenshot, and works perfectly with no defects and is much easier than going to twitter.com all the time to tweet.

Price: Free.

Site: http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific/

Screenshot

Rating: 4.5/5

General Info: I already have a ton of software. Okay, not quite a ton (maybe 1/2 a ton ;-). This includes apps for graphics editing, a variety of things I can use for HTML editing, and so on. For the longest time I’ve worked in Dreamweaver then I ended up with a license to RapidWeaver. Then I found themes. I’m hooked. But, I like to tweak things and make them my own, especially colors and graphics since that’s what my background is in.

On a search for things that work with RapidWeaver I came across RWThemeMiner. Yes, I probably have other tools that I could pull together to get inside the RapidWeaver theme components but RWThemeMiner is direct, intuitive and makes quick work of tweaking themes to make them your own. Sometimes the larger apps get all the attention but there are some really nice little hidden gems that crop up because of the “main” app. The modular aspect of RapidWeaver is a nice feature that’s allowed other developers to come up with useful add-ons like themes, RWThemeMiner and a few other related apps.

If you are interested in making themes or customizing aspects of your websites to suit your own tastes by tweaking the colors or images you may find RWThemeMiner as useful as I have in just a short time.

Price: $15.00

Site: http://www.ttpsoftware.com/Products/rwthememiner.html

Screenshot

?Ǭ†Theocacao has been allowed to leak some of the features of Delicious Library 2.0, to be released in October. Among them are: advanced ways to export libraries to the web, full iTunes integration, and (of course) an amazing new interface that takes full advantage of Leopard’s capabilities. Cryptically, Theocacao also reports “…you’ve probably noticed there are no screenshots. There’s a reason for that.”

Rating: 4.5/5

General Info: To learn what VisualHub does one can dissect the name. Visual-Hub. OK, so you still can’t guess. VisualHub is a video conversion app that can convert just about anything you would need to. It uses the reasonably fast back-end FFmpeg to convert video at a speedier pace than QuickTime Pro. It converts video in about real-time on a new Mac. You don’t have to know that an iPod with video can handle 640 by 480 resolution video at 30 frames per second to use this app. VisualHub has presets that can convert video to formats supported by ?ج£¬øtv, iPod 5G, North American and non-North American TV, PSP, Final Cut, DVD, Wii, various web formats, and a whole lot more than you’ll ever need.
In addition to all of those presets, you can change all of the usual advanced options like crop, deinterlace, resolution, frame rate, bitrate, codecs, and (you guessed it) a lot more. Very convenient and timesaving is the fact that you can save these settings as a file to make your own presets. Another timesaving aspect is preview and “video info”. Preview alone can do a lot to prevent you from using the wrong settings, saving re-encoding time. The best thing about VisualHub is it’s price. QuickTime Pro costs $29.99 at first. The problem Apple QuickTime Pro has is, besides it’s slowness, that you can lose your license with an upgrade to the next major version. Also, that license losing upgrade is essentially forced as new iTunes music and video often requires QuickTIme to be at it’s latest version. Next contenders, Roxio’s Popcorn and Crunch, $49.99 and $39.99. VisualHub’s price is $23.32. FFmpeg X is free and hard to install, and doesn’t work too well.
The only problems I have with VisualHub are with it’s interface. On the top left of the main window is a box showing “VisualHub” and more info about the app. Why? It simply wastes space on a product you paid for. Second, the “To:” label designating the sections of presets is discolored and has it’s own background. Lastly, is the reliance on ugly, separated palettes. Apps like VoodooPad at least give you the option of having them in a “drawer”. Ok, so those are small points, but they’re irritating and seem easily fixable.
Who would need VisualHub? Anyone who needs to convert video to anything other than iPod formats, iSquint and iTunes are free solutions for iPod. VisualHub looks to be the best consumer level app for converting video.

Retail Price:?Ǭ† $23.32

Site: http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/