Mac Software

If you have a lot of media to browse through, no matter what viewer you use, it's bound to take some time. Whatever the project may be--from picking the best shots from a pro photo shoot to getting the most action-packed movie clips from a birthday party--you need a good way to browse, compare, and sort through your media quickly. The obvious choices on your Mac are iPhoto or iMovie, but if you're looking for a different way to sort through several media file-types with added unique features, check out AtomicView.

AtomicView offers a sparse, but intuitive interface … Read more

Me.dium is a free social networking tool for Firefox and Internet Explorer with a twist. It lets you browse the Internet alongside your friends, and even make new ones.

The interface is modern without being obnoxious. A sidebar and a toolbar appear in your browser window. The top panel of the sidebar is a map that lets you view what sites your friends are visiting. The bottom panel of the sidebar lets you view your friends profiles and send messages. Me.dium will definitely appeal to Facebook users because you can send messages directly to your Facebook friends from … Read more

CodeWeavers have successfully ported a build of Chromium, Google Chrome's codebase, to non-PowerPC Intel Macs using Wine. Unfortunately, it's incredibly buggy, and while it proves that Chrome can eventually run on the Mac, CrossOver Chromium is more about demonstrating the utility of Wine than creating an effective version of Chrome for the Linux and Mac platforms before Google does.

In fact, in the CrossOver Chromium FAQ, that's precisely what CodeWeavers states: "This is just a proof of concept, for fun, and to showcase what Wine can do." They go on to assure users that they … Read more

Google has finally made the Safari-friendly version of Gears available. Savvy Mac users could have downloaded and installed a rougher version of it as early as three weeks ago, however only Monday did the company announce a new version that's been readied for mass consumption.

Like its predecessor, the Mac version of Gears requires version 3.1.1 or higher of Safari, or version 1.5 or higher of Firefox, along with a machine running the most recent build of OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5.3 (Leopard). It offers the same offline-goodness as its Windows counterpart, … Read more

There are several excellent freeware video playback programs out there, and VLC media player is one of the best. Made by "those VLC folks," or VideoLAN as they prefer to be called, the wildly popular open-source player now offers a slightly better experience than before for both Windows and Mac.

VLC will now cooperate with Last.fm, there's direct playback of video URLs, and, unexpectedly, a lot of attention has been given to how VLC interacts with the Internet. Users will find VLC to be more secure, with options for strictly regulating Internet usage through the player … Read more

Apple has released the latest version of Leopard, with bug fixes and security updates accompanying the fifth update to the operating system.

The company sent over a list of improvements about 30 minutes ago, and the full list of fixes and improvements should be up on Apple's Web site any moment with the update itself popping up in Software Update. Two notable updates from the "General" section were a fix for the video playback problems that affected some MacBook Air owners, as well as a puzzling bug "in which some Macs could unexpectedly power on at … Read more

Think that every conceivable useful feature not included in Firefox has been created? Not likely. At least now, though, we can take attachment drag-and-drop off the list with dragdropupload.

The add-on works with most major Web mail services and message board systems. Once installed, simply go to your Gmail, for example, and "compose" a new message. Hit the "add attachment" button, and instead of browsing through your complex file tree from there, you can grab the file from Windows Explorer and drag it over the file location box in the page. The plug-in supports multiple files, … Read more

This is one of the best Firefox extensions around and makes tabbed browsing even better than it already is. Tab Mix Plus can change the close button on each tab feature, control the rows of tabs when you exceed the width of the browser window, and almost everything else associated with tabs. Use your scrollwheel to browse tabs, or control tab switching via mouse gestures. You can specify where Web pages will open--in the background or the foreground, in a new tab or the current one--based on how they were created: by clicking a link, typing an address, or using … Read more

Of the two big browsing features of 2008, one seems to run counter to where developers are driving their browsers. The melding of the location bar to the search bar was expected in Firefox and Opera, thanks to beta versions. Chrome has it, too, calling it the Omnibar. What seems to have caught developers off-guard has been the clamor for a universal switch to stop the cache and browsing history from recording anything at all.

Microsoft's InPrivate debuted in Internet Explorer 8 beta 2, and Google Chrome's version is the well-received Incognito feature. So far, in Firefox, the … Read more