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Updated: MacScan 2.7

SecureMac — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:50:38 -0500

MacScan is designed to detect, isolate, and remove spyware, keystroke loggers, trojan horses, and make you aware of remote administration applications which could have been maliciously or inadvertently installed on your Mac. MacScan is available for Mac OS X containing the latest definitions for spyware. With Internet privacy in mind, MacScan has added a blacklisted cookie scanner. This feature maintains a list of known tracking cookies, and when run, removes them from Web browsers in which they are found. No more losing saved usernames and passwords to websites when you want to clean your cookies.

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.2.4 or later

To download a demo copy of MacScan 2.7 (5.2MB), click here.

What We Didn't Get Yesterday

J Keirn-Swanson — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 13:44:54 -0500

So there were all kinds of new tweaks and price drops and so forth with Apple's incredibly popular iPod line, but yesterday's event was more notable for what didn't happen than what did.

First off, despite the popularity of the number nine in the catalog of The Beatles and yesterday's propitious dating, there were no announcements about the Fab Four's catalog at long last coming to iTunes. As the remastered CDs hit the brick and mortar stores in the physical form, digital Beatles continues to be elusive despite Yoko Ono's predictions. Label EMI missed a serious chance to make some coin on the hype and excitement of the re-release paired with The Beatles RockBand game hitting the shelves.

Source: AppleInsider

Less hot in the rumor loop was a revamp the Apple TV which hasn't seen an update since 2007. With lagging delivery dates, speculation suggested that the 40GB models were on their way out in favor of a newer model with a larger hard-drive than even the 160GB model. Alas, as the music-related title suggested, the show was strictly iPods and iTunes.

While this might have reasonably been a good place for a major refresh of the iPod touch, possibly throwing a camera into the mix, instead we were treated to iTunes 9 which was fitting with the date, but considerably less big news.

Which meant of course that Tuesday's biggest hope -- the highly anticipated, incredibly longed for, much dreamed of Tablet -- was Wednesday's biggest tearjerker. It was all music all the time and there was no love for Mac nerds on this front either. There seemed a strong chance when Phil Schiller busted out the games and the game stats, a tablet Mac seeming a good fit for your gaming experience, but no.It was not to be.

The event was over. Rumor predictions were batting around 50%, which isn't unusual, but the biggies didn't make the cut. Oh well, there's always next time. There's always 2010. Get your rumors started....now.

Digitize Your Mental Notes with Evernote

Susie Ochs — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 18:29:40 -0500

Capture ideas and information instantly--and be able to find it all when you need it.

What You Need:

-- Free account at www.evernote.com
-- Evernote application for the Mac (free, www.evernote.com)
-- Optional: Evernote application for the iPhone or iPod touch
-- Optional: Twitter account (see Step 9)

What do you do when you come across some info you want to remember? If it’s a webpage maybe you bookmark it; if it’s an email or a file, you might stick it in a folder called “Important!” Evernote is a super-useful service that comprises a Web-based application, a free Mac desktop app, and even an iPhone app, all kept effortlessly synced. And it’s ready to store all your digital info--receipts, serial numbers, snippets of code, articles, photos, PDFs, audio files, recipes, you name it--with handy tagging, indexing, and searching features so you can actually find it all later. We’ll walk you through setting up Evernote, then encourage you to tinker around and discover how it fits into your personal workflow.

1. Sign Up and Download

Head to www.evernote.com and click the Register link at the top-right of the page. Then click the Downloads link at the very bottom of the page (or go to www.evernote.com/about/downloads) and grab the free Mac app, which requires Mac OS 10.5, aka Leopard. Install that puppy in the usual fashion

This is all the personal info they ask for. Refreshing.

2. Look to the Menubar

The app will put a little elephant-head icon in your menubar. Click it to check out your options: New Note launches a window where you can type a new text note or drag in an attachment from the Finder. If you have a free account, you’re limited to attaching JPG, PNG, or GIF images; MP3 or WAV audio files; or PDFs. But Premium account users ($5/month or $45/year) can attach any file type.

Those hotkey combos work globally, and you can change them in Evernote > Preferences > Shortcuts.

The menubar icon also lets you paste the clipboard contents into Evernote, send a screenshot to Evernote, and launch the main Evernote window with the cursor in the Search box. Better still, all these commands can be executed with global hotkeys.

3. Web Clips, Three Ways

Most of the info we want to save comes from that ever-gushing font of knowledge and nonsense known as the Internet. Evernote’s got that covered: Firefox has a dedicated Evernote extension, which adds a toolbar button with a contextual menu for clipping the whole webpage, or just a selection, to Evernote. The Evernote app can install a similar Safari plug-in (click it to send the current webpage to Evernote, or Shift-click it to save the page to Evernote as a PDF, which does a better job of preserving the formatting).

But if you want to avoid bloating your browser with extensions or plug-ins, there’s also a “bookmarklet” you can drag into your bookmarks toolbar for one-click clipping. Find it at www.evernote.com/about/downloads.

Mouse over the Evernote button in Safari for a reminder of what it does.

4. More Ways to Add Notes

If the Evernote app is running, you can also drag supported file types right onto its Dock icon. If you’re using someone else’s computer when inspiration strikes, just log in at www.evernote.com to view your notebooks and add new notes through the Web interface.

And the app also has a button labeled iSight Note that lets you snap a shot with your Mac’s iSight—and it even flips the image horizontally before saving it to a notebook, so any text that’s visible in the image doesn’t appear backward.

Normally when you hold something with writing up to your iSight, the text is backward.

5. Search for Text in Images

“Who cares if the text is forward or backward?” you may ask after reading step 4. Well, you do. The genius of Evernote is that it finds text in your notes—even text that shows up in a photo, scanned document, screenshot, or PDF, and even if the text is handwritten. When you click the Sync button in the Evernote app, the notes on your Mac are synced with Evernote’s servers, where the text recognition is performed. Once that info is synced back to your Mac (which happens automatically, or you can click Sync again after a couple of minutes), you’ll be able to search for words contained inside any of your notes.

Our search for "Mac" found the image we took in step 4. Smart!

6. Tag Notes

Evernote lets you create multiple notebooks, but we prefer to dump everything into one notebook and then use tags to keep it all organized. You can tag notes as you write them, and as you type a tag, the app will suggest tags you’re already using that contain those letters. For tagging after the fact, just select one or more notes from the list and drag them onto the desired tag, listed in the sidebar—it’s the quickest way to tag multiple notes at once. And of course, each note can have as many tags as you need.

Drop multiple notes onto one of your tages to apply that tage to all of them.

7. Add Notes from Your iPhone

...or iPod touch, naturally. The free Evernote app is a lifesaver for capturing inspiration on the go, letting you create new notes by typing, taking a snapshot with the camera (iPhone only, of course), using an image that’s already on your device, or even recording a quick voice note. You can read all your notes, mark some as favorites (which saves a copy to your device, so you can read them offline), and search your notes too.

Notes you make on the phone will sync back to Evernote on the Web and on your Mac.

Bonus: Tap the magnifying glass icon to the right of the Search box for the Advanced Search page, where you can search for notes based on where you made them (within 1, 5, or 25 miles of your current location)—great for finding the note you made about where you left your car, once you get back to the parking garage.

8. Export or Share

The Evernote app can export your notes as ENEX files, which lets you back them up locally, but only the Evernote app can read the ENEX files. The app can also print your notes (including the ol’ print-to-PDF trick) or email them via Apple Mail. Evernote’s Web application also lets you print and email, and even publish your notebook online—you’ll get a URL you can share with friends.

Share your notebooks to let anyone (who knows the URL) read them.

9. Add Notes via Twitter

If you have a Twitter client open all day anyway, it can double as a fast way to send short notes (140 characters or less, duh!) to Evernote. First, you have to follow myEN (twitter.com/myEN). You’ll get a direct message with a URL for linking your Twitter and Evernote accounts—make sure to sign in to Evernote before you click the link. Then just add @myEN anywhere in your tweet to have a copy sent to Evernote. You can also direct-message myEN (start the tweet with D myEN) if you want your note to stay private.

To get started, go to twitter.com/myEN and click Follow.

10. Go Premium?

Evernote’s Premium account ($5/month or $45/year) boosts your upload limit to 500MB/month (a free account is 40MB/month), syncs your files between multiple computers running Evernote--even across platforms--and supports more file types and SSL encryption. (The small ads in the bottom-left corner of the Evernote app and webpage disappear too.) We don’t want to discourage anyone from upgrading to the paid service (we’re sort of Evernote fanboys, OK?), but we have to admit that in our months of using the service, we’ve yet to have an “Oooh, I wish I was Premium!” moment. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Could Flash Be Coming to the App Store?

J Keirn-Swanson — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 02:21:41 -0500

It could be in some form or other, if comments made by Adobe's Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch, prove to be true. According to Lynch, a full-featured version of Flash for mobile devices will arrive before year's end.

The ability for the iPhone to process Flash-based graphics, animation and movies could be a huge step for the devices. At this stage, there are a number of apps with the same level of interactivity as Flash. But any device that only sees the HTML side of the web is half as good as it needs to be. (At least until sites begin supporting HTML 5 and unified codecs, but that's another argument entirely.)

Lynch's comments were echoed by Ted Patrick, Adobe's Senior Manager of Developer Communities at a company event for analysts. As a whole, all of Adobe's comments, from their prediction of full-fledged Flash for iPhones (Apple depending, of course) to their embrace as a culture and a company to a partly crowd sourced model, were reasons to celebrate.

So will Adobe Flash based applications eventually arrive on our iPhones, taking more advantage of the accelerometer and location-based functions, before year's end? Or will many online surfing adventures continue to end in little cubical boxes alerting us to missing plug-ins?

Only time will tell, but this is a rumor making rounds with credible sources and the potential to be a real game changer. The App store might just be about to get even more interesting.

Touch Ski 3D

Susie Ochs — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:42:10 -0500

In Touch Ski 3D, two of your fingers act as the skier’s legs, and you see the tips of your skis poking out. You control your speed and direction by putting the skis parallel and pointing ‘em straight down the mountain to go faster, moving the skis on the slant to turn, and pointing the ski tips in toward each other slightly to slow down. (We kept thinking of the South Park ski instructor’s “If you French fry when you should pizza, you’re going to have a bad time” mantra, but if you haven’t seen that episode, trust us, it’s too silly to explain.)

Anyway, the game includes seven modes (training, race, slalom, freestyle park, tight slalom, distance jump, and freestyle jump) and 42 courses in all, so there’s lots to do. In the freestyle modes, you hit jumps, and then while in the air, take your fingers off the skis and tap one quadrant of the screen to perform a trick. The object is to vary the tricks and not crash—it’s fun to watch the scenery spin around like you’re really doing a 360. In all modes, the MPH indicator turns green when your skis are exactly parallel, and your job is to keep it that way, even when turning.

The 3D graphics are gorgeous, and they combine with the pleasant swooshing sound effects to give you a real sense of speed. The menu music is OK, but we’d rather be able to listen to our iPod tunes. And it took us a while to be able to see the ski tips poking out from under our fingers--the trick is to keep them very low on the screen, and it helps a ton if your iPhone is lying flat on a table.

Swish. Swoosh. Crash.

Safari Beta A Security Risk

JC Domingo — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:42:32 -0500

Update your Safari browser as soon as possible! According to SecureMac, if you have the older version of the browser, your computer might be in danger--both Macs and PCs. Malicious websites are known to steal files from the local systems using the Safari beta by just visiting them.

The attack occurs when an Xml eXternal Entity (XXE) is planted against the parsing of the XSL XML.

To update your Safari to the latest version, launch "Software Update" on your computer.

Safari Escapes from Beta

JC Domingo — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:22:39 -0500

After a few months in beta, Safari 4 is ready for action. Whether you're using Leopard or, (ahem) Windows, the new Safari is ready for download now.

If you haven't been test driving the beta, here are the new features.

The ‘Top Sites’ page allows you to navigate to your favorite websites by previewing up to 24 thumbnails all in one page. You can also personalize the display by relocating each in the grid, making it easier for you to find your top sites. You can also tell if each top site has changed since your last visit when you see a white star on the top-right corner by looking on the grid page. And, of course, each would be at your disposal.

If you're a fan of Cover Flow, Safari has you covered. Now you can review your site history and bookmarked sites in full-page versions, just like iTunes or navigating the Finder.

Can’t find what you’re looking for? Just type what you’re looking for in the ‘Search’ bar. Typing a simple word or phrase will search through the whole browser.

Apple reports that Safari is the world’s fastest web browser, overshadowing Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome. ‘Nitro Engine’ performs JavaScript at almost 8 times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and more than 4 times faster than Firefox 3 (testing on iBench and SunSpider).

‘Developer Tools’ allows you observe the structure of a page, debug JavaScript, optimize performance and compatibility, inspect offline databases, or test experimental pieces of code. Click here for more information and here for all 150 features.

Download and enjoy the new Safari 4 here for free! Happy browsing.

Things 1.0.4

Cultured Code — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:25:16 -0500

Organize your tasks in an elegant and intuitive way. Things combines powerful features with simplicity through the use of tags and its intelligent filter bar. A Leopard style source list allows for quick and easy focusing. Together with a beautiful user interface, Things aims at the seemingly impossible: making task management both easy and fun.

REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later

To download a demo copy of Things 1.0.4 (4.3MB), click here.