Perian enables QuickTime application support for additional media:

• File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
• Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture
• Audio types: Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), and MPEG Layer I & II Audio, True Audio, DTS Coherent Acoustics, Nellymoser ASAO
• AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3
• Subtitle support for SSA/ASS and SRT

• libavcodec from the ffmpeg project along with code from the old FFusion component
• libavformat from the ffmpeg project along with AVIImporter.component
• libmatroska with matroska-qt.component
• liba52 with A52Codec.component

Perian enables QuickTime-based playback tools access to more file formats and codecs. The code is available under the LGPL.

New MacBook Pro

Author: Chris @ bitdepth.org

I’ve had a lot of Mac laptops (actually every laptop I’ve had since the first has been a Mac) and I can say for myself that the new 15-inch MacBook Pro that I have is great.

Best. Laptop. Ever.

The only other laptop where I’ve felt this sort of love for was my “Pismo” G3 PowerBook that just felt right and was powerful and beautiful. With the G3 PowerBook it was the balance of speed and power and features that made it work. The slightly curving case was comfortable and fit easily into the carrying case. It was fast to set up and very flexible with 2 FireWire 400 ports, USB, s-video out as well as VGA out. There was AirPort too… and this was 8 years ago. I haven’t plugged in a laptop to go online at home for 8 years!

Over the past near-decade things have changed a lot with technology and with the new MacBook Pro Apple strikes the balance just right again. There are 2 USB-2 ports, one FireWire 800 port (which is a bit of a pain, but with an adapter cord, all of the FW400 things work with it), ethernet, a different Mini DisplayPort plug for external video (which means you need to get adapters for VGI or DVI out), and an SD card slot. I initially thought that the SD card slot was kind of strange, but I find that it’s great for getting pictures from the SD card in my digital camera. It is very fast and I don’t need any cables as I just pop in the card and the transfer speed is a lot faster than through the camera with cables. While I haven’t tried it yet, it will also work great with digital audio files that I record with my Zoom H2 recorder, which also uses SD cards.

The battery life is amazing. While the official story is that it will last up to 7 hours, in reality, it’s still pretty amazing, and I’ve been able to get more than 6 hours out of it and I haven’t had the battery die on me yet. It runs very quiet and doesn’t seem to get very warm. I’m using the lower capacity video card as it takes less power. With the video card with twice the RAM (512 MB), it apparently eats more power. For video editing that’s the one that will get used, but for surfing and writing and other non-video tasks, the display is fine.

The screen is absolutely gorgeous with the best colour and contrast that I’ve ever seen on a laptop. In working with photographs there is a lot more detail and the colours just seem to pop. I don’t know about using it for serious colour-correction, but it’s dramatically better than anything I’ve seen before.

Some unique changes that are part of Apple’s zen-like design ethos is the new, buttonless trackpad. The trackpad is much larger and the whole thing is a button. Initially I didn’t even notice the change, since the larger area works perfectly with my thumb where the button would have been. The trackpad is made from a similar glass to the surface of the iPod touch and there are all sorts of cool multi-touch features. Two fingers to scroll, three fingers to page around, and four fingers up and down for Expose (for hiding things and showing all active windows) and finally four fingers left and right to switch between applications. In the System Preferences there are great little videos demonstrating all of the multi-touch mouse action, which makes it much easier to understand.

The new 15-inch MacBook Pro is a simply beautiful and powerful laptop that makes me fall in love with design and laptop computing all over again.

Article found @ bitdepth.org



A simple, beautiful and powerful notes app. The nice user interface lets you focus on the important things - taking notes

Write notes quickly Taking notes was never so easy, JustNotes synchronizes and saves your notes automatically, so you don't have to care

Have access everywhere JustNotes synchronizes your notes with Simplenote, so you have access to your notes also from your iPhone

Save money You download and use the application for free, donations are always welcome and helps future development

Mail your notes Mailing your notes or just a piece of it with just one click, it's that simple

Integrated search Search for keywords through your whole notes, the highlighted keywords help you to find them

Always there  JustNotes always runs in the background with a small desktop footprint, by pressing the statusbar icon it pop's up only when you need

Safari AdBlocker is the only 64-bit ad blocker built for Mac OS X 10.5+ to integrate directly into Safari, for minimum disruption to your browsing experience. Safari AdBlocker supports the use of AdBlock Plus subscriptions (url's with the prefix "abp:") - and will be updated automatically, each week.

 Features

• Adblock Plus subscription support
• Convenient contextual menu to enable/disable
• Right-click to block/whitelist site's, url's, images, and frames
• Automatic updating courtesy of Sparkle

A free application to help you get what you need done. Pronto! focus booster is a simple and elegant application designed to help you eliminate the anxiety of time and enhance your focus and concentration.

focus booster has been designed based on the principles of
the Pomodoro Technique and features:

• a sleek and unobtrusive design
• changes color as time goes by for quick, peripheral updates
• alarm/buzzer sounds for completed sessions
• customizeable time and sound settings
• session counter

It's quick to start up and works efficiently in the background
without consuming computer resources, or your focus.

Droplr is the best way to share files from your Mac on the internet. Period.

Image sharing. Whether you want to link to an image or embed one somewhere, Droplr makes sharing images on the web easy.

Notes & Code. Need to share a text note? Or how about a code snippet? We'll even syntax highlight it for you.

Keyboard support. Don't like the mouse/trackpad & dragging and dropping? Droplr has full keyboard shortcut support.

Storage. Every account comes with 1GB of free storage. Plenty of room to host and share all your bits.

Screenshots. Sharing screenshots made easy. Only upload the screenshots you want to share.

Twitter integration. We love Twitter. And if you do too, you know it's one of the best ways to share.

Free! Droplr is completely free to use with ad supported content. Don't worry, they're really pretty ads. Promise.

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems.

Features

• Record live audio.
• Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
• Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
• Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
• Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
• And more! See the complete list of features.

Candelair is an alternative driver for the built-in IR receiver as found in many Mac®s today. It provides a clean, global fix for Apple® Remote issues many users are experiencing with third party applications under Snow Leopard releases 10.6, 10.6.1 and 10.6.2. It's based on Remote Buddy's driver and comes packaged in a preference pane that presents all remote control options at a glance. Candelair is a free download.

Features

• Global fix for Apple® Remote IR Receiver locking issues - as seen under OS releases 10.6 and 10.6.1
• Legacy Compatibility Mode - makes many applications that use outdated Apple® Remote code compatible with OS 10.6.2 (optional, can be enabled/disabled)
• Pairing always available - remotes can be paired regardless of whether an application currently holds an exclusive lock on the IR Receiver
• Powerful preference pane - dynamic, context-sensitive interface for installing and uninstalling the Candelair driver, pair remotes and more

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.

CocoThumbX is a freeware thumbnail creator for Mac OS X. It is capable of creating and removing thumbnails from the common image file formats as BMP, TIFF, TARGA, GIF (animated), PNG, JPG, PICT, PDF, EPS, ICNS, JP2, SGI ... text files such as DOC, RTF, RTFD, HTML, CSS, TXT and QuickTime supported Movies. CocoThumbX creates a thumbnail from your image and add the thumbnail as icon to your image file.