Apple Announces Safari 4 Public Beta

Apple has announced a public beta of Safari 4 for both Windows and Mac. Apple says there are 150 new features in the browser. I haven’t read through all of the features because that would take a lot of time and since browsers aren’t the most interesting of applications it would also be a little boring (but if you would like to they are all listed here).

Top Sites

The first feature you will probably see when you open up Safari is “Top Sites.” Top Sites is essentially a homepage showing you your 12 most visited web sites, which are automatically generated by Safari.

Safari 4 Tab Bar

Apple has also decided to go along with the trend of putting the tab bar above the address bar. I’m still unsure as to whether or not I prefer the tab bar above the address bar or not but I do understand that it saves room and the way Apple has done it does look incredibly slick.

Safari 4 Speed Test

Apple also claims that Safari 4 is faster then any other browser out there. I have heard from others though that Chrome might actually be faster in the real world but according to the tests Apple did, Safari 4 is faster.

Safari 4 Web Page ZoomSafari 4 now has the ability to not only increase the font size on a web page but also increase the size of the images on the page.

Safari 4 Smart Address FieldApple has added a “Smart Address Field” which offers suggestions for you from your browsing history and bookmarks.

Apple has done a very impressive job with Safari 4, they look like they are on the path of a slower release cycle but when they do release they push out a huge list of features making them one of (if not the) best browsers available.

But, I still won’t be making the switch from Safari, I do only have one reason I’m not switching. The reason I’m not switching is that Safari 4 doesn’t have an option to force links that would normally open in new windows, to open in new tabs. This is especially frustrating when I use Google Reader and try to use the “v” shortcut to open the currently highlighted item on its website, in Safari it opens a new window, in Firefox it opens a new tab and that is how it should be. Apple, please add this seemingly simple feature, it’s the only one keeping me from switching.

Apple – Safari – Introducing Safari 4 – See the web in a whole new way.

Google Releases Picasa for the Mac

Picasa for the Mac

Very odd looking user interface, for the Mac that is. It doesn’t really look much like a Mac app.

We’re therefore excited to announce that we’re bringing the full version of Picasa to Mac OS X. Like its Windows and Linux counterparts, Picasa for Mac is a standalone program that helps you organize photos anywhere on your hard disk, edit your photos to perfection, and then easily share them online.

Google Photos Blog.

Torrent2exe Turns .torrent Files Into .exe Files

Torrent2exe is a pretty amazing web utility that turns .torrent files into .exe files that are self contained BitTorrent downloaders. This allows you to download bittorrent files without having to have a BitTorrent client installed on your computer.

It is really easy to use too, all you do is download the .torrent file from whatever site you get it from, upload the .torrent file to torrent2exe.com, click the download button and you are off and running with an executable file. When that executable is ran it opens up a download window and starts to download the source file to the directory that the .exe is located in.

If you want to skip a couple of steps you have the option of entering the URL to the .torrent file.

This looks like a really good way of getting your friends into BitTorrent that have had some trouble wrapping their heads around the idea of it.

Torrent2exe (via DownloadSquad)

Sun Microsystems Releases Open Source Free Virtualization for OS X

Sun Microsystems has recently updated their xVM VirtualBox software, with one HUGE new feature.

Mac OS X is now supported by xVM VirtualBox. That means that Sun Microsystems is the first to offer open source virtualization to Mac OS X. The software comes in two versions, free for all,  a licensed version that has some advanced features which are only free to individuals and not to businesses.

The new and improved (sorry for the PR speak but it just sounds nice) VirtualBox 1.6 now comes with seamless windowing for Solaris and Linux guests, SATA support for up to 32 hard disks per VM and a programming interface for Web services.

Unfortunately Mac OS X is not supported as a guest OS, I think that may have a lot to do with OS X’s terms of service, but overall this is a pretty solid product.

I can’t wait to see some benchmarks on this compared to VMware and Parallels.

Sun xVM VirtualBox 1.6

15 Great Mac Apps

AntiRSI – This application will help you take breaks periodically to keep you from getting any repetitive stress injuries. I’ve been using it for a few months and it is seriously helped me from enduring any more wrist and finger pain because of all this typing.

AppCleaner – Basically the same functionality as AppZapper, it is the uninstall app that Apple should have made, AppCleaner is free and helps you get rid of all the extra files that applications leave on your hard drive that can sometimes be a little hard to get rid of.

Firefox – Yes, I know, everyone knows about Firefox but it deserves mention because as Safari gets better and better people seem to often forget that Firefox has so much more functionality just because of the vast amount of extensions available for it.

Handbrake – The ultimate DVD ripper for the Mac, with the large amount of presets built into the application Handbrake will help you get your movie where YOU want it.

MetaX – After ripping those movies on to your hard drive you may want to add some information to that file such as title, description, or album art, so that when you add the file to iTunes it will have all the movies information, MetaX will help you do that easily.

NeoOffice – You could spend a ton of money on Microsoft Office for the Mac… or you could download NeoOffice for completely free. I’ve used NeoOffice since I got my Mac more than a year ago and have never had any problems trying to open any files.

PandoraJam – Pandora is a great web service that lets you listen to music that is similar to music you like, PandoraJam will let you record that music to your computer.

Quicksilver – The ultimate Mac productivity app. Many people just use it as an application launcher, but that is just the beginning of its features. You can also find many skins to make it look exactly how you want it to.

RapidoResizer – Very often you will find yourself needing to resize an image, this makes it quick, easy, and painless. You can also save the image out to nearly any image format to help out in getting small image sizes in pixels and in kilobytes. It’s great for bloggers.

SuperDuper! – Time Machine is a great backup tool, but it is also very important to have a second backup, and it would be really nice if Time Machine didn’t take 2 hours to restore your whole computer, SuperDuper! makes bootable backups easy, this way if anything goes wrong with your hard drive you can be back up and running in about 5 minutes.

The Unarchiver – I know that Apple’s Finder can unzip all sorts of archives but it doesn’t do it as well as the Unarchiver does. The Unarchiver can open basically any archive type that has ever been made.

Transmission – Simply the best bittorrent application available for the Mac. Transmission has all of the features that you want in a bittorrent client. Transmission recently got a facelift after Leopard was released and now it looks gorgeous.

Twitterrific – Twitter is the not-so guilty pleasure of most geeks and Twitterrific makes updating Twitter and viewing others tweets as easy as pie.

iSquint – Handbrake is great for converting DVDs but what about those videos that you find online, iSquint is a super simple app that will convert nearly any video to an iPod friendly format.

Paintbrush – Have you grown dependent on the many things you can do with Microsoft Paint? Have you been frustrated several times since you purchased your Mac because Apple hasn’t built a Paint-like application? Paintbrush can help.

SyncTV Preview

SyncTV is a video download service by Pioneer that has a mix of subscription and pay per download content. Currently SyncTV is still in private beta and works with Windows, Mac, and Linux.

DownloadSquad had some time with the service and here’s a great video showing you the service:

DownloadSquad also has some screenshots and a full rundown of the features which you can read about here.

Mozilla Releases Firefox 3.0 Beta 1

Last night Mozilla released the first beta of Firefox 3.0. The beta is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux at Mozilla’s download site in 20 different languages.

Remember that this is still beta software so don’t expect it to work flawlessly. Many websites and extensions don’t work very well with the browser.

The browser has seen many improvements on the features side but nothing that really seems to stand above the rest as a “killer” feature.

With some time the application will exit beta stage and undoubtably will work much better but for now I suggest you look at the release notes, maybe download it to try it out, but most likely you will end up going back to trusty old Firefox 2.

Lightweight GPU Identification App In Development

Many of you may be familiar with CPU-Z a comprehensive CPU identifying application that tells you a whole bunch of information about your processor. Well, a new application that has just began development is setting out to do the same thing as CPU-Z but for the graphics card, it will be named GPU-Z.

The developer of GPU-Z is not at all related to the CPU-Z application but from what I can tell GPU-Z will be one heck of an app when it hits 1.0.

Currently GPU-Z is at version 0.0.6 so it is in the very early stages of development, don’t expect it to identify every GPU quite yet.

If you want to play around with the application it is available for download at TechPowerUp.com.

Coupon Craze – Firefox Extension for Coupon Codes

“Find out about the latest coupons, deals and offers available while visiting your favorite shopping websites.”Coupon Craze is a nifty little extension that allows you to find out about all the deals that you can get while visiting shopping web sites. The extension supports over 4,000 sites.

I don’t usually talk about Firefox extension but I thought this one was really cool. Who doesn’t want to save money? Get the extension at its Mozilla Firefox add-on page.

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Google Adds StarOffice into Google Pack, and Who Cares?

Recently there was a buzz around the blogosphere about Google adding StarOffice being added to the Google Pack.

My question is: Who Cares?

I don’t know anyone who downloads the Google pack and I don’t know why anyone would. Out of the 12 programs in the Google pack I would only suggest people use 4 of them, Google Earth, Firefox, Skype, and Picasa. Why wouldn’t you just download them separately? Alright maybe if you have a family member who isn’t so tech savvy you can just tell them to download the Google pack but who actively goes out and downloads it?

Ok so let’s get to StarOffice, StarOffice is basically OpenOffice.org with some proprietary stuff in it. So why wouldn’t you get OpenOffice? OpenOffice is actually my favorite office suite out there, I like Microsoft Office 2007 but I hate the price.

So I guess my major issue with this news is, who downloads the Google pack?

[Google Pack Adds StarOffice – Google Operating System]