Mac OS X – CyberSurge

DoubleTwist is Now Available

DoubleTwist is a universal media hub that is now available as a public beta for Mac OS X. DoubleTwist is like iTunes except it works with not just iPhones and iPods but also with other portable media players.

Not only will DoubleTwist transfer the media to your player for you but it is also capable of converting nearly any video format to the correct format for your device.

The only thing I would suggest to the developers of DoubleTwist is that I don’t want to have to drag and drop media to my device, I would rather set a list of parameters based on ratings, how recent it was last played, etc. and have DoubleTwist transfer it for me. Essentially I want a true iTunes alternative.

doubleTwist.

Snow Leopard Might Have Stacks Folders

When Leopard was released one of the coolest features was Stacks. Stacks were basically just folders sitting in your Dock that when clicked on would fan out to display all of the contents of that folder. Stacks Folders however is a new feature for Snow Leopard that will allow you to navigate through your computers files system from within those stacks.

There is no indications as to whether or not this will be a final feature of Snow Leopard but if it is I’m sure it will end up much more polished than its current incarnation because honestly, it looks a little messy.

Click the link below for a video demonstration of Stacks Folders:

Stacks Folders

Snow Leopard Might Include Location and Multi-touch Tools

Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard operating system will include tools borrowed from the iPhone that let developers determine the geographical location of Macs, as well as extend additional support for multi-touch to their apps, AppleInsider has learned.

I’m sure many developers have been waiting to use some of those cool multi-touch gestures that have been included in the latest Mac notebooks but the question I pose is: what about the desktop Macs?

Of course the same question could be posed about the location services that could be included in Snow Leopard. Although, it might be useful for applications like Google Earth.

But, even if these particular features aren’t that useful to desktop Mac users the rest of Snow Leopard is compelling enough that most (if not all) Mac users will be purchasing Snow Leopard as soon as it is available.

AppleInsider | Apple’s Snow Leopard to include location, multi-touch tools.

Phil Schiller to Demo Snow Leopard at Macworld

However, although Apple is expected to show off Snow Leopard at Macworld, the software is very unlikely to be in consumers’ hands until at least a month later – and more likely two or three months later. “I think it will be a major factor at Macworld. The question is when it is going to be available,” says Enderle.

It doesn’t seem unlikely, especially since Schiller has seemed to be part of almost every software demo I can remember (in the short few years that I’ve payed attention to Apple news). I’m really excited for Snow Leopard but am still trying to figure out if Apple would be charging the full $129 for the upgrade, I don’t think they will since there are no new user focused features.

Apple ready to show Snow Leopard’s spots | Technology | The Guardian.

How to Force Empty Trash in Mac OS X

These instructions may have changed, a new version can be found here.

One of the problems I see coming up over and over again on my Mac is the inability to empty the trash. I like to keep my trash can clean so every time I get 2 or 3 things in the trash I empty it. But, probably 3-4 times per week the trash won’t empty because one of the applications that I was using on some of the files in the trash just won’t let the file go.

So, I have to do something, because I (like the crazy person that I am) can’t stand to have stuff in my trash when I tried to get rid of it. So I resort to a simple little Terminal command to empty the trash no matter what is in it.

rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

Just copy and paste the code above into Terminal and your trash will be emptied immediately without having to see any dialog boxes at all.

Apple To Be Showing 10.6 at WWDC

So recently some rumors came about in which OS X 10.6 would be shown off at WWDC next week. At first I thought “No,” but then I started to think “Maybe.”

You see Leopard actually shipped on October 26, 2007, nearly 8 months ago. The average time between OS X releases is roughly 13 months and that means that we could be seeing the next version of OS X actually being released sometime around November of this year.

The rumor actually says that we will be seeing early builds of 10.6 with a release in January, not exactly unreasonable to me, especially since the last two versions of OS X took Apple 18 months to release, January would set this wait time at 15 months. And, if the rumor is true, that this next version of OS X wouldn’t have any substantial new features but instead be dropping support of PowerPC and just making the overall OS more rock solid, it is not far fetched in the least.

So now that I’ve explained it a little bit, WWDC would be the perfect place for Apple to start talking about the next version of OS X and since it seems very timely I think it will happen.

Oh, and by the way many have been calling this next version of OS X “Snow Leopard” which makes a lot of sense, it is just like Leopard, with almost no extra features but incredibly good at working in a specific environment (Intel processors). This means that Snow Leopard could very well be the name, but I do want to point out that from my calculations, Lion is the only other big cat left for Apple to use as code names.

TUAW