Comic Life Magiq is the latest and greatest version of the familiar Comic Life app you've probably seen bundled with some Macs. It takes the Comic Life concept of building comic strips using your own images, and gives you a fully-loaded toolbox that makes the job easy and a lot of fun.
To build a nice-looking page, all you have to do is grab one of the many pre-loaded layouts and drag it to your new page. The panels drop into place, and you can begin dragging in images, which fit your panels by default. Then you can add some text, using a wide range of speech balloons. Voila! Easy comics!
Comic Life Magiq is definitely not hard to use, but it also doesn't force you to color inside the lines. You can do everything by hand, if you're so inclined. Plenty of advanced options (grouping panels and adding reflections, for example) are included, but we found no need to use them to pack the recommended daily allowance of POW! ZAP! and BLAMMO! into our test comic. If you liked the idea of Comic Life, but found its lack of image editing and customization a bit boring, Magiq won't fail to impress.
Freenet is a tool that lets users publish pretty much anything online "without fear of censorship." The software stores your data on a decentralized, anonymous network of nodes made up of other Freenet users' computers. Freenet communications are encrypted and routed through those nodes, making it difficult for anyone to trace what you're doing. The service is useful for communication where a right to free speech is not guaranteed, and for privacy nuts and conspiracy theorists in countries where free speech is supposed to be a universal right, but may not be.
Freenet 0.7 was released this week, marking the first major update in three years. The latest version not only lets users upload data anonymously, but also lets users mask the fact that they're using the service at all by connecting only to computers of people you know and trust.
You can use the Freenet network to share files, publish websites, send emails, or communicate via message boards. The software is Java based and works with Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.
The Audacity team has released an updated version of the popular opern source audio editing application. Audacity 1.3.5 beta packs a bunch of minor updates, including bug fixes better file handling, and some interface improvements. Here are some of the things that jumped out at us:
Hit Shift while clicking record to start a recording at the end of an existing track
Users should see fewer invalid sample rate problems under LInux
Updated versions of the Portaudio, Libogg, LIbvorbis, and other libraries
More informative dialogs when dealing with unsupported file formats
New keyboard shortcuts
Audacity is already one of the best free audio editing applications for Mac, Linux, and Windows, and the program just keeps getting better.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 is due out in September. But if you just can't wait that long, today the developers released a beta of the open source office suite. Back in March we took a look at a pre-beta version of OpenOffice.org, but the latest build is a bit more stable. And while we wouldn't recommend replacing the software you use to balance your companies books with a public beta, you can just check it out if you're an office suite geek looking for a rush. We won't judge.
So what's new under the hood? Here are some of the highlights:
OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the first version to run on Mac OS X (there are also Linux and Windows versions)
OpenOffice.org Start Center gives you a one stop shop for creating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, databases, or templates
Support for collaborative spreadsheet editing
Improved Writer notes features
View multiple Writer pages while editing a document
Improved crop features in Draw and Impress
Support for ODF and MS Office 2007 formats
Keep in mind, this is beta software. So while it will probably work properly 99% of the time, don't blame us if it crashes your system or goes crazy and starts messing up the formatting of that manuscript you've been working on for the last 10 years. In other words, remember to backup your documents, and think twice about using OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta to create or edit really important files.
You just have to love an online game that knows exactly what it aims to be. And the concept of this game is, well, rather difficult. The Rather Difficult Font Game tests your ability to recognize typefaces by showing you a piece of text and then four font names. Your job is to correctly choose the correct typeface.
As with any multiple-choice test with a limited set of answers, this game becomes rather less difficult as you go, if you're careful to remember what you've already seen. While we're certainly not font experts, by process of elimination we were able to score an 18 out of 30 on our first try.
Like any good time waster, this one can be done relatively quickly, like maybe during your coffee break. And if you are the type of person that feels guilty about the time you spend playing time wasting online games, you can tell yourself that at least with this one you're learning something. Whatever lets you live with yourself, right?
Twitter users are increasingly starting to question whether the frequent number of Twitter accounts that are following them are actually people, or simply a form of Twitter spamming. The rule of thumb with that sort of question is usually that if you think something nefarious might be going on, unfortunately, you're probably right.
The next question that invariably comes up is, well, why? What benefit do these purported Twitter spammers get from friending everyone they possibly can? The answer is twofold:
1. There is a large number of very misguided people that seem to believe that the polite thing to do when someone follows you on Twitter is to follow them back. This is a ludicrous behavior. (As a quick aside, if one of the main things we struggle with in our high-speed, data filled lives is trying to keep a sane signal-to-noise ratio, and learning how to filter out the noise, why would we actively choose to follow random people's Twitter updates? What an incredible waste of time.) The thing is, this behavior can be and is exploited. If someone follows 20,000 random Twitter accounts, there is a very good chance that they will get at least 10% of those people following them back. Perfect! Now they have an audience of 2,000 people to spam, for free.
For some reason when a page is loading in Firefox, it doesn't seem to respond to user interaction immediately. For example, say you're loading a very long page (maybe you're using a free Backpack account), and you know that the content you need is half way down the page. By default, Firefox will ignore user interaction in favor of giving all processing power to page rendering.
It may well be that Firefox's engineers made this decision for a very good reason, but what if it bugs you that Firefox ignores you when you know exactly what you want to be doing? Well, it turns out there's a hidden setting in Firefox that will allow you to bend it to your will.
Firefox uses two priority modes when rendering a page: a low-priority mode that often checks for user input, and a high-priority mode that prioritizes page rendering over user input. There is a timer that determines how long Firefox will wait for user input before switching to high-priority rendering mode.
The Geek at How-To-Geek researched this setting, and determined that switching the default value from 750000 to 1000000 is a good balance that allows for a more responsive feeling browser, while still giving an adequate amount of time to the high-priority mode.
To make this change yourself, type about:config into your Firefox address bar, then type content.switch.threshold into the Filter field. You will likely not have any results returned. If the setting already exists, simply switch the value from the default 750000 to 1000000. If it doesn't, right click anywhere in the window and choose New > Integer. Use the following setting:
Key Name: content.switch.threshold
Key Value: 1000000
To reverse this tip, simply right-click on the setting and choose Reset from the context menu.
The Opera team has released the second public beta of Opera 9.5. The web browser packs all the features we've seen in earlier test builds like an improved tab manager, plus a bunch of new features and fixes. Here are just a few:
Full text history search from the address field
Spatial navigation highlighting similar to that used in Opera Mini 4 and Opera for the Nintendo Wii
Opera can now be set as the default mail application from the Windows Control Panel
Improved IMAP performance in email client
Improved Acid3 test performance (although like all browsers, Opera 9.5 beta 2 still fails the test)
Improved compatibility with Gmail 2
Improved fraud protection
Support for Extended Validation certificates
In other words, most of the changes won't be that noticeable to the average user. But the latest browser is more secure and should do a better job of rendering some web sites. Opera 9.5 beta 2 is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Have friends, relatives, or business contacts located in faraway lands? Internet telephony company Skype is launching its first plan that lets you make unlimited international PC to telephone calls, assuming you're calling a landline in one of 34 countries covered by the plan.
Most of Europe is covered, as well as the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.The $9.95/month plan doesn't cover calls to cellphones in all areas, but you can call mobile phones in the US, Canada, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Or you can just convince everybody you know to install Skype on their computers and mobile phones so you can make Skype to Skype calls for free.
There are currently two great software bundles now available for Mac OS X: the MacHeist Bundle and MacUpdate's Promo bundle. Both offer a collection of commercial Mac apps, and both offer great savings by purchasing the apps bundled instead of separately. Here is a quick breakdown of both bundles and our recommendation if you can have only one.
MacUpdate Promo The initial bundle costs $64.99 (USD) and includes the following:
Camino 1.6 is now out in the wild, and it looks to be the release a lot of people were waiting for. With many new features as well as many updated features, Camino 1.6 is an excellent and compelling alternative to Safari and Firefox on the Mac.
New to Camino 1.6:
Toolbar Search Improvements: The toolbar search in Camino can now be edited and customized, with the ability to delete, rename, and reorder search engines. Camino also supports OpenSearch plug-ins.
Streamlined Find Interface: No more Find panel in Camino 1.6. Instead, a simple Find toolbar will appear when you need it at the bottom of the browser window (this feature is very similar to Safari's inline search, though Safari's find toolbar appears on the top).
Tabbed Browsing Improvements: Camino 1.6 now includes a scrolling tab bar. If more tabs are open than can be displayed in the tab bar, you'll see arrows on the right and left edge that will allow you to scroll through the tabs.
Integrated Software Update: Using the "Sparkle" framework, Camino now has an auto-update feature.
There are also many improved features in Camino 1.6, including AppleScript support, feed detection, and spell checking.
The big improvement in Camino 1.6 for many users has to be the updated keychain support, which now stores information for multiple accounts in the Keychain. And, as always, Camino will automatically block pop-ups, ads, and animations.
You owe it to yourself to download Camino 1.6 and take it for a test run. It might just be the best browser on the Mac. Agree? Disagree? Spell it out in the comments.
Sure, you make fun of the chintzy Time Machine animation when you're out to sushi with your geek friends, but secretly you adore it. When the night is late, and it's just you and your Mac, you turn on Time Machine simply to gaze longingly into its starry goodness.
But don't you wish that you could just get that pesky Finder window out of the way, so you could stare into the full, unadulterated Time Machine backdrop? Well, we've got the next best thing, friend: the Time Machine Screensaver.
The Time Machine Screensaver is a Quartz Composer Movie that is pretty much an exact clone of the Time Machine animation. To install the screensaver, you can drag it onto the Screen Saver window, or put it into your default Screen Saver folder, or copy it to the Screen Saver alias included with the download. Once you see it in your Screen Saver preferences, select the Time Machine Screen Saver, and off you go.
Now, it's just you and the Time Machine. Face to face.
If you want something a little more "Leopard" themed, with the colors from the default Aurora desktop picture, you can download it from the Time Machine Screen Saver discussion forum.
Chances are, if you've searched the web for a universal video converter for the Mac, you've come across VisualHub (formerly iSquint). Now, the makers of VisualHub have brought the same conversion magic to audio with AudialHub version 1.0.
AudialHub can easily convert audio files to most any format of your choosing, including AAC, MP3, WMA, AIFF, WAV, Apple Lossless, 3G (cell phones), Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and Audio and MP3 CDs.
AudialHub brings the same simplicity-and optional advanced features-that VisualHub offers. If you want to use AudialHub for quick and dirty conversions, simply drop in some audio files, choose the output format, and hit start. That's it!
If you want more advanced conversion, you can look into the advanced settings, where you can set bitrate and channel, trim the audio file, add tags and comments, etc...
AudialHub also offers a Quick Preview capability, so you can instantly preview compression quality and trim settings before you convert. AudialHub also supports simultaneous conversions in separate queues, each with their own setting.
AudialHub is currently offered with a free trial; after that, it'll cost you $18.81 (you get a $4 discount if you're a current owner of VisualHub). AudialHub requires Mac OS 10.4.11 or later.
Deluge is an up-and-coming BitTorrent client for Mac, Windows, and Linux that looks strong enough to compete with the likes of Azureus, uTorrent, and Transmission.
Deluge supports the most common P2P features, including encryption, UPnP and NAT-PMP, Mainline DHT, proxy support, and more. The main strengths of Deluge, however, come from its design:
The program has a clean interface and is easy to look at, which makes for simple and unobtrusive torrent downloading.
The program was built to be extensible, with a rich plugin collection (many plugins are included in the software already)
The progam was designed to be lightweight; it doesn't tax your system like other BitTorrent clients.
Best of all, like previously stated, Deluge will run on Mac, Windows, and Linux. If you're willing to give Deluge the old college try, you can download it here – and be sure to report back what you like and don't like about it.
If you're like us, which we hope you're not; you don't become writers for Download Squad by being handsome, well-adjusted, and sociable, (Ed: Speak for yourself), you like to keep your applications up-to-date.
AppFresh is a promising new application for the Mac that aims to keep all of your applications updated, or fresh (hence the name). The wonderful thing about AppFresh is that it doesn't limit itself to only applications; instead, it scans all widgets, preference panes, and plugins for updates as well.
AppFresh even scans your system for Apple updates, thus removing the need to run Apple's Software Update separately. It also takes the place of Microsoft's AutoUpdate, if you have Office 2004 or 2008 installed.
Another gold star for AppFresh: you can download and install updates from directly within the AppFresh interface.
AppFresh is currently a Development Preview, and will remain free at least until version 1.0 (the developers haven't promised anything beyond that). AppFresh works on both Tiger and Leopard.
You just have to love an online game that knows exactly what it aims to be. And the concept of this game is, well, rather difficult. 
For some reason when a page is loading in Firefox, it doesn't seem to respond to user interaction immediately. For example, say you're loading a very long page (maybe you're using a free 
