Growl provides customizable pop-up alerts for hundreds of Mac apps, making sure you never miss an important chat message or completed download. You can use Growl to set an alert for just about anything, and you can also make Growl notifications look practically any way you want. The built-in themes and the list on the official Growl Styles page don't even begin to cover all the options for gorgeous notifications, from the minimal to the very flashy.

Here are 10 lesser-known Growl styles that look a lot nicer than the defaults:

Until April 30th 2010 -- six whole months! -- Adobe Lightroom 3 is available for public beta testing.

In the last week there's been a lot of news regarding Lightroom 3's advanced feature, and now here's your chance to actually give it a whirl!

Lightroom is great for every kind of photographer -- casual, avid snapper or professional. It's not a full-featured editing suite like Photoshop, but it does have most functionality that photographers (note: not 'digital artists') might require -- but if you're the kind of artist or photographer that likes to airbrush his works into submission, Lightroom isn't for you. It is a 'digital darkroom and presentation' tool -- so from downloading photos, to sorting through them and producing pretty presentations/contact sheets, Lightroom's the program to use.

For those of you that have used it before, and are wondering why it might be a good time to upgrade (or at least try the beta), here are the new or enhanced features that Adobe are touting:

• Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
• Portable sharable slideshows with audio-designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)*

And if those bullets got your juices flowing, here's the download link again: Adobe Lightroom 3 Public Beta

When it comes to organizing your email inbox, Apple's Mail.app isn't the most sophisticated offering out there. FlagIt! is a mail add-on that lets you quickly mark your messages as urgent, pending or to-do. It adds its own set of flag icons to the seldom-used "flag" column in Mail, and sets the titles of your messages to the corresponding colors.

Once you've installed FlagIt!, you can start flagging by right-clicking (or control-clicking) on messages in your inbox and scrolling down to "Mark." In addition to flagging messages, you can set up custom flags and mark messages as completed right from this menu. All the default Mark menu items are still there, too, so you can mark as read or unread like you normally would. One word of caution to Snow Leopard users: to make FlagIt! work, you'll have to put Mail.app into 32-bit mode. You can do that by selecting Mail in the Finder and doing a Get Info.

If you've been waiting patiently for Google Chrome to come to the Mac, but you're not an early adopter who likes to take chances with nightly builds, you'll be happy to know that the first official Developer Preview of Chrome is out now. Chrome brings speeds comparable to that other Webkit browser you may have tried on your Mac, Safari. It's also got a growing library of themes, in case the default Chrome blue turns you off.

With Safari 4 switching away from the tabs-on-top after trying them out in beta, the orientation of the tabs is Chrome's defining UI feature. Chrome's multi-process architecture also keeps one crashing tab from taking all your other tabs down with it. Sure, you can "restore all tabs" when Firefox crashes, but that's still more of a pain than it needs to be. Chrome is also making strides toward supporting extensions. It'll also import bookmarks and settings from your other browsers, so it's easy to make the switch.

[via Ars Technica]

The open source movement isn't just for grown-ups: Open Office 4 Kids is a slimmed-down version of the open source Microsoft Office alternative OpenOffice.org.

The target age group for Open Office 4 Kids is 7-12, but after trying it out, I think there are a lot of adults who would prefer it over MS Office or the full version of OpenOffice. It's available on whichever OS you've set your kid up with: Mac, Windows and (of course) Linux.

Less UI clutter helps make OO4K super-fast. Load times for the app and for creating a new document blew away Office 2008 on my Mac, and I didn't experience any of the annoying lag in loading font menus that I sometimes get in Office.

OO4Kids also has large, very obvious buttons for all of the most common functions of each Office app. The "4Kids" branding is almost a shame, because this could also be Open Office 4 Your Mom Who Always Asks You How To Do Stuff in Office.

On the other hand, I'm glad that any 7-to-12-year-olds who use this app will grow up understanding that Microsoft Word isn't the only way to write a paper.

[via Ghacks]

There's been a lot of buzz about cloud computing over the last year or two as more and more applications (email, Office, note-keeping and so on) move to the web. Then, a little over a month ago, I started seeing a lot of buzz surrounding something called CloudApp.

A more generic sounding name, I could not imagine. All I could tell from the "OMG CLOUDAPP!!" tweets was that there was a new app named CloudApp, that beta invites were being issued soon, and that a lot of people were very excited about receiving an invite. I'm not sure anyone knew any more about it than I did other than "OMG IT'S IN THE CLOUD™ " and "OMG IT'S AN APP" and "OMG CLOSED BETA INVITE ONLY".

Three possibilities crossed my mind:

1. Sociological study of the feeding frenzy surrounding beta invites and tech buzz words.
2. Twitter phishing scam
3. (remote possibility) an actual app.

Possibility #2 was confirmed in my mind when I saw the following tweet:

The good news is that there's now a Google Wave desktop client for the Mac. The bad news is that it's not yet that much better than the web interface or a Fluid app. The app is called Waveboard, and it looks quite promising, although it's still in its early stages. In case a prototype for Wave on the desktop isn't cool enough for you, there's also an iPhone app in the works.

Waveboard offers a handful of features that you won't get by running Wave in Fluid. It alerts you to changes in your waves using a badge on the dock icon, and also supports Growl notifications. It also allows you to copy a link to a public wave so you can share it with others. Any wave links you run across in your browser can be set to open in Waveboard by default. True, the look of Waveboard is still identical to the Wave web interface, but the additional features at least start us down the path toward an awesome desktop version of Wave.

I'll admit that it seems strange to use Microsoft's Live Mesh on a Mac, but with Apple's MobileMe getting spotty reviews, some Mac users prefer to look for alternative ways to sync. Until now, Snow Leopard users who rely on Live Mesh were out of luck, but a new version of the Live Mesh client supports OS X 10.6. If you're still on Leopard, you don't need to update to the new release, but Snow Leopard users will have to reinstall Live Mesh to get it working again.

Remembering that Live Mesh is available on the Mac - and seeing the new iPhone app from another syncing service, Dropbox - got me thinking about whether you can use Live Mesh on an iPhone. It turns out that the answer is yes, although there's unfortunately no app for that, yet. If you're sharing files through Live Mesh, you can get to them on an iPhone via the web interface. Although Apple fans tend to balk at using anything from Microsoft, this might be one case where it's viable.

It would be easy for Linux and Mac users to point to this blog post by Brian Krebs at the Washington Post's Security Fix and feel smug. The post flat out states that the simplest, most cost-effective way to avoid online fraud is: "Don't use Microsoft Windows when accessing your bank account online."

If you're a Windows user, ouch.

But hold on a second. The thing is, Krebs isn't endorsing the Mac or Linux platform in his condemnation of Windows. Rather, he's pointing out that Windows is the most-targeted platform, but that certainly doesn't mean that Macs or Linux machines are invulnerable.

Krebs points out that the safest way to avoid malware and make sure your banking session is secure is to boot your machine from a Live CD that is a pristine, uninfected environment. Live CDs are typically Linux variants, but the OS doesn't really matter -- what matters here is that you are booting an operating system that malware can't infect because its state is not persistent.

This is solid advice, and it leads me to wonder how long it will be before the major OS makers offer a locked-down virtual machine, or better yet a locked-down banking partition that is a fast booting light OS containing only a secure browser with which to do your most sensitive online tasks.

Kind of sounds like a job for Chrome OS, doesn't it?

Shirt Pocket released an update to its Mac backup software package SuperDuper! today, and though it's only a minor version number revision, it's a major speed improvement. The software company announced on their blog that, while they understated the speed increase on the official announcement (there they only claimed a 2x increase), during their in-house testing they were seeing speed increases of about 3x over how long it was previously taking to do an incremental update of a backup set.

If you're a Mac user and you're not aware of SuperDuper!, you should be. It's a backup program that creates a complete drive image of your Mac's drive, then on a schedule can keep the image up to date using incremental backups. This means that once I had created the image, I could keep my Mac's backup up to date by letting SuperDuper! update my drive image overnight. Typically this takes about an hour on my machine, and if Shirt Pocket's blog is to be believed, that number will drop down to about 20 minutes.

What's cool about this way of doing a backup is that if you are backing up to an external Firewire drive, you can actually use Target Mode when booting your Mac and boot from the external drive in the event that your primary drive fails. This means that you are only out of commission momentarily, and if you are doing daily backups, you have only lost a maximum of one day's work.

If there's one Mac app that I wish I had a Windows equivalent for, it's SuperDuper!. Aside from the goofy name with the awkward exclamation point in it, SuperDuper! is by far the best workstation backup application I've ever used, and now it comes with 66% more oomph!

SuperDuper 2.6.2 is a free upgrade for existing users. A feature-limited free version is available that can make bootable clones, but can't do incremental updates. To do that, you'll need the full version, which costs $27.95US.

If your computer has an accelerometer in it, Firefox 3.6 will be able to detect when your computer is tilting to the left, right, front, or back.

Accelerometers serve a number of purposes in laptops and tablets. In some cases, they can be used to shut down a hard drive if your computer is falling so that less damage occurs when your laptop hits the floor. But they can also be used to add motion-sensitive controls to some applications. And starting with the next generation of the web browser, Firefox will be one of those applications.

Mozilla developer Christopher Blizzard has published a short video showing the new feature in action. Mozilla is releasing an API that allows web publishers to support the feature. Enabled web pages will be able to respond as your computer moves, allowing you to play web games with motion controls or just to rotate your screen and read web pages in portrait mode.

Support has been added for Mac, Linux, and some Lenovo Thinkpad models.

[via CNet]

Adobe has released an Adobe AIR based client for Facebook called Adobe Photo Uploader for Facebook. As Digital Inspiration notes, it's better than Facebook's official app.

Photo Uploader for Facebook offers most of Facebook's functionality, with uploading photos being only a small part of it, though it does make uploading photos much better than using Facebook's web interface. The app offers various views including a rich media version and a plain text version, as well as offering a slide show mode.

Adobe is really selling this app short by naming it Adobe Photo Uploader for Facebook, given the full functionality of the app. Maybe they don't want to step on any toes, but it seems that with an app this powerful, they'd want to pitch it as an AIR version of the Facebook experience.

Eventbox, an all-in-one social networking app with Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader and Digg support (and more), impressed me when I reviewed it last year. Now it's been acquired by UK-based Realmac software, makers of LittleSnapper and Rapidweaver (and, full disclosure, home to Download Squad's Nik Fletcher). So, to acknowledge its new developers, Eventbox is also getting a new name: Socialite.

Socialite 1.0 launches in November, and existing Eventbox users will be able to get new, free licenses. RealMac hasn't announced any firm plans in terms of features, but Socialite will continue to support all the services it does now. A brand-new license for Socialite will run you $20.

Pollux is a new Mac OS X application by Chetan Surpur and Shashwat Kandadai that will automatically tag your music files in iTunes. It is capable of tagging the name, artist, album, album art, genre, year, and lyrics for each song, and it does so by analyzing the song's audio fingerprint. This means that it can draw on a database of tag information, and do so very accurately, even if the song has no identifying information at all to begin with.

To use Pollux, you select songs in iTunes, then from the Pollux icon in your menu bar, choose Tag Selected iTunes Tracks. Tagging can take a little while, so don't expect instant results. In my testing I found tags to return in anywhere between 15 and 60 seconds. Tagging an entire library this way could certainly take some time, but since it's all automated, why not? There is also an option in Pollux to automatically tag any new music that is imported into iTunes.

There are other applications that do similar things, but Pollux sets itself apart by being both unobtrusive and free. Pollux is still in beta, so you might experience a problem here and there, though in my limited testing it was solid.