It frustrates me that so many different services have a calendar function, and yet it's still a pain in the ass to make sure that my personal calendar is up to date. More often than not I find myself manually creating events using copy-and-paste, instead of the event being automatically created for me by whatever service I'm using.

If you happen to be a Facebook Events user, a utility called EventSync can help you keep your iCal calendar application on your Mac up to date with your Facebook events. It's smart enough to allow you to choose to sync all events, or only those that you have accepted (amongst other options). Development is active on the utility too, and Hawk Wings reports that version 2.0 will include the ability to display the flyers and images associated with the Facebook events.

EventSync is donationware for the Mac platform.

OS X browser geeks, start salivating ... Reports from around the web are saying that Google's Chrome browser might get a finished Mac version in about month. Stephen Shankland at CNET has been vigilantly monitoring the Chrome development mailing lists, and some talk about Chrome's new extensions UI reveals that the Mac launch is scheduled for early December.

Chrome 4 for Windows is in Beta already, while Mac and Linux only recently got their first developer previews. Since the highest-profile new feature in the Chrome 4 Beta is browser actions (Chrome's equivalent of Firefox's add-ons), developers are getting their extensions ready for launch. Apparently, a product manager for Chrome posted a message advising developers to switch to the new browser actions system so they'd have more time to get their code in shape for a beta launch in "early December."

While software giveaway sites like MacHeist allow indie developers to trade a bunch of free copies of their app for publicity and new customers, some developers aren't on board with that arrangement. Red Sweater Software's Daniel Jalkut believes in getting paid for his hard work, so he decided to offer a 20% discount instead of giving his apps away for free.

It turns out he's not alone. In fact, over 80 different Mac developers have joined Jalkut's "One Finger Discount" promotion. That means you have your choice of over 100 apps at 1/5 off (hence the "one finger").

Of course, the promotion includes Jalkut's own apps, the impressive MarsEdit blog editor and Black Ink crossword maker, but there are some other choice goodies there, too. Some of my personal favorites include Flying Meat's Acorn image editor and VoodooPad, and SmileOnMyMac's TextExpander. There are also tons of apps I haven't tried yet, or haven't even heard of. That's the whole point, though: giving you a chance to discover something new at a big discount. Indie developers for the win!

It was pretty exciting news at Download Squad to hear Orb, the "sort of software version of Slingbox," was available for Mac. Orb allows you to broadcast your media to any device that has a web browser. After downloading Orb to your "always on" Mac with a high speed internet connection, you can access all your photos, songs, TV shows, and videos from any device with a browser and media player.

After downloading the app, Orb indexes your media and then prompts you to either log in to mycast.orb.com, or create a log in if you don't have an account. After you log in you can see your dashboard and all your media goodies.


Though my songs appeared immediately, my photos did not. There are various feed settings you can play with and channels to explore. Also, with a simple drag drop interface you can share your media with your friends via email, SMS, widget on your blog, or a public URL.


Checking it out from my home computer is one thing, but would it work on other devices? Success! I was able to access my media from my Dell PC.

A note for iPhone owners: The esteemed and indefatigable Jay Hathaway noted that he received errors when he tried to download the free version of OrbLive for the iPhone, which he tried from both his iPhone and his iTunes account on his Mac. There are 3 flavors of Orb available for the iPhone: OrbLive free, OrbMedia ($4.99) and OrbLive ($9.99)

Note to Orb: Please update your landing page to include PC and Mac, ok?

As web apps become more powerful, more popular, and more full-featured, they're starting to replace desktop apps for many people. A Mac app called Fluid can pull those web applications onto your desktop and turn them into OS X native site-specific browsers.

Fluid has a lot of advantages compared to running web apps in your browser: you get a Cocoa app with its own Dock icon, automatic unread badges for sites like Gmail and Google Reader, and built-in userscript support. Keeping your web apps in a separate browser also means that they can't be taken down when another site crashes in some other tab. You can even create menubar apps, so your favorite webapp will be close at hand, right at the top of your screen.

To find icons for your Fluid apps, I recommend checking out the Fluid Icons Flickr group. The users there have come up with attractive icons for most of the apps on my list. Chris Ivarson has also designed a handful of great icons for Fluid apps.

Now that you know a little bit about how and why you should use Fluid, give these 10 sites a spin as site-specific browsers!

Google Wave

Google's hot new communication tool is a perfect candidate for a site-specific browser. It's pretty resource-intensive, and it's still in the preview stage, so it's prone to crashes and lag. I haven't found any excellent Wave userscripts yet, and the site's favicon makes a nice enough Fluid icon. If you want an additional icon and a userscript that gives you a badge count for Wave, Devthought has posted them.

Google Reader

A lot of people are already using Google Reader as their main RSS app, so it makes sense to set it up in Fluid. You also get the benefit of an unread count badge on the Dock icon and a bunch of great userscripts. One of my favorites is Helvetireader. Try setting it up with Chris Ivarson's icon.

Share

Have you ever received an iWork file created in Pages, Numbers, or Keynote on a Mac, and not had any way to deal with it? Next time, try changing the file's extension to .zip, then unzip it with your favorite zip utility. Inside you should find a PDF preview document containing a nicely formatted version of the document in question.

It seems strange that Apple doesn't promote this fact more, as it's a real usability win for iWork users that want to share their documents with non-Mac users. Wouldn't it be nice if Word, Excel, and Powerpoint did this?

[photo by *keng]

Mozilla's Camino, the lightweight Mac alternative to Firefox, is getting very close to a 2.0 release. The first release candidate is out now -- you can download it by checking for updates in an earlier version of the browser -- and it's got updates to appearance, security features and more. You'll notice a new, more Leopard-like look for the tabs and toolbars, making Camino blend in better with recent versions of OS X.

One of the best additions to the new version of Camino is a built-in Flash blocker. You can turn it on to block all Flash animations, and then add exceptions the sites whose Flash you actually want to see. Other security features include making use of Google Safe Browsing, which warns you when you're headed for a site that Google has blacklisted for malware or phishing. All-in-all, Camino 2 isn't as feature-packed as Firefox, or as pretty as Safari, but it's lighter than either one (and offers Firefox-equivalent page-load times using Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine).

[via TechCrunch]

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]

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.

After a long, long wait, RIM have finally released their Blackberry Desktop sync product for Mac OS X.

The application allows you to sync your iTunes playlists, calendars, contacts, notes and tasks with your BlackBerry, manage applications, apply software updates and backup and restore your device (with support for scheduled updates and encryption).

Blackberry Desktop for Mac can manage multiple BlackBerry devices and is a free download.

The popular Twitter client Tweetie -- available for both Mac and iPhone -- is getting a major overhaul.

Tweetie 2.0 for iPhone is built on the same framework -- dubbed "Bigbird" the Mac version enjoyed, stripped to essentials and updated. The new version also promises a complete offline mode with caching of tweets and the ability to remember exactly where you left off. It also fully supports landscape mode, gestures and even has a complete draft mode that can send updates to Birdhouse. Whew!

Some other cool features include:

• Saved searches
• Better threaded conversations
• Link to iPhone address book
• Multiple attachment support
• Hashtag picker
• Short URL previews

Former Download Squad'er Christina Warren managed to sneak in a preview for Mashable, which looks rather promising. Tweetie 2.0 for iPhone is coming soon and will cost $2.99. The Mac version update will be free.

I'm willing to bet that while reading Download Squad, you've discovered some great applications that you now use on a regular basis.

Although we all use our machines in a slightly different way, I always find it fascinating to hear about which applications other people use and often when chatting to friends or colleagues I'll learn about an application that i've never used before - there's nothing like a personal recommendation.

That's where our new feature - 'Tell DLS: What are you top 10 must-have apps?' - comes in!

Each week, a Download Squad team member is going to share their top 10 applications are on their chosen platform and explain why! We'll be covering Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and the mobile operating systems, so hopefully you'll discover some gems that you hadn't used before too.

Of course, being a 'Tell DLS' feature, we want this to be all about sharing your experience too - so please post your chosen top 10 in the comments.

Read on after the jump for my top 10 (how many can you identify from the icons above?).

Snippet is an OS X app that gives you quick access to snippets of code you want to reuse in your projects. it sits in your menubar, and its most important functions are accessible without using a mouse. You can add new snippets and search your saved ones using hotkeys, so you don't break up your workflow. Once you grab a snippet, it'll send the focus back to the window you were coding in, no clicking necessary.

You can keep track of your snippets by tagging them with keywords for better searching, and labeling each one with the appropriate language. Snippet also syncs over MobileMe, so you can access your code on multiple Macs (which is great if you have separate work and home machines). The downside to Snippet is the $12.95 pricetag, but it's the kind of app you'll use for work every day if you end up liking it, so the price is definitely not unreasonable.

One of the more frustrating things I found when moving from Windows to a Mac in a business environment was receiving email messages that contained other messages as attachments. This is a fairly common thing for Outlook users to do, and it doesn't usually cause problems because Outlook can happily open those messages. It's not very good email etiquette and you should avoided doing it if possible (forwarding the message makes it possible for the receiver's email program to index and search the contents), but there are times when it makes sense -- such as when forwarding a batch of messages at once.

The problem is that the Mail app that comes with all Macs unfortunately isn't capable of opening Outlook's .msg files. If you use a Mac and regularly receive messages from Outlook users, it's likely you've run into this problem at some point.

45RPM Software created MailRaider to solve just this problem. It's a free app that does one thing, and one thing well: makes .msg files created with Microsoft Outlook viewable on a Mac, including any included attachments. Formatting may be lost, but typically that's not a huge issue.

One interesting aspect of MailRaider is that the developer has pulled out the code that he uses to read the mail messages, and has turned it into a framework he calls MOLE. MOLE is a free framework for developers to use that need to read Microsoft OLE documents on a Mac.

There are other ways to read Outlook messages on a Mac, but MailRaider's price (free) and simplicity are definitely compelling.

[via Lifehacker]

If there's one thing that's something of a chore on a computer it's the task of keeping your software up to date. Sure, operating system patches are handled by the OS itself and some applications implement their own update systems (particularly on the Mac where Sparkle is prolific), but wouldn't it be great if you could manage all of your application updates in one place? Well, if you are on a Mac then the free application AppFresh - which has just received a minor update - is the answer to your prayers!

As you can see from the screenshot above, AppFresh searches your machine for applications and lists the currently installed version, latest available version together and the release date. Simply select the applications you want to update, hit 'Install' and off it goes to work it's magic... and magical it is indeed!

There's a lot to like about AppFresh. It looks very slick and has a user interface that is in line with the best Mac applications, it's frequently updated and best of all it's free! AppFresh interfaces with the iusethis website for it's version information and can also save information on the applications you are using back to your iusethis profile. A benefit of this is that if you rebuild your Mac at any time, you can ask Appfresh to reinstall all your favourite applications from your iusethis profile. Neat!

As well as applications, AppFresh supports widgets, preference panes and application plugins (as well OS updates) ensuring you are always up to date.

The newly released version 0.8.5 of the application (yes, it is a pre-release version) adds improved Snow Leopard compatability (while retaining compatability with Tiger) as well as a host of minor fixes.