Camino is the dark horse in the Mac browser competition. It's the faster, lighter little brother to Firefox, and there's a solid base of users who prefer it over Firefox and Safari. Camino uses the same Gecko rendering engine that Firefox is built on, but its focus is on a speedy user experience instead of maximum extensibility. With the preview of version 2.0, just released, Camino has added and tweaked some things to make the browsing experience even better.

Despite some rumors that Camino would be switching to Webkit, the rendering engine shared by Safari and Google Chrome, the browser is stick with Gecko. Version 2 updates Camino to the latest version of Gecko, which should improve its ability to handle flash. It also improves support for web standards, scoring a 71 on the Acid3 test (that's the same as Firefox 3.)

In terms of new features, there's a "tab overview" mode that shows thumbnails of all your tabs. This is a big plus if you're someone who keeps a huge number of sites open at once. There's also a new menu within the browser history that shows your recently-closed pages, so you can get back if you closed something by accident. What's more, full content zoom allows you to shrink or magnify an entire page, not just the text size. All in all, a solid improvement for Camino.

Now that torrent technology has become one of the most popular ways to distribute large files, it's important to find the right Bittorrent client. If you're on a Mac, that's Transmission. I used to be a fan of Azureus (now called Vuze), but I switched to Transmission because it's less cluttered and takes up a lot less screen real-estate.

Transmission's not bare-bones in terms of features -- you can fine-tune your upload and download speeds, change ports, and check your ratio -- but its design is minimal and not too distracting. I don't want a busy-looking torrent app, I want one that I can set up quickly and leave alone until my downloads finish. Transmission provides that, while still letting advanced users get under the hood where they need to. It's also free and open source! That's why it's one of my favorite Mac apps.

Cue music, enter FunctionFlip. This app -- now a Preference Pane as of version 1.2, does what it says it does: it flips your function keys one-by-one. So if you want to free up F1 through F4, but leave F10 and F12 as volume keys, you can go right ahead. It's the kind of great idea that makes you wonder why Apple hasn't built it into the system preferences yet.

[via Mac Gems]

Although no release date for the Linux and OS X variants of Chrome has been announced, some details about the Mac version of Chrome are starting to emerge.

Yesterday, Amanda Walker, a Google software engineer, laid out some of the basics on the Official Google Mac Blog.

While individuals who excel at Mac development are building the Mac version of Chrome (and Linux developers are focusing on the Linux version), the different platforms are not operating on different teams -- everyone is part of the same group and working off of the same Chromium source tree.

As I discussed earlier, Chromium is available for developers to build on OS X -- the UI layer does not exist right now, but you can run tests in the TestShell.

When it comes to a release date for either Mac or Linux, Amanda won't give an estimate. In the blog entry, she writes, "we're not setting an artificial date for when they'll be ready--we simply can't predict enough to make a solid estimate." Fair enough, though obviously lots of Mac and Linux fans hope that it is sooner rather than later.

More details, at least about who is working on the Mac version, have also started to emerge. Mike Pinkerton, the project leader for Camino, posted in his blog that he is working on the Chromium project as a Mac developer. For anyone unfamiliar with Camino, it is a native OS X Gecko browser. Think the rendering engine of Firefox 2, with the interface and Cocoa-goodness of Safari. Up until FireFox 3, Camino was pretty much the only Gecko-based browser I used on my Mac. Interestingly, Pinkerton's former co-lead on the Camino project, Dave Hyatt, currently works at Apple on the Safari and WebKit teams.

Knowing how successfully the Camino team adapted Gecko to OS X, this gives me a lot of confidence in Chrome for OS X.

Reading and writing to a Mac formatted drive from Windows couldn't be any easier than selecting the samba file sharing option in Leopard. This works great if you have 2 physical computers but what if you only have a Mac running Boot Camp? Since Leopard isn't running getting to that document on the Mac partition from Windows would be difficult unless you installed MacDrive.

Once installed, Windows Explorer is able to mount the Mac drives right along side your standard Windows formatted drives. You are free to access them like any other drive.

If you're worried that you may accidentally delete files off your Mac partition just tick the option to mount the drives in "read only" mode, thus preventing any accidents. MacDrive's options can be access by double clicking it's icon in the system tray. But once you have tailored it to your work flow you'll rarely have a need to access the options.

In our testing we found no noticeable performance drops while accessing standard office documents and music files. And even if there were any drops in performance, the benefit of being able to access files created on the Mac partition from within Windows more than makes up for it.

So if you have your Mac set to dual boot you may want to consider MacDrive in order to swap your documents back and forth.

Headline is a distinctive-looking newsreader for OS X that offers a different reading experience than you might be used to from popular RSS apps like NetNewsWire or Newsfire. To maintain a small desktop footprint, Headline lists stories in a compact one-column layout that can be quickly sorted using a dropdown. It displays the full stories using a slick, Quick-Look-like effect, taking advantage of Core Animation. And now this reader has reached its 1.0 release!

Headline definitely has potential, but with its major competitors switching to a free model, you're going to have to really fall in love with its unique UI to pay the $20 pricetag. That said, we do really like the minimalism of Headline, and it would be nice to other newsreaders develop a mini-mode that mimics the one-column layout. You might also want to check out Headline if you subscribe to podcasts via RSS, but aren't a fan of iTunes, as Headline can play them inline.

When it comes to download management, it seems like Windows has always been ahead of OS X. That might still be true, but it's definitely up for debate, thanks to a very smart app called Leech. It's got the basic features that all good download managers provide: you can use it from within the browser, and it allows you to pause downloads, or resume them after a crash. Good start, but Leech really shines when it comes to defining rules for different file types and hosts.

Let's say you want all .mp3 files to download to your iTunes library, all .jpg files in Pictures, and all DMGs on the desktop. Yeah, Leech will do that, no problem. It also handles post-processing, so you can expand those DMGs automatically, or play those Mp3s as they finish downloading. You can drag or copy-paste a URL into Leech to start downloading immediately, or shift-drag to choose a different location. And if you don't want Leech in your browser, you can use it on its own, too.

So why not Activity Monitor? Well, if you're just going to use it as a display in the dock, it's using way more system resources than you need. Its Dock readout also isn't as customizable as the one in CPU History, which lets you set the update interval, the width of the bars in the CPU graph, and the size of the icon in the Dock. The latest version also shows separate graphs for multi-core processors. It doesn't really do much, but CPU History gets its very specific job done with minimal hassle.

[via Daring Fireball]

There are tons of useful preferences in OS X and popular Mac apps that aren't part of the GUI, but you can tweak them by using the command-line. That Terminal stuff isn't for everyone, though, so it's a good thing there's Secrets. This little preference pane from Blacktree Software (the makers of Quicksilver) is worth a thousand mini-tutorials. It comes pre-loaded with preferences for the Finder, as well as for apps like Twitterrific, iTunes, Safari, and NetNewsWire.

Among many other tricks, Secrets can change the orientation and pinning of the Dock, set how often Mail refreshes RSS feeds, show all hidden files in the Finder, and switch Safari's loading animation to a circle instead of a bar. One of the cooler Secrets is turning Dashboard on or off with one click. Back in 2005, we reported on the struggle to get rid of Dashboard, including apps dedicated to the purpose. Well, this is 2008, so get Secrets. You'll be able to do that and lots more.

Cocoalicious is a really slick -- but, unfortunately, Mac-only -- dedicated browser for your Del.icio.us bookmarks. If you're a bookmarking junkie, and you have way more sites saved to Del.icio.us than you could ever hope to keep track of, this could be an ideal solution for you. It's laid out a bit like Apple Mail, with your tags running down the left side, your bookmarks on top, and a browser pane at the bottom.

You can put bookmarks directly into Cocoalicious -- it syncs with your Del.icio.us account -- or use the bookmarklet to add stuff to Cocoalicious straight from your browser. This way you can take advantage of autocompletion, tagging by dragging, and other features that make Del.icio.us easier. Cocoalicious also supports Spotlight, so you can search for your bookmarks straight from the Finder!


[via Lifehacker]

On June 17, 2008 Mozilla attempted to set a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period. According to Mozilla over 8 million downloads were recorded. Currently they are awaiting word from Guinness if they were successful.

But there was one thing we wanted to know about this number. Out of the 3 major operating systems in use today which one blazed away with the most downloads. So we decided to ask and a Mozilla spokesperson gave us the following numbers:

• Windows 79%
• Linux 13%
• OS X 8%

Now the number 1 spot didn't surprise us at all since Windows leads in overall computer operating systems it's almost a given that most of the downloads would come from Windows. But what was a bit surprising was that Linux bested OS X in the numbers of downloads.

One could say that Ubuntu, which is a very popular Linux distro comes packaged with Firefox so it's only natural that more downloads would come from Linux users. But according to w3counter, OS X accounts for 4.95% of the operating systems in use while Linux is barely half of this at 2.01%

So this strikes us as odd. What would cause OS X to slip to 3rd place in the number of downloads? Do these numbers suggested that Apple users only like to use Apple apps? Or did a large group of Mac users not get invited to the download party?

If you're not one of the 125,000 people who got a chance to try out the cross-platform note capture app Evernote during its private beta, don't despair. Evernote has launched an open beta, so now everyone can give it a try. If you were already in the beta, does this change anything for you? Yes, indeed it does: there are now two types of Evernote accounts, free and premium.

Free users keep all the features of the closed beta, with the caveat that you're now limited to 40mb a month of uploaded notes. If you're a power-user, or someone who's really sold on the Evernote lifestyle, go premium for 5 bucks a month or $45/year and get rid of that cap. Premium also comes with the option of SSL for all your uploads (for all those pictures of the enemy base, we guess) and priority access to the queue for Evernote's text-recognition features.

If you're like us, you have to read long blocks of text on a monitor all the time, and it's kind of a pain for your eyes. E-books and long PDF articles would be great if they could somehow get diced into neat, readable columns. Hey, it works for newspapers. Well, Tofu brings that pleasant reading experience to the Mac.

In a nutshell, Tofu cuts up what you're reading -- whether it's a PDF, a doc, or a chunk of text you've selected -- into columns. This is a good, because monitors are wider than the human eye is really comfortable with, and columns fit the text into your optimal scanning area for easy reading. Tofu's full screen mode and adjustable text size and colors are crucial, too. This app is good enough that we'll think twice before printing out something we can just read in Tofu.

Besides having one of the coolest names for an app that we've seen in a while, CookieThief is pretty handy if you're thinking about switching to the sexy, lightweight Mac browser Camino. Sure, a lot of people prefer Camino's speedy, no-frills browsing experience to flashier, more bloated browsers like Firefox and Safari, but Camino apparently forgot one handy little feature for switchers: moving your cookies over from your old browser.

Retyping those passwords is a pain, so you can use CookieThief to steal all your login cookies from Safari and put them right into Camino. No fuss, no muss, just cookies. We'll admit this is an app with a pretty limited scope, and you'll probably only use it once, but if you can't be bothered to do it yourself, it might be just what you're looking for. (Oh, and if you happen to be going from Camino to Safari, CookieThief can copy your cookies that way, too!)

Many of us have been in this situation: you want to post your email address on your website so that people can read it, click a link, and get in touch with you. You're worried about displaying your email as a regular link, though, because bots will index it and start sending you spam. If you want to post your email address on a website so that it's readable by humans, but obfuscated from any bots trying to harvest it, take a look at The Enkoder.

The Enkoder is a quick web form (and a Mac desktop app!) that takes your email address and the link text you want to use, and spits out some encrypted JavaScript that you can put on the web. It's provided free-of-charge by Dan Benjamin and HiveLogic.com. The Mac version runs straight from your machine and remembers previous encodings.

[via Daring Fireball]