Mario Paint Composer lets you do what you know you've wanted to do all of your life...compose music in the key of Super Mario. You'll remember this from the Super NES days, but everything is way more fun on the computer.
This baby is free and it's available for Windows AND Mac and it comes from unFun games. Yay.
Don't have any music writing chops? No problem, neither do we. It makes fun noises and has cool Mario icons. 'Nuff said.
The default song when you load up Mario Paint Composer is a jazzy version of your favorite video game theme song ever. But it's up to you to write the next masterpiece.
And not just any masterpiece, you get to use pigs and cats and hearts.
Best part is that when the app is loaded, everywhere you click on your computer, the sounds follow. I like hearing a nice Yoshi sound when I click on an email or on iChat.
unFun built an interface for you to lo in and download all the songs you want, for your personal listening and partytime enjoyment, but it took forever to log into the system, so we wouldn't hang our hats on that feature.
Since it was revealed that Apple's recently-announced .mac replacement, MobileMe, was partially built on something called SproutCore, the buzz around this hot new JavaScript framework has been growing. Although this is the first that many people will have heard about it, SproutCore has actually been around for a while, powering services like .mac's Mobile Galleries. Now it's getting so much attention that SproutCore.com has been unreachable all day, a week after the WWDC announcement.
So, why SproutCore? Daniel Eran Dilger, over at RoughlyDrafted, has a great rundown of things to love about this open source JavaScript framework: it will allow developers to build web apps that look more like desktop apps, function offline, and take advantage of modern browser features. Apple's using SproutCore to build a front end for WebDav and its own WebObjects, but other developments could easily add PHP, JSON or XML data to the mix, to name a few.
Parallels for Mac, the crazily popular utility for Mac users to run Windows on their Apple computers in...a window has said the product's user base has hit 1,000,000 users.
That's a really nice pace for a piece of software not blessed by Mr. Jobs himself we'd say.
Right now the company's running a special where you can get 2 copies for $129. Kind of cool if you have multiple Macs around the house like a lot of you do.
Our question is this though:
Do a lot of people get Parallels and run Windows because they want to, or because they have to? Do people secretly love Windows XP (or egads Vista) but want to feel like a cool kid by having a shiny sexy Apple product?
Tell us what you think in the comments, if you're one of the 1,000,000 users of Parallels, why do you run Windows at all anymore?
So some guy named Steve Jobs got up on stage at something called the WWDC yesterday and talked about some products from a company called...orange or banana? Or was it carrot.
It was long. And sometimes boring. So thanks to Mahalo Daily, here it is in Sixty Seconds. Did we get our iPhone with iRobot and iHateMakingMyOwnCoffee? We do get Exchange integration and now we're all Mobile with MobileMe and plus Apps for iPhone coming July 11th. Whew, that's a lot.
What they left out was that the new OS Snow Leopard or Rain Monkey or whatever (coming next year), will support multi-core processors, AND be able to take advantage of even more RAM (up to 16TB!).
So this uber smart dude Zodttd, has done something pretty sweet.
He has successfully ported the popular VLC media player over to the iPhone. Yes, the iPhone.
Big deal you say? Well check out what you'll now be able to do on your little piece of Apple mobile goodness: Drag, drop and play MPEG/MPG, AVI and MP3 media formats.
Woohooo!
Soon it will play FLAC and OGG and he's checking out how to build support for VCD, DivX, WMA, and WMV.
You will have to break free from the jail on your iPhone to see this baby working, and it's currently in beta.
One question though, Why aren't these formats already supported by Apple? Aren't we all tired of the format wars at this point? If you pay $400 or more for a device, shouldn't you get a say in what plays on it and what doesn't?
Have you ever wanted to view or edit a file that wasn't sitting on your own hard drive? Sure you have.
It's either on your work machine, or on your mom's machine, or it's on your brother's Alienware gaming machine in the basement and you just don't want to get up to deal with it. You wish you had a network drive for all of these machines.
The great thing about external drives on the mac is that they show up on your desktop immediately. Like this little USB thumbdrives. We love how they JUST WORK.
Basically, ExpanDrive is a souped up SFTP client. You don't have to set up any configurations, you can log in to any machine with its current credentials to access files and edit them seamlessly.
Just like they were on your own drive.
If you get disconnected, no problem...you'll automatically reconnect when you're able to.
This basically lets you use any computer that you have access to as an external drive for storage. As long as that computer has an internet connection and is turned on...you're set!
Currently, the cost is $29, and that's an introductory price, so it could go up in the future.
Gawker lets you do time-lapse photography with your Mac's iSight. You can share and record your streams with other people, and they can record as well.
That's awesome. And very scary. Don't forget to turn it off before you go to bed, or the world wide interwebs will know that you sing Barry Manilow in your sleep. It was just one time, ok?
There's a neat page of examples that you can check out here.
The newest release lets you password protect your streams, schedule a stream to start and end, and some cleaning up of the user interface.
Apparently the folks over at the co-working space IndyHall were using it, and their fearless leader Alex Hillman tweeted about it.
So you love Mac OS X. We love Mac OS X. But you don't have the money to pony up for Office 200whatever, or maybe you don't even like it. Microsoft Office is overkill for most people who just need a simple word processor. We've used Open Office, but it's probably too much to play around with if all you want to do is write a document.
We've mentioned Bean before, along with other Mac "toolkit software", but a new version came out late in April (version 1.2.0)l, so we felt it deserved another look.
Do you often repeat the same HTML code, form emails, or text? jfSnips might be up your alley then. With jfSnips you can manage all of the text you regularly paste over and over again, as well as re-use everything you've copied in a clipboard, much like Windows does. Except this is for all of you Mac OS X lovers out there.
You can place clips of text in whatever categories you like, so you could have one for PHP code, Javascript, HTML, or whatever tickles your fancy. Just don't tell us about your fancy tickling, that's way TMI.
Keyboard shortcuts make it even easier to insert text wherever you like. A simple SHIFT-CTRL-V pops open the jfSnips drop-down that sits up in your menu bar. Easy.
So if you repeat multiple email signatures that go a little something like "Sincerely, Thurston Howell IV" over and over and over, then give jfSnips a whirl. You can download it and give it a 15 day try or pay $15 for a full license. If you're looking for a free option, or a commercial utility with a different feature set, check out our recent rundown of clipboard applications for OS X.
Apple has announced a deal with HBO to offer some of the cable channel's premium content through the iTunes store. Normally this wouldn't be all that noteworthy, but this is no ordinary content partnership. Apple has agreed to price some of the TV shows at $2.99, which is the first time the company has been willing to deviate from its standard pricing of $0.99 per song, $1.99 per TV show, and $9.99 to $14.99 per movie.
In fact, it was a squabble over standardized pricing that led NBC to stop distributing its shows through iTunes last year. not every HBO program will cost $2.99. The network is offering up Sex and the City, The Wire, and Flight of the Conchords for $1.99 per download, while The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Rome will set you back $2.99.
The move makes sense when you consider the fact that HBO charges $50 or so for 1 season of these shows on DVD, even though there are typically fewer episodes per season of an HBO show than you get from a broadcast network program. So we're hoping this isn't going to lead to a pricing free-for-all, with networks charging more for popular shows like Lost and less for shows nobody was going to pay for anyway like 'Til Death.
Monday Google unveiled yet another beta site. Google Reader is now formatted for the iPhone. iPhone users tired of pinching and stretching and tapping text only links in the normal version of Reader or dealing with the plain Classic mobile version of Reader can head over to http://www.google.com/reader/i/ to check out the new beta site.
With the iPhone-enabled web-app, Google joins Ask.com in the web-based RSS reader marketplace. Ask.com's Bloglines has had an iPhone version available to users since July 19, 2007. iBloglines was created with less than a 1000 lines of code on a lark by an internal developer who bought an iPhone and wanted better access to the site.
Still trying to figure out if you want to raise your bid for Yahoo! or if you'd rather just buy Jerry Yang some flowers, apologize, and then see if Google is busy Saturday night? Well then, you've obviously had so much on your plate that you might have missed a few other stories this week. So without further ado, we bring you some of our favorite stories from the past 7 days:
Shady business practices work: Apple dramatically increases Safari users Apple got a lot of bad press a few weeks back for bundling the Safari web browser with its software update utility for Windows. Many PC users who thought they were just updating Quicktime or iTunes found themselves with a new web browser they never asked for. But you know what? It looks like it may have worked, because Apple tripled the number of Safari users on Windows.
Flipping the Linux Switch: Xfce, the hidden gem of desktop environments Sure, GNOME and KDE get all the attention. But that's because they hog the limelight, while unassuming little Xfce toils away in the background doing what needs to be done. Xfce is a simple desktop environment for Linux that includes everything you need, and nothing you don't.
Digsby adds support for Facebook Chat Facebook recently launched a chat service that lets you communicate with other Facebook users in real-time -- but only when you're visiting the social network's web site. Now you can use desktop chat client Digsby to chat with your Facebook contacts whether you're on the web site or not. You can also use it to keep up with your AOL, MSN, Yahoo! AND Google Talk contacts.
Gramlee - Website for people who can't write good If the automated spelling and grammar checking features in your word processor aren't enough to make your text readable, Gramlee can help. The web service is staffed by real people who will whip your prose into shape. Just remember, submitting your crappy 10th grade English paper and paying someone to rewrite it for you is wrong. Easy, but wrong.
Michael Dalesandro, CEO of Where I've Been - DLS Interview "Where I've Been" is both a popular Facebook application and a popular web site that lets users share their travel experiences, find travel tips, and plan future trips. We caught up with CEO Michael Dalesandro to ask him a bit about the site's success.
TypeRacer: Competitive typing test - Time Waster TypeRacer could be the best online typing test ever. The web game turns the typing test into a game, and pits you against a handful of other players. Sure, it's not particularly accurate. The tests are too short to properly gauge how many words you can crank out in a minute. But you'll be amazed how quickly you can type when you see another player hot on your tail.
Wrongcards: e-cards for the insensitive If you're the sort of person who always has a hard time finding Hallmark cards that adequately express your feelings, you might want to check out Wrongcards. The site specializes in e-cards that are just... wrong. But funny. But oh so wrong.
Del.icio.us releases Firefox 3 beta plugin Firefox 3 beta has been making the rounds long enough now that we know many Download Squad readers have started to use it as their primary browser. But there are a ton of useful plugins for Firefox 2 that don't yet work with Firefox 3 beta. And up until this week, the popular del.icio.us plugin was one of them. But you can finally cross that one off the list of incompatible plugins, because it's back, and it's better than ever.
Apple's Safari web browser may be hot stuff on the Mac, but since launching a Windows version a little while back, not too many Windows users have bothered to install the browser. So what does Apple do? Simple, the company sneakily adds Safari 3.1 to the Apple software update utility so that you download it automatically if you have any Apple software on your PC -- even if you've never installed Safari on your computer. In other words, a whole bunch of Windows iTunes users suddenly found a copy of Safari on their computers.
While a lot of folks criticized Apple for shoving unwanted software at the general public, the strategy appears to have worked. Net Applications reports that Safari's market share of the Windows browser space rose from .07% to .21%. That's still a ridiculously tiny number. But it's bigger than it was. So the message is clear: Give the people what they don't want. Some will be too lazy to uninstall it. And they might even try using it. Ugh, did we just write that?
You've got to hand it to Apple: they listen to their detractors, and listen fast. When they dropped the price of the iPhone soon after its launch, and the responding outcry was fierce, they doled out credits to the Apple Store as an apology. The 10.5.2 update, while fixing many other issues, was also a response to customer complaints about the new Leopard feature Stacks.
The most recent Apple fiasco had to do with pushing Safari for Windows via Apple's Software Update. The sticky wicket was putting Safari in a software update as if it were a necessary update, or an update to a piece of software already installed on your machine. Detractors claimed that amounted at worst to trickery, at best to an unfair advantage in the ongoing browser wars. Frankly, we kind of agreed.
The newly released Apple Software Update now has two panes instead of one: Updates, and the new pane, labeled New Software. This small but significant tweak allows users to easily discern whether a product is an update to an existing piece of software on their machine or a new offering.
Some might say that the change is still not enough. After all, the Safari install is still checked by default. We're also left to wonder, in the intervening time between offense and repentance, how many new Safari "users" can Apple claim?
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.
Mario Paint Composer lets you do what you know you've wanted to do all of your life...compose music in the key of Super Mario. You'll remember this from the Super NES days, but everything is way more fun on the computer.
So this uber smart dude 
Have you ever wanted to view or edit a file that wasn't sitting on your own hard drive? Sure you have.
Still trying to figure out if you want to raise your bid for Yahoo! or if you'd rather just buy Jerry Yang some flowers, apologize, and then see if Google is busy Saturday night? Well then, you've obviously had so much on your plate that you might have missed a few other stories this week. So without further ado, we bring you some of our favorite stories from the past 7 days:
