Every now and then I find myself working on slides in Keynote and writing Download Squad posts - and struggling to find a suitable image. Of course, Flickr is the best way to find images - their clear licencing and Creative Commons support makes finding images fairly straight forward. However, getting the image into Keynote isn't entirely painless. The workflow of browsing search results, viewing the image and then finding it at a suitable size (if it exists) takes time - however that's where Viewfinder steps in.

A native Mac OS X application (requiring Mac OS X Snow Leopard), Viewfinder allows you to search Flickr from the desktop apply filters to show only Creative Commons images, and specify a particular image size. Then, once you select an image you can download the image, set it as your desktop background - and most importantly - send images straight to Keynote for your slides.

If you're a heavy keynote user (or blogger) who frequently needs to find Flickr images for your work Viewfinder is indispensible. I've been testing it since early September and found it an incredibly convenient tool to have at hand. A licence costs £15 (roughly $25) and a free demo is available for you try from the Viewfinder webpage.

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.

It's been a long-debated topic as to the pricing (and availability) of Apple's next operating system release: Mac OS X 10.6 - a.k.a. Snow Leopard. However at the annual Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco Apple has (if you'll excuse the pun) let the cat out of the bag and announced that Snow Leopard will be available in September for $29 (if you're upgrading from Mac OS X Leopard), with Family Packs for up to 5 computers costing just $49 - again, if you're upgrading from 10.5.

Long-touted as 'just' a behind-the-scenes update, Snow Leopard features support for Microsoft Exchange, a re-written Finder and an all-new QuickTime player with hardware acceleration and built-in YouTube uploading. There's also a tonne of new developer technologies to allow developers to handle multi-processor machines with Grand Central, and an all-round speed increase for all the OS components.

Apple's official web pages have yet to be updated with the pricing details or more information beyond the original holding pages, however in today's WWDC keynote Apple confirmed dates, pricing and some more features - as well as confirming that Mac OS X Snow Leopard is indeed going to only run on Intel-based Macs.

If you're running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on an Intel machine, the options are between a Mac Box Set (featuring Snow Leopard, iLife '09 and iWork '09) for $169 or 5-User Family Pack which brings you the iLife, iWork and Snow Leopard package for $229.

If you're wanting to stay up to date on everything at WWDC, be sure to stop by our good friends at TUAW who're covering the conference throughout this week.

The latest point update for Mac OS X Leopard has just been released. If you thought OS X 10.5.2 was big, hold onto your socks because 10.5.3 is even bigger. The combo update for versions of Leopard prior to 10.5.2 is 536 megabytes and the standard update for users of 10.5.2 is a still staggering 420 megabytes.

Still, with big sizes come BIG changes, fixes and features. Apple has the full list, but here are some highlights:

• Addresses stuttered audio or video playback from certain USB devices
• Improved Airport and 802.11x behavior and reliability
• iPhone users can now sync their address book contacts with their Google account
• Safari works better when connecting through a Microsoft ISA proxy
• Improved Spotlight search on AFP volumes
• Improved iCal syncing
• Fixes issues with authenticated RSS feeds in Mail.app

Plus improvements to Time Machine, Spaces, iChat, .Mac and Parental Controls. Apple is recommending this update for all users, but as always, encourages making backups of important files and folders before installing.

Matuschak believes an operating system is only as good as its ability to avoid or solve problems, and that's what Ubuntu's really good at. For example, in Ubuntu, if a user tries to watch a video and doesn't have the proper codec to do so, the open source OS will attempt to find and install the codec.

But there's a solution on the horizon, or Matuschak would like there to be. He believes the answer is in Spotlight, a commonly underused but very powerful OS X feature which can be adapted to be a general problem solving tool.

Coming back to the video codec problem, if the user would like to figure out what's needed to play the video file, he types the file extension into Spotlight. The service would return a variety of options including codecs and programs. The suggested codecs and programs aren't necessarily installed on the computer, but, with one (or two) clicks, the user can then install whatever programs or codecs came up as a result of the search. It's merely a concept at this point, but Matuschak would like to make it a reality. If you'd like to help him out, make sure to check out his site.

To inaugurate Apple's latest Mac OS X release, version 10.5, we grabbed all the latest news we could find to answer some of the outstanding questions floating around the web:

Q. Can Time Machine backup to network shares?
A. Yes, but only using the Apple File-sharing Protocol (AFP). Jeers. And Macworld agrees with us that Time Machine is Leopard's most important new feature.

Q. Is Time Machine visible on screen during backups when the external hard disk is connected?
A. No, backups occur automatically in the background.

Q. The new screen sharing feature is VNC-based. Does this mean I can use my other VNC-equipped machines with Leopard?
A. Yup, only not with iChat's screen sharing feature; that only works with iChat clients.

Q. How long does this puppy, er kitty, take to install?
A. According to Engadget, about one hour on a Macbook Pro with 2GB of RAM.

Q. Have any improvements been made to file systems or disk partitions?
A. Well, the most underhyped improvement is this: According to MacWorld, disk partitions can now be resized on the fly. Nifty.

More after the jump.

When Apple said they were going to redesign the Finder, we though, oh, we've heard that before. But with Quick Look and Cover Flow, Leopard introduces the most significant upgrades to the Finder since the 10.1 to 10.2 transition. One of the most time-consuming aspects of using the finder is previewing files. If you're thumbing through a folder looking for a file you need, and the only way to identify the right file is by peeking into it, OS X can really slow you down, at least until Friday when Leopard arrives.

Quick Look is a system-wide technology that the Finder takes advantage of in order to give you fast previews of a file's content within the file system browser. Unlike thumbnail views, which were sloppily implemented and didn't actually work all the time on previous iterations of the OS, Quick Look actually supports all kinds of files, from movies to Keynote presentations and images. Plus, Quick is the name of the game, as anybody who has used Cover Flow on in iTunes will attest.

The other new feature we looked at this morning is Parental Controls, which Apple has amped up by adding to the Preferences window. Historically Apple has done pretty well by allowing parents to designate which applications children can run (and even which web sites they can visit), but with so many cool kid-oriented web sites popping up all the time, it's hard to keep up with the demand. Echoes of, "Hey Dad, can you unlock this web site for me?" can drive a parent bonkers, especially when it's happening five or six times each time your kid sits down to surf.

For the first time, Apple has implemented some content filtering in Safari. They've adapted the anti-spam filter from Apple Mail as a web content analyzer, and apparently it works well enough for blocking "no-no" sites on your kids' behalf. Of course, if you still want to totally lock down your kid's browser, Safari will still allow you to permit only those sites you've approved ahead of time.

Mac's OS X operating system has a number of system caches where it stores information that may be of use in the future, to speed up the process of looking it up. The trouble is, there appears to be no limit to how large these caches can grow to be. At a certain point, a huge cache can be just as bad as no cache at all in terms of performance. Plus, all it's really doing is storing "nice to have" information in case it needs it. But if you didn't have your cache populated, your machine would go and seek out the information from its original source.

Okay, so we're talking out of our cache here a little bit, but you get the idea.

If you've been using your Mac for a long time, your cache files could be pretty large. Cache Out X is a utility that specializes in clearing out these caches, with the result being a snappier machine.

While most people would agree that Mac OS X is a very attractive operating system, there are still times when you'd like the ability to apply a new set of icons to your system. The easiest way we've found to apply icons system-wide for all operating system objects is to use a utility called CandyBar.

CandyBar, from Panic and Iconfactory, is an easy to use utility that lets you browse through the various operating system elements in Mac OS X that require icons, and set new downloaded icons as you wish. Wondering where to get beautiful new icons? Check out Iconfactory, and particularly their Freeware category.

The fully-functional trial version of CandyBar allows you to change your icons up to 25 times, or use the application for 15 days (whichever comes first), and then you must pay for a license to continue using the software. A license for CandyBar will set you back $12.95 USD.

VMware's desktop virtualization application for Mac OS X, codename Fusion (seriously, what isn't Fusion these days?), has hit Beta 2 and with it a handful of new features to boast: experimental 3D acceleration for Windows XP SP2 & DirectX 8.1, Vista support, improved networking, 64-bit OS support on Core 2 Duo Macs, and a slew of other improvements.

Having tested the first beta release, I can indeed say that this update is much faster and more stable. I don't know if I would give up Parallels for it, but the two are a close match. In fact, it almost seems like VMware Fusion is less processor intensive on my Core Duo iMac than Parallels is, but without any formal testing I'm just going to chalk that up to first impressions. Like Parallels, it allows custom screen resolutions for your Windows virtual machine after you install the VMware Tools, and also has drag-and-drop copying from Mac OS X to Windows, both cool features that I certainly appreciate. If you are interested in testing it out, you can sign-up and download VMware Fusion Beta 2 for free.

Democracy Player version 0.9.5 has been officially released, introducing a host of new improvements and enhancements since the 0.9.2 release back in November of 2006. Here's a brief highlight of what to look for:

• Simpler, more minimal interface
• New 'Share' menu on each item allows user to email a video or post to VideoBomb, del.icio.us, Digg, or Reddit
• VLC 0.8.6 on Windows version that powers Democracy has been upgraded with improved Flash video support
• Video downloads are now stored in folders by channel for better organization
  
• New pause and resume download functions
• Improved BitTorrent performace
• Drop-down menu feature for auto-download for individual channels
• Automatic thumbnail generation on OS X for videos lacking thumbnails

The application is immediately available in all PC, Mac, and Linux flavors. Of course, the team still urges users to keep an eye open for any potential bugs that might be lurking about and fill out a bug report where necessary. Anyway, the program is looking great thus far and this upgrade will be worth the download. Check out the full list of improvements at the Democracy blog.

The hard-working folks over at the Participatory Culture Foundation have made the Democracy Player 0.9.5. release candidate available for both Windows and Mac OS X platforms, and they're a-lookin' for bugs and want your help. Just a quick reminder, in case you didn't know: Democracy Player is the application for open-source 'internet television' surfing, and it's been chugging along over the past six months or more since its inception. There have not been any specific mentions of what features have been enhanced, so we'll just have to wait for the official 0.9.5 update. If the developers keep the ball rolling, it won't be unreasonably long until the big 1.0 strikes, I suspect. The Democracy team has been extremely timely about new updates. Anyway, use their bug report form to submit any faults you might stumble upon if you give the 0.9.5 RC a spin.

Apple's web site has always had a fairly nice Downloads section, but most recently (to coincide with MacWorld SF maybe?) they've beaten it with the pretty stick and made it more functional. It's now easier to find great new Mac software, new Dashboard widgets and of course movie trailers. Mainly the Mac OS X section and the front page have seen the biggest changes - I'm especially psyched about the addition of RSS feeds for the top downloads, newly added items, and their staff picks. The latter two being great places for indie Mac developers to get some time in the spotlight.

[Via MacDevCenter.com]

Making your own Dashboard Widgets for Mac OS X is nothing new, but making your own Widgets using the Dashcode Developer Beta changes the entire process. Apple has taken the ease of use of Xcode and whittled it down to scale, providing all the tools necessary to quickly and easily develop your own Widgets. In this How To I'll show you how to go about creating a Download Squad RSS widget. Follow along if you like, but by all means feel free to improvise.

This is a very simple How To and is not intended to teach you how to code a Widget from scratch, but to show you how easy it is with Dashcode to create one. If you would like to find out more about developing Dashboard Widgets, check this guide on Apple's site.