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Perian. The swiss-army knife for QuickTime:

“Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats.”

(via)

Wired, The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry:

“It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple’s top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple’s boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster. It wasn’t just buggy, it flat-out didn’t work. The phone dropped calls constantly, the battery stopped charging before it was full, data and applications routinely became corrupted and unusable. The list of problems seemed endless. At the end of the demo, Jobs fixed the dozen or so people in the room with a level stare and said, “We don’t have a product yet.”

The effect was even more terrifying than one of Jobs’ trademark tantrums. When the Apple chief screamed at his staff, it was scary but familiar. This time, his relative calm was unnerving. “It was one of the few times at Apple when I got a chill,” says someone who was in the meeting.”

X Lossless Decoder: Lossless audio decoder for Mac OS X

John Siracusa:

“I started this review talking about expectations. As I’ve learned more about Leopard, it’s become increasingly clear where, exactly, those two-and-a-half years of development time went. Leopard is absolutely packed with improvements. It seems that not a corner of the OS has gone untouched.

Perhaps that’s not as clear to the casual user who just sees the surface changes and the major new features in Leopard. But even in that case, there’s more than enough to recommend it. if you’re wondering whether you should upgrade to Leopard, the answer, as it’s been for every major revision of Mac OS X, is yes.”

Mac OS X Leopard

Dave Winer:

“There isn’t much you can do, after the Mac has been around for 23 years, that hasn’t already been done.”

John Gruber:

‘The most significant new feature in Leopard is Time Machine.’

Jason Snell:

“As with every OS X update since version 10.1, there’s no single feature in Leopard that will force Mac users to upgrade immediately. Instead, it’s the sheer deluge of new features that’s likely to persuade most active Mac users to upgrade, especially since this is the longest gap between OS X upgrades — two and a half years — since the product was introduced.”

Leo Laporte:

“Leopard is not a revolutionary release – I wouldn’t expect it to be, it’s a mature operating system – but it is easily the best OS X ever, the culmination of a decade of UI research and OS refinement.”

Andy Ihnatko:

“No matter how you work the numbers, though, it’s pretty clear that Apple has yet again crammed way more than $129 worth of value into its latest OS update.”

MacWorld, I will keep my Mac safe from other users

1. Use admin accounts for administration only
2. Don’t share user accounts
3. Turn on password prompts
4. Encrypt sensitive files

Rogue Amoeba – Radioshift: “With Radioshift, you control Internet and AM/FM radio from around the world. Listen and record – Radioshift is radio on your schedule!”

Stevenf.com: “Transmit supports Amazon’s S3 file hosting service.”

Panic Software: Transmit

Liquidicity:

“Ever wanted to type the copyright icon, or do an accent over an A without having to resort to some character palette? We have, and it takes time and is an effort. So we put together a series of help sheets that reference all of the characters that aren’t listed on your keyboard, along with their shortcut keys to make your life easier.”

Favoriete feedreader NetNewsWire is 3.0 geworden en razend snel. Onmisbaar voor een newswatcher. Mac only.

Permanent Eraser: “This utility overwrites your data thirty-five times, scrambles the original file name, and truncates the file size to nothing before Permanent Eraser finally unlinks it from the system. Once your data has been erased, it can no longer be read through traditional means.”

ID-Design: “WhatSize is a simple tool that allows the user to quickly measure the size in bytes of a given folder and all subfolders and files within it. You would be surprised at how many useless files might be laying around on your hard disks.”

Rogue Amoeba: “SoundSource is a tiny tool for OS X enabling you to switch your audio input and output sources with a single click. And with the System setting, you can transfer system beeps to a secondary audio source so you won’t be disturbed.” SoundSource is freeware.

Torrent Freak: “A new Dashboard widget for the Mac has simplified the process of creating a torrent to grabbing a file or folder and dragging it onto the Mac OS X Dashboard.”

Dashboard Widget: CreateTorrent

• Stunt Software – On The Job
  “On The Job is an unobtrusive, easy to use time tracker. It’s not bloated with features you’ll never use, yet it’s powerful enough to handle all of your time tracking needs. On The Job is perfect for anyone billing by the hour.”
  (tags: mac osx work timetracking)

• Replacing my home backup server with Amazon’s S3
  “I’ve been considering using S3 as the backend to an on-line backup, since I’d been beating that for a while (…)”
  (tags: backup amazon s3)
• A List of Amazon S3 Backup Tools
  “In an effort to replace my home backup server with Amazon’s S3, I’ve been collecting a list of Amazon S3 compatible backup tools to look at. Here’s what I’ve discovered, followed by my requirements.”
  (tags: backup amazon s3)
• Why I Started Using Amazon S3 – PaulStamatiou.com
  ” It lets you connect to your S3 account as a networked drive on your computer (WebDAV). JungleDisk adds a bit of user-friendliness to the essentially UI-less S3.”
  (tags: amazon s3 backup jungledisk)
• JungleDisk – Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3™ – Jungle Disk
  “Jungle Disk is an application that lets you store files and backup data securely to Amazon.com’s S3™ Storage Service”
  (tags: amazon backup mac s3 storage)

• Knack.be – ‘Als het VB aan de macht komt, is het hek van de dam’
  “‘Mijn mensbeeld’, zegt Luc Tuymans, ‘helt over naar de pessimistische kant. Ik denk dat die visie verstandiger is dan het optimisme. (…)”
  (tags: art tuymans)
• How to convert .flac files to .mp3 using OS X – Simplehelp
  “There are two steps in converting your .flac files to .mp3. The first is to decode the .flac’s into .wav files. After that’s done, you’ll encode the .wav files into .mp3’s.”
  (tags: audio flac mp3 osx mac)

• Architecural Tricks To Control Users
  “Below is an A-Z of retail tricks that we have compiled to empower you before you go out shopping, so that you can buy what you need and collapse our economy! More will be added as we root them out.”
  (tags: shopping evil architecture design marketing)
• Wired News: One Million Ways to Die
  “how likely are you, statistically speaking, to die from a terrorist attack?”
  (tags: us waronterror terrorism)
• HandBrake
  “HandBrake is a GPL’d multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter.”
  (tags: tool osx video)