Mac Utopia

I don’t think I’ve ever posted any virus scanning software for the Mac, because there’s really not been the need to even have one installed. However, as the Mac grows in popularity and more people are switching, I believe that we will see more frequent attacks start to pop up. It’s never a bad idea to be ahead of the game and protect yourself before anything unexpected does occur. I’m actually a little surprised that there has been no news of attacks on Macs with the ability to now run Windows on them in Boot Camp or Parallels.

If your interested in installing a virus scanner on your mac, VirusBarrier from Intego is a popular choice. From the developers:

“..VirusBarrier X4 is the simple, fast and non-intrusive antivirus security solution for Macintosh computers, by Intego, the leading publisher of personal security software for Macintosh. It offers thorough protection against viruses of all types, coming from infected files or applications, whether on CD-ROMs, DVDs or other removable media, or on files downloaded over the Internet or other types of networks…

Intego VirusBarrier X4 is an application that works in the background and checks everything that your computer does, looking for viruses. It detects and eradicates all known viruses, including Word and Excel macro viruses, and even viruses targeting the Windows operating system. It knows the unique signatures of all known Macintosh viruses, and whenever a new virus is discovered, Intego’s Virus Monitoring Center goes into action to provide updated virus definitions, which you can download using Intego VirusBarrier X4′s automatic NetUpdate function.”

If you are concerned with viruses and protecting your Mac from the latest attacks, download head over to Intego and download VirusBarrier for OS X.

I posted previously about a how you could manually edit the dock background images using wood or sky images.  I had no doubts that before long applications would start popping up to take the manual part out of the equation and make it easy enough for anyone to do in seconds.  I’ve seen quite a few dock customization sites pop up and figured I’d get a good list of them going here.

Below is a list (I’m sure there are some missing)  of both sites that provide the images for you to edit the dock manually as well as applications that will do it all for you.  My favorite so far is Dock Dr with the Black Glass effect.

• DockDr
• DockEdit
• DockChanger
• LeopardDocks.com
• Dockulicious.com
• PimpMyDock
• YellatDucks.com

If you have any sites or applications you think should be added to the list that offer some quality dock customization, leave the links in the comments.

MoreiChatEffects is an application that will allow you to add 24 new background effects to your iChat video chats. The new iChat in Leopard comes with a few to choose from but they are quite limited. More iChat Effects brings some pretty cool backgrounds to choose from, but seems to only be fully functional on Intel Macs – sorry PPC.

Below are a couple of examples of the new effects that MoreiChatEffects brings to iChat:

To see the rest of the effects and download the installer script, head over to http://ismileys.free.fr/moreichateffects/index.html, and click on “download” in the sidebar. If you want to uninstall it just run the installer script again.

PS – What do you think of the new layout.  Leave your feedback in the comments if you have any!

test is a definitive procedure that produces a test result.

• Descriptive title and scope of the test method
• Date of last effective revision and revision designation
• Person, office, or agency responsible for questions on the test method, updates, and deviations.
• The significance or importance of the test method and its intended use.
• Terminology and definitions to clarify the meanings of the test method
• A listing of the types of apparatus (and the specific device) required to conduct the test
• Sampling procedures. How are samples to be obtained. Number of samples.
• Preparation of samples for the test
• Detailed procedure for conducting the test
• Calculations and analysis of data
• Interpretation of data and test method output
• Report: format, content, data, etc

The test result can be qualititive (yes/no), categorical, or quantititive (a measured value). It can be a personal observation or the output of a precision instrument.

Usually the test result is the dependent variable, the measured response based on the particular conditions of the test or the level of the independent variable. Some tests, however, involve changing the independent variable to determine the level at which a certain response occurs: in this case, the test result is the independent variable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_method

With the recent release of iTunes 7.5 and iPhone firmware 1.1.2 you are once again able to create your own custom ringtones by simply adding it to your iTunes playlist and syncing your iPhone.  To create the custom ringtones just crop down your favorite audio file to 30-40 seconds and change the extension to .m4r.  Once you have the m4r rile double click it to load it in iTunes and it will show up in your ringtones category.  The next time you sync up the iPhone your ringtone should be in place.

The previous versions of iTunes released broke this method of adding ringtones to your iPhone, so either 1 of 2 things happened.  Apple stopped being jerks about what you can use as ringtones, or they accidently undid what they did to block this from happening.

Either way it works for now, so go have fun with it.  Mine is currently Low Rider by War.

In a follow up to how to customize the dock in leopard, you can now customize the look of your Menu bar.   If you’re not a fan of the transparent look that Apple put on the Menu Bar in Leopard there are a few ways to make it look however you want.

The first application is called OpaqueMenuBar.  This is a simple application that basically turns your Menu bar back to the solid color that it was in previous versions of OS X.  Not having the option to make it whatever color you want isnt much fun though.

A second method to customizing the Leopard menu bar is an application called Leopard MenuHack.  From the developer’s site:

“Leopard MenuHack is an application that allows you to circumvent the ugly transparency in the Leopard menu bar by creating a modified copy of your background image, backing the transparent menu bar with a colour of your choice. This effectively allows you to control the colour shading of the menu bar.

Leopard MenuHack only affects the main display, and leaves your original background image files untouched. It automatically scales the image you select to the resolution of your screen.”

So, if your not happy with the transparent menu bar in Leopard, these 2 applications may be just what you need.

One of the first things you’ll notice when you instal Leopard is that the dock has changed quite a bit. It’s more polished and of course has Apples favorite effect – the reflection. Most people like the new look, others hate it. If you’re in the latter camp then you’ll like this. If you haven’t seen yet, the dock can be customized to pretty much anything you want using a series of 4 images.

Check out the 2 below that are available for download from The Apple Blog.

Sky:

Wood:

To install the custom backgrounds for your dock just go into System/Library/CoreServices/ right-click on Dock and select “show package contents”.  Once here go into Contents and then resources.  Copy the image files here, but be sure to back up the original files if you want to revert back to the default leopard appearance.

Once the images are in place, go into terminal and type killall dock – this will close the dock and restart it. When it comes back up your new background should be in place.

I receive emails pretty frequently of applications people think I should post about, sometimes from developers sometimes just from people who really like the application.  I got a pretty good list from Permee the other day and thought I would share it with everyone.  If you would like to see something covered here that hasn’t been, then just send over a quick email (address is in the sidebar on the right) and I’ll post it as soon as I can.

Max
When extracting audio from compact discs, Max offers the maximum in flexibility to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. For pristine discs, Max offers a high-speed ripper with no error correction.

Colloquy
Traditionally, chat clients on the Mac have been anything but glamorous. Colloquy is an advanced IRC, SILC & ICB client which aims to fill this void. By adhering to Mac OS X interface conventions, Colloquy has the look and feel of a quality Mac application.

Pixen
Pixen is an innovative graphics editor for the Mac. It’s designed from top to bottom for pixel artists—people who make low-resolution raster art like the sprites you see in old video games. But it’s great for artists of all arenas: Pixen is like a very powerful MSPaint or a simpler, more agile Photoshop.

xAct
xACT stands for X Audio Compression Toolkit. It is a GUI based front end written in AppleScript Studio for the Unix applications Shorten, shntool, monkey’s audio compressor, flac, and cdda2wav with paranoia support. It also uses a modified md5sum and sox. It does the basic commands of these applications and adds a few features to speed up productivity in creation of etree.org standard filesets.

Sox Wrap
SoX Wrap is a wrapper for the conversion routines of the open source sound utility SoX (Sound eXchange). It transfers to and from the following formats: 8svx, aiff, al, au, avr, cdr, cvs, dat, gsm, hcom, la, lu, maud, mp3, nul, ogg, prc, raw, sb, sf, sl, sph, smp, snd, sndt, sw, txw, ub, ul, uw, vms, voc, wav, and wve.

I read today about a new startup service called BlogRush, and thought it was actually a really good idea. BlogRush is basically a syndication network for bloggers to use in gaining more traffic and awareness for their site. The service is still in its early days and is in Beta for English sites only.

You can see BlogRush in action in the sidebar on the right hand side of the page. It is a list of 5 links (based on the category I selected) of other members of the network. The way your site gets listed is on a point system based on both the number of page views your site has daily as well as any referral sign ups you have. It’s a little tricky to try to explain, so watch the video on their website to learn more about exactly how it works.

After a few days of data collection, you will be able to log into their dashboard to see stats about the referrals both to and from your site as well as a few other reports. It will be interesting to see how this site develops, and if it gets large enough, how people find ways to spam it. If you run a site and are interested in testing it out, go ahead and sign up for a BlogRush Account.

It’s pretty obvious that no one agrees with Apple’s business plan for charging money for ringtones for your iPhone – especially on song you’ve ALREADY PAID FOR! Asking people to pay an additional 99 cents for a 30 second clip of a song in addition to the 99 cents they are paying for the full song is just ridiculous, and guess what – you don’t have to do it.

There are tons of applications popping up that will let you take audio files that you already have on your computer, convert them into an iPhone compatible format and sync them automatically. The only thing that these applications dont do is give you an easy way to select which portion of the song you want to use for the ringtone. Dont worry, there is a pretty easy way to take an audio file and crop it down to any section of the song you want. Audacity is the one that I tend to use just because I’ve used it before, there are others out there though. Once you’ve cropped your file down in Audacity to the section of the song you want to use take your pick from the applications below to transfer them to your iPhone:

Download Audacity. You will also need the LAME MP3 encoder in order to export your file to mp3.

iPhone Ringtone Apps

iTone (worked great for me)

RingRong (I think this is what a Japanese doorbell sounds like)

MakeiPhoneRingtone  (another good choice)

Ringtonator (I’ve heard some people had trouble with this one)

If you have any other iPhone Ringtone Apps that you like, leave them in the comments.