So I got an iPhone today and one of the first things I went looking for was a way to use songs from my MP3 collection as a ringtone. I knew there was a way to do it on a PC, so I had no doubts there would be a way to do it on the Mac. iToner is the answer. iToner requires no hacking, no understanding of file structures, and it really doesnt require much of a brain cell to work. Simply download iToner, connect your iPhone, drag the audio files you want to add as a ringtone onto the iToner application and push sync. Your done.
From the makers of iToner:
“iToner enables you to quickly transfer custom ringtones for your iPhone – without modifying, hacking or having to reset your iPhone. Simply drag and drop your MP3 or AAC audio files on iToner’s window, click the Sync button, and you’re done. Even better, your ringtones will continue to work with future iPhone OS updates!”
“Your iPhone allows you to assign different ringtones for your different contacts. With iToner, now you can have a Barry White ringtone for when your girlfriend calls, Frank Zappa for when your college buddies ring you up, or the theme from Jaws for when your boss is calling.”
iToner has a 30 day trial and is 15 dollars once the trial runs out, and the trial does not have any limitations.
Download iToner and use mp3s as ring tones on your iPhone.
Art text is an simple to use graphic app that allows you to create great looking vector text graphics for use in presentations, or website logos. From the BeLight website:
“Art Text is an application to create high quality textual graphics, headings, logos, icons, banners, and buttons. You can modify text and vector shapes and turn them into fancy graphics for your own use, using the resulting work in iWork, Microsoft Office, BeLight programs, and other. With the program you will create more compelling business presentations, brochures, flyers, postcards, business cards, and websites.
Art Text comes with 110+ pre-designed styles, 450+ pictograms. Shading Pro tool let you cover or shade any object with shading material, presenting it as glassy, plastic or metallic, smooth, or rough. Over 100 materials are supplied with the program. Advanced material editor will let you create your very own, unique material.”
If you’re not very handy with Photoshop, then Art Text is a great solution to easily create professional looking text graphics.
Download Art Text and create some great looking text graphics.
Wasting time using StumbleUpon I came across a pretty good post titled “10 Essential Back to School Mac Apps” from J David Macor.com. Even though I’ve been done with school for a couple of years now, the list of apps can still apply to just about everyone. I know I use a quite a few of them on a regular basis.
David’s Top 10 Back to School Apps for Mac include: 1. Microsoft Office
2. iWork ’08
3. iProcrastinate
4. Yojimbo
5. Adium
6. Carbon Copy Cloner
7. Norton AntiVirus
8. Wallet
9. Transmission
10. CyberDuck
Using DVD2One allows you to create complete backups or movie only backups of your personal DVD collection for safe keeping. Either store it on your HardDrive or burn it too a blank DVD. One of the nicest features of DVD2One is the ability to set up to 15 discs to be processed one after the other without user intervention. DVD 2 One is available for both Mac and PC.
DVD2One Feature List:
Unique video compression engine: combines blazing speed with the highest quality.
Multi-processor, multi-core and multi-computer (grid) compatible.
Process a movie to fit on a single recordable in a matter of 15 to 30 minutes (depending on the speed of your computer).
Make a movie-only copy of your DVD. Why waste space and image quality on unnecessary intros, menus and language tracks?
Make a full disk copy of your DVD. For those who want to keep those fancy menus and intros.
Powerful join mode. Useful for putting multiple episodes of a (tv) series or joining both sides of a flipper on 1 disk.
Batchprocessing: Program up to 15 disks to be processed one after another without user intervention.
Remaster your CDs on DVD in Super CD quality.
Builtin burnengine.
Written from scratch, not based on any old code, libraries or existing opensource projects.
Just about everyday I hear people complaining about how the Mac sucks because it cant do one thing or another. However, these are the same people who havent used a mac since OS 9 and really have no clue what they’re talking about.
Not once has someone been able to say they can do something on a PC that I haven’t been able to find an application on the Mac that will do the same thing (in most cases do it better). So for that reason I decided to put together a list of the most common tasks people do on a PC and provided some options for doing them on the Mac. If your new to the Mac then maybe you’ll learn something new.
If you have something you’ve been trying to do on a Mac or are just an annoying PC user that wants to try and stump me leave it in the comments. And dont try to be funny and list games…thats what boot camp is for.
NerveGas has put together a great application that will allow you to play your favorite old school NES games on the go. Getting NerveGas’s emulator may be a bit more of a challenge than your looking for.
Below is a quick overview of the steps required to run the application. If your interested in taking on the task, it sounds harder than it really is. For a detailed step by step instructional guide on these steps, head over to http://iphone.natetrue.com/. There you will be able to download all the required files, and get the guide on installing everything.
Hacking the iPhone to play NES roms
1. Create Keys
2. Uploading DropBear
3. Overwriting “Update” with “chmod”
4. Overwriting the update configuration
5. Rebooting the iphone twice
6. Replacing the original update and com.apple.update.plist files
7. Change the root password
I’ve seen a couple of pretty cool iTunes plugins popping up every once in a while and have been meaning to post about them. Instead of doing a bunch of little posts, here is a quick list of plugins for iTunes for your enjoyment.
iConcertCal – monitors your playlist and creates a personalized calendar of upcoming concert and album releases. Available for both windows and os x.
The Filter – create itunes playlists based on your mood
Eyephederine - OpenGL 3D visualization plug in for iTunes which renders your preferred music with 77 different visualizations where real 3D entities react to spectrum and waveform values
iLike Sidebar – helps you discover music with friends
iWow - audio enhancement plug-in providing 3D sound, using SRS Labs’ state of the art audio enhancement technology
I’ve written previously about a completely unique visual application launcher for OS X called Trampoline. Trampoline is called up by pressing a hotkey combination which presents you with a wheel of your favorite applications that you use most often but dont want taking up space in the dock. I received an update from the developer that version 2.1 has just been released with a good number of bug fixes, and feature updates.
Trampoline version 2.1 release notes:
•added the ability to drag-hold an icon over a folder to open a new trampoline of that folder, allowing you to drag onto icons inside folders in the trampoline
• Added a setting to show a files label color.
• The “Show In Finder” and “Get Info” menu items (and their as- sociated key commands) will now use Path Finder if Path Finder is running and “Enable Reveal in Path Finder for third party applica- tions” is turned on in Path Finder’s preferences.
• added the ability to relaunch a running application either by pressing the ‘l’ key or by choosing the item from a contextual menu. (timeout is 2 minutes)
• added a “Force Quit” menu item to the contextual menu of run- ning applications.
• The “Add Special” popup button in the Items Preference now includes a submenu for the Applications folder, making it very easy to add most applications from within the Items Preferences.
• Added a “Delete Icon” menu item in the contextual menu of URLs, so you can change the icon of an URL in Trampoline.
• updated background appearance by adding a glasslike reflection, and changed the color cast of the bezel buttons to suit.
• The registration reminder icon no longer grows over time.
• added a paging prevention scheme to help Trampoline appear more quickly after it’s not been used for a while.
• fixed a bug where dragging onto an alias of a folder would not behave as expected (folder icon would not appear selected)
• fixed a bug with exposé via e key press.
• fixed an obscure memory bug
• Updated the help menu items to include old-jewel.com rather than the old oldjewelsoftware.com addresses.
• some behind the scenes cleanup.
Download the visual application launcher Trampoline 2.1.
Have you ever been sitting somewhere on your laptop enjoying an open wireless connection? Have you ever wondered what the other wierdos around you are looking at on their laptops? Well, for educational purposes only of course, I’m gonna show you how to spy on the unsuspecting yuppies drinking their lowfat mocha latte’s.
Eavesdrop is a very easy application to use and it is basically a packet sniffing application that will intercept all network activity; both incoming and outgoing. This means you are able to see people’s IM conversations, emails sent and received, websites visited, and Eavesdrop even displays the pictures they are viewing from webpages. Additionally, if people are dumb enough to log on to any type of internet application on an open network, you will see their usernames and passwords as well.
I do not condone the use of this software for personal gain such as stealing peoples passwords, I’m just reporting on the types of applications that are out there. Hopefully after reading this, you will be a little more careful about the types of things you do on your laptop while connected to an open wireless connection. Especially if it’s your own wireless network in your home. ENCRYPT IT. IT’S NOT HARD. You never know…your neighbors could be intercepting everything that your doing online.
As you can see from the images above, the data captured may not be exactly intuitive, but its easy enough to see from the first image the person is looking at a Google image search results page in Safari. Looking at images tab (2nd image) you can see the images that were downloaded from the images.google.com page.
Overall, Eavesdrop is a really cool app to play around with, and can be a big wake up call to those of you who think its safe to use open wireless networks.
LiteIcon is an OS X system icon management application that allows you to easily go in and change many of the default icons. There are other applications that do this for the Mac such as CandyBar. However, unlike Candybar, LiteIcon is completely free.
To use LiteIcon, just drag and drop the icon you wish to use on to the current icon within the application. If you ever decide you dont like the changes you’ve made, LiteIcon has a restore feature that will return all changed icons back to their normal state that they came with in OS X.
If you would prefer to change any icon manually instead of using an application such as LiteIcon or CandyBar, just right click on the icon and select “Get Info”. Now go to the icon you wish to use and press command+c to copy the the icon and go back to the “Get Info” window you previously opened. Click on the icon in the upper left hand corner and it will highlight in blue. Press command+v to paste the new icon and your done.
So I got an iPhone today and one of the first things I went looking for was a way to use songs from my MP3 collection as a ringtone. I knew there was a way to do it on a PC, so I had no doubts there would be a way to do it on the Mac. iToner is the answer. iToner requires no hacking, no understanding of file structures, and it really doesnt require much of a brain cell to work. Simply download iToner, connect your iPhone, drag the audio files you want to add as a ringtone onto the iToner application and push sync. Your done.
Wasting time using StumbleUpon I came across a pretty good post titled “10 Essential Back to School Mac Apps” from J David Macor.com. Even though I’ve been done with school for a couple of years now, the list of apps can still apply to just about everyone. I know I use a quite a few of them on a regular basis.
Using DVD2One allows you to create complete backups or movie only backups of your personal DVD collection for safe keeping. Either store it on your HardDrive or burn it too a blank DVD. One of the nicest features of DVD2One is the ability to set up to 15 discs to be processed one after the other without user intervention. DVD 2 One is available for both Mac and PC.
NerveGas has put together a great application that will allow you to play your favorite old school NES games on the go. Getting NerveGas’s emulator may be a bit more of a challenge than your looking for.
I’ve seen a couple of pretty cool iTunes plugins popping up every once in a while and have been meaning to post about them. Instead of doing a bunch of little posts, here is a quick list of plugins for iTunes for your enjoyment.
I’ve written previously about a completely unique visual application launcher for OS X called 
Have you ever been sitting somewhere on your laptop enjoying an open wireless connection? Have you ever wondered what the other wierdos around you are looking at on their laptops? Well, for educational purposes only of course, I’m gonna show you how to spy on the unsuspecting yuppies drinking their lowfat mocha latte’s.
LiteIcon is an OS X system icon management application that allows you to easily go in and change many of the default icons. There are other applications that do this for the Mac such as CandyBar. However, unlike Candybar, LiteIcon is completely free.