Peter Borg recently released version 2.0 of Smultron, his excellent open source text editor. So what’s new? Well, among other things…

Tabs Smultron has, until now, sported a left-side Documents List showing all open files. This is still around, but now you can optionally open some tabs at the top of the edit window too. The tabs replicate some functionality from the Documents List, but some people will welcome their appearance nonetheless. They act as proxies for the Documents List, which means the controls for moving around the list also apply to moving around tabs.

Projects Smultron lets you create a multitude of Projects, each of which contains any number of text files. By default the top-level project is called “All documents” and contains all files from all your projects. Click on a single project in the Projects Drawer, and you’ll only see the files it contains; they’ll be listed in the Documents List.

Full screen mode It does exactly what you’d expect, but cannot be customised to display text differently; if you want green-on-black and font size 18 in fullscreen, you’ll have to change the main font/color settings to that first.

In my recent article How Does Open Source Software Stack Up on the Mac?, a reader and I have been having a very interesting discussion via the talkbacks at the end of the article that has drifted through various facets of OSS, economics, and ethics. I’d like to invite you to read the Why reinvent the wheel? discussion and chime in here with your thoughts. An opinionated summary of the most interesting thoughts that have come up so far follows, along with my take on each of them:

Who Wants to Be A Superhero: Episode 101
The SCI FI Channel, Bruce Nash (Nash Entertainment), and legendary comic book creator Stan Lee’s (Spider-Man, Hulk, The Fantastic Four, X-Men) POW! Entertainment, Inc., have joined forces to discover the next great American superhero. Who Wants to Be a Superhero? is an all-new reality series that challenges a lucky few to create their very own superhero alter-ego, live together under in a secret lair under the watchful eye of Stan Lee, and compete for the best reality competition prize yet: immortality. All they’ll need is an original idea, a killer costume, and some real superhero mojo. The winning superhero will be immortalized in a new comic book from Dark Horse Comics created by Stan Lee himself and will be featured in an original SCI FI Channel movie. Executive producers are Bruce Nash, Stan Lee, Scott Satin, Gill Champion and Andrew Jebb.

30 Days: Episode 101 and Making-of Special
30 Days features a diverse group of participants, each given the opportunity to experience firsthand a world antithetical to their own comfortable existence. Each installment of the show examines a very different subject and is hosted by Morgan Spurlock. In the final installment this season, Spurlock is also a participant, as he turns the cameras on himself. The series explores explosive topical issues and conducts fascinating social experiments. As the 30 Days participants learn about others, viewers will learn more about themselves. Join host Morgan Spurlock as he conducts fascinating social experiments that immerse participants in worlds vastly different from their own.

Tabloid Wars: Episode 101
Every day the staff of the New York Daily News only has 24 hours to win the story…or lose the war against its archrival, the New York Post. Follow the News’s top editors, journalists, and reporters as they hunt down the headlines, get their story straight and play beat-the-clock to get the paper out the door and into the hands of its hundreds of thousands of readers every day. These tireless and intrepid newspeople take viewers out on the “beat” — to the scene of the crime, to get the much-needed quote from the source, or to the hottest celebrity bashes for the photo op — and then back into the newsroom before deadline.

Psych: Episode 101
James Roday plays the somewhat eccentric Shawn Spencer, a police consultant who solves crimes with powers of observation so acute that the police think he’s psychic — or so he lets them think. With the reluctant assistance of his best friend Gus (Dule Hill), Shawn opens up a PI Agency named Psych, and together they begin solving cases even the most seasoned detectives cannot crack.

A plea for help: Macs in education in Australia are under threat. Can anyone help out?

Hog Bay’s Mori notebook has been bumped to 1.3; now includes a DEVONthink-ish “Find similar” command.

Windows experimenters: How to dual-boot Vista Beta 2 and OS X on a MacBook.

Used CDs versus iTunes; I agree with much of this. I rarely purchase from the iTMS, preferring to buy used CDs from sellers on Amazon, or from second-hand record stores.

Omni: humans who make software. I noticed the following paragraph at the top of the OmniPlan license agreement prior to installing, and it caught my eye because I’ve not seen such direct, easy-to-understand, written-for-real-people wording in a license agreement before. Here it is:

“The document that follows this paragraph is a license agreement. Why do we need such a thing? Well, to be perfectly honest, our lawyers have told us that we need to protect ourselves. We at The Omni Group pride ourselves on our low-key style, but the global nature of the software business means that one lawsuit from one user in a far-flung jurisdiction could put us out of business. It also means that, without this agreement, we might not have protection from people who misuse our software. We do not want to bet our entire company on such possibilities, however unlikely, because we like doing what we do and want to continue to be able to do it. And, so, we require you to read and agree to this license. We think you will find it quite reasonable. Obviously, if you disagree, click “Disagree.” But, don’t just stop there. Let us know. Send some email to info@omnigroup.com telling us what you find unacceptable about our license agreement. We can’t promise to change anything, but we will do our best to get back to you.”

I especially like the last few lines. Most companies offer the license agreement as a fait accompli; you like it, or lump it. Omni goes one step further than most, here; it cares if people find the license terms unreasonable. omni++, I say.

The winners and runners-up of Phill Ryu’s Fake Leopard Screenshot Contest have been announced, and what a wonderful collection of ideas and eyecandy they are.

Tabbed Finder? Pretty much an essential part of every mentioned entry. Merging Mail and Address Book? Another common idea, but with very different approaches. Completely abandoning the Desktop, Menu Bar and every semblance of a toolbar in Mail? Well, only one entrant thought of that. But hey, full marks for originality.

Winner Eric Patterson’s entry boasts plenty of smart ideas for the next OS X. His re-invented Column View for Finder windows - in fact, his complete rethink of the Finder interface - is praise-worthy indeed. I particularly like his Finder Peek idea; a file previewer in the Finder that displays/plays/gives you a peek at pretty much any file on your disk.

I doubt very much that we’ll see any of the ideas on show in this contest (except perhaps the tabbed Finder, but even that is by no means a given) when Leopard does emerge; but that won’t stop me looking forward to the moment anyway.

A developer’s lot is not always an easy one. Take, for example, making a choice between putting an application’s data information and controls in palettes (like BBEdit does) or in a sidebar (like Mail does).

After all, some people prefer palettes. Some prefer sidebars, or drawers. You can’t please all of the people all of the time, so which ones do you choose?

Gus Mueller faced this tricky decision with the recent release of VoodooPad 3. It was comment worthy for many reasons, most of them the impressive collection of features that Gus had taken the trouble to add to an already feature-packed application.

Thursday night I get on a plane for Reykjavik as part of the Adobe Lightroom Adventure and will be depending on my Canon 5D, MacBook Pro, and Adobe Lightroom to handle all of my photography needs. The days are 22 hours long, and I plan on working most of that time. (Although, I hear that the Runtur - pub crawl - in Reykjavik is must-do. And since I’m a people shooter, I think I can justify immersing myself in the experience.)

When I return, I’ll have a very good idea of how well this version of Lightroom performs in the field under real shooting conditions. We’ll be posting our shots, comments, and hopefully some video on the official Lightroom Adventure site. I’ll also post more personal anecdotes, along with audio, on The Digital Story.

We return from the Adventure the week WWDC begins. I’m speaking at the San Francisco Apple Store on Wednesday, August 9 at 5pm. If you want to see some of what I shot, you might want to drop by.

Oh, and one other thing, if you’re curious about some of the San Francisco participants on the Adventure, I published a few shots from our recent get-together at Zuni Cafe, including a podcast about the Iceland Adventure. The podcast also features interviews with other participants (about the 18 minute mark). You can see and listen here.

I keep several free drag-and-drop audio applications on my desktop for quick tasks. From left to right, here are the ones that have stuck around, albeit usually with truncated names:

• Deep Niner Xtract2Wave44 converts any QuickTime-compatible audio file to a 44.1kHz WAV. The developer offers a 48kHz version as well.
  
  
• Doug Adams’s Drop a Few My Way uses iTunes to convert dropped files to various formats, which you can choose on the fly without burrowing into iTunes’ preference menu. It’s also smart enough to keep the files from infiltrating the iTunes library.
  
  
• Add “.aif” is an AppleScript droplet I wrote that simply adds an “aif” extension to the file’s name. It saved me a lot of time when I transferred several hundred extensionless AIFF files from my OS 9 Mac to my OS X one.
  
  
• Add 2 iTunes Library may also have come from Doug Adams or MacOS Hints.com. (There’s a similar droplet here.) Does what it says.

  Which droplets have stuck on your desktop?

Reader Guillaume C writes: “Could help me finding an app that mixes Finder and Preview. Before asking, I have crawled the web, asked in forums, nothing. I keep a lot of PDF files (really a lot, >10 000) and I would like to have a software that allows to browse directories by column, select a PDF, view the page snapshot, and navigate inside the PDF. I have made a photoshopped screenshot of it. Any idea if this app exists? I know about Pathfinder and MacGizmo, but they are not exactly what I need. Perhaps such an app would interest a lot of other people.”

I’m at a loss. Hey you reader folk, any suggestions for Guillaume? Thanks in advance for any pointers.

Depending on how you’ve set your iTunes preferences, it can take hours or days for podcasts to update themselves. For all those people who wrote me last Wednesday about the Project Runway podcast, let me offer some basic hints.

• Bravo generally has the Tim’s Take podcast go “live” shortly after the East Coast premiere of each new episode. Sometimes Tim’s Take has even gone live before the first showing has ended.
• To bypass your iTunes preferences and immediately update your podcasts, select and control-click (right-click) the podcast name. Choose Update Podcast from the contextual pop-up and (if needed) click the GET button for the new episode.

Just for the record: Go Laura, Robert, Kayne, and Michael. Down with Vincent, Angela, Keith and the-guy-with-no-neck.

US: Pretty Little Thing by Fink
Fink’s history is deep in electronic music, but he’s delved further into his own musicianship than ever before to produce a folky, acoustic and intimate sound. Our single of the week is the UK singer-songwriter’s sexy, simple heartbeat of a song, describing one man’s complimentary notice of a woman, “Pretty Little Thing.”

US: We Share Our Mothers' Health by The Knife
With Deep Cuts, the Knife showed that they could do near-perfect electro-pop (need we remind you of the tune “Heartbeats”?). Now as our Discovery Download track proves, the Swedish subversives can do corrosive, icy-white electro-freakiness just as well. Want to turn the dance floor upside down? Then throw on this twisted, theatrical gem.

US: Tabloid Wars Episode 101
Every day the staff of the New York Daily News only has 24 hours to win the story…or lose the war against its archrival, the New York Post. Follow the News’s top editors, journalists, and reporters as they hunt down the headlines, get their story straight and play beat-the-clock to get the paper out the door and into the hands of its hundreds of thousands of readers every day. These tireless and intrepid newspeople take viewers out on the “beat” — to the scene of the crime, to get the much-needed quote from the source, or to the hottest celebrity bashes for the photo op — and then back into the newsroom before deadline.

US: Psych Episode 1
James Roday plays the somewhat eccentric Shawn Spencer, a police consultant who solves crimes with powers of observation so acute that the police think he’s psychic — or so he lets them think. With the reluctant assistance of his best friend Gus (Dule Hill), Shawn opens up a PI Agency named Psych, and together they begin solving cases even the most seasoned detectives cannot crack.

US: Workout Episode 1
Jackie Warner, the star of Work Out and elite trainer and owner of the exclusive Sky Sports and Spa in Beverly Hills, California, believes in two things: working hard and playing harder. We’ll go “between the machines” of this fitness mecca for an inside look at the actors, models, and celebrities — and the people who just want to look like them and are willing to pay a hefty price to do so — on their quest for the best body in Hollywood. This six-episode, one-hour docu-series uncovers the drama, conflicts, pressure, and emotional turmoil — in and out of the gym — as Jackie makes her team of sexy, hard-bodied trainers and upscale clients sweat the big stuff all while keeping her business growing and her own personal life afloat.

Australia: It Lasts by Karl Broadie & Kevin Bennett
Karl Broadie’s evocative lyrics and beautiful melodies have seen him steadily winning fans since he first appeared on the scene in 2003. Our Single of the Week, “It Lasts,” is an almighty unleashing of heart and soul that proves the critics’ plaudits were deserved. We’ve also reduced Broadie’s album Black Crow Calling in price to celebrate this week’s featured track.

Canada: The Looks by Mstrkrft
MSTRKRFT (pronounced Master Craft) is one half of explosive punk rock duo Death From Above 1979. Jesse F. Keeler put this track together with help from studio regular Al-P. Part of DFA1979’s appeal is their relentless, pummeling beat - something worked to frazzled (im)perfection on “The Looks” - our free Single of the Week.

UK: Torches by Webb Sisters
Indeed there are two sisters here (Charley and Hattie, oddly not related to the Webb Brothers) whose voices intertwine in an easygoing, palatable folk-pop way. “Torches” is an acoustic-led, jaunty jump into the pop world, with a more sombre, inward-seeking manner that calls to mind either Fleetwood Mac or Heart in their glory days.

France: Remember Me by Daija
Le premier album de Dajla est déjà annoncé comme l’un des disques très attendus de l’année. Découverte lors des Transmusicales 2005, cette jeune Nantaise écume dès le début de cette année la playlist de Radio Nova. Se distançant du R’n'B galvaudé et ultra-formaté des ondes FM, Dajla est l’une des rares chanteuses françaises à pouvoir soutenir une comparaison avec les interprètes nu soul d’outre-Atlantique. À vous d’en juger en téléchargeant gratuitement notre Single de la semaine, « Remember Me ».

Other items of note:

US: LP by Landon Pigg
Not a freebie, but the iTMS is offering a special price for the album for a limited time: With notable mentions in Glamour and Teen Vogue, and upcoming appearances on Last Call with Carson Daly and Late Night with Conan O’Brian, 22-year-old Landon Pigg is on his way to inevitable stardom. His first full-length album, LP, includes “Sailed On,” which was featured recently on Grey’s Anatomy, plus eleven more tracks penned with Pigg’s melodic vibe. iTunes Special Offer We recently featured Pigg’s single “Sailed On” as a free Single of the Week, and now, for a limited time, you can purchase his new album, LP, at the discounted price of $7.99.

US: Aquaman
This is not free and it does not appear to be a joke (i.e. Entourage) and I have no idea where this turned up from but I thought I’d put in my list today and hope that someone would explain this one to me. Just another things that make you go “huh?” I suppose. UPDATE: It’s not Entourage. It’s apparently from the creators of Smallville. Maybe they’re trying an iTMS rehash of the Nobody’s Watching viral marketing success?

Sleuth Network
Newly available TV shows include Miami Vice, the A-Team, Knight Rider (Hoff! Hoff! Hoff!) and Dragnet 1967.

Warner Bros. Television
New TV Shows include Friends, Aquaman (!), Babylon 5, the Flintstones, the Jetsons and MadTV (season 8, 9, 10).

“Life on Mars” starts tonight on BBC. Recommended.

The OmniGroup announcing a new application should be a national Mac holiday, frankly. And the rampant…nay, *rabid* speculation spawned by the tantalizing “reveal” on their blog has been amusing to watch. Also informative for any developers interested in what Mac users are looking for (hint: a decent email client is a big one).

That said, another big deal lately has been productivity-related activities, including Getting Things Done with systems like Kinkless, which combines OmniOutliner, AppleScript, and GTD techniques. This has not gone unnoticed by the OmniFolk, who have finally announced the new app: OmniPlan, which should be in beta this week.

The Ars.Technica “Infinite Loop” blog posted a trio of screenshots purporting to be of the new app. Verrrry interesting indeed.

We look at them every day, our eyes are drawn to them almost every time we interact with the computer - icons for apps and files are a very important part of the interface. But what attributes make a good icon?

Personally, I tend to prefer icons that stand out visually. I’m fond of the icon for Notational Velocity, not because it’s attractive but because it looks completely different to every other icon (very few icons use lettering, and none of them in quite the same jarring manner as NV does).

One problem people have commented on in the past is the prevalence of ‘blue circles’ - it’s hard to pick out apps in a crowded Dock when all the icons are round-ish and blue-ish. For this reason, I’m also keen on icons that deliberately adopt brighter, more visible colors and unusual shapes. One I spotted (and liked) recently was the icon for Spotlaser, very distinctive.

But I’m not a designer. So I thought I’d ask a few professionals - people who know a thing or two about icons - for their thoughts.

Jon Hicks, creator of the Firefox icon (among others), said:

“That’s a really hard one to answer, but I guess it all comes down to simplicity that can work at small sizes, and still have scope for detail at large sizes.”

He went on: “My favourite application icon has to be Transmit by Panic. While it’s a very detailed icon, with subtle shading and form, its still an instantly recognisable Yellow Truck, no matter what size, 128px or 16px.”

How about Jasper Hauser, creator of the Camino icon? He summed things up like this:

“Basically there are two aspects that are the base of a good icon: 1) shape, and 2) use of color. If you look at the Appzapper icon you will see that it 1) has a original shape, and 2) uses irregular colors and an irregular color combination. Doing a blue circle will not stand out.”

Via Ethan Zuckerman, I came across a post by Maciej Ceglowski on Idle Words, From: Pushkin.

Many months ago I found myself exploring a website with the collected works of Alexander Pushkin, and taking inspiration from the Samuel Pepys blog, I thought it might be fun to import Pushkin’s letters into an email client. Apart from the novelty value, the mail client provides all kinds of very useful search and sort features you don’t usually get with literary texts.

I love this tidbit, however:

I had to bump the date up by 200 years because Mail.app refuses to properly sort nineteenth century email. I consider this a bug.

Maciej has some fun ideas about setting up “historical correspondence,” annotating the letters of famous people via email.

Workout: Episode 1
Jackie Warner, the star of Work Out and elite trainer and owner of the exclusive Sky Sports and Spa in Beverly Hills, California, believes in two things: working hard and playing harder. We’ll go “between the machines” of this fitness mecca for an inside look at the actors, models, and celebrities — and the people who just want to look like them and are willing to pay a hefty price to do so — on their quest for the best body in Hollywood. This six-episode, one-hour docu-series uncovers the drama, conflicts, pressure, and emotional turmoil — in and out of the gym — as Jackie makes her team of sexy, hard-bodied trainers and upscale clients sweat the big stuff all while keeping her business growing and her own personal life afloat.

Project Runway 3: Road to the Runway
Emmy®-nominated Project Runway returns for a third seam-busting season. Supermodel and host Heidi Klum, her fellow judges — fashion designer Michael Kors and Elle Fashion Director Nina Garcia — and everyone’s favorite fashion mentor, Tim Gunn, are back to decide which of the new crop of 15 aspiring fashion designers will be in…or out. This season promises more surprise guest judges, more unexpected challenges, and of course even more drama on and off the runway.

Psych: Episode 1
James Roday plays the somewhat eccentric Shawn Spencer, a police consultant who solves crimes with powers of observation so acute that the police think he’s psychic — or so he lets them think. With the reluctant assistance of his best friend Gus (Dule Hill), Shawn opens up a PI Agency named Psych, and together they begin solving cases even the most seasoned detectives cannot crack.

I’ve always enjoyed reading Amit Singh’s articles dealing with the nitty gritty technical aspects of OS X on his website kernelthread.com. Recently, however, I ran across something a bit different — his Hanoimania! page. I thought that it was so cool that I needed to share it with you.

Basically, it’s a page containing over 100 implementations to the Towers of Hanoi problem. Maybe you’ve worked up a solution in Python or C before — but what about PostScript, Sendmail, Make, or Autoconf? (Yea, me neither.) This page is an amazing display of “thinking outside the box” and creativity.

If you enjoy reasoning about these sorts of things, you may also enjoy reading about Turing Completeness or esoteric programming languages. Or, if you really want to enlighten yourself, check out Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid from your local library.

What’s the most off the wall programming language you’ve ever used to solve a problem?

After much investigation, I settled on the SE W810i handset because of its impressive array of features, OS X compatibility, and similar form factor to my SE T637. Here’s what I’ve learned in daily use.

As you may recall, I asked Mac DevCenter readers their thoughts in my post, Time for a New Phone. The ensuing discussion was wildly helpful and led to me choosing the SE W810i. After a few days of use with Cingular’s GSM/EDGE network, I’m happy with my choice… for the most part. Here’s how it shakes out.

I thought I’d throw together a collection of my favorite half-dozen overlooked iTunes UI features. These range from the fairly unobvious to the very unobvious, so your mileage may vary from mine. Feel free to add your own personal suggestions to the comments.

[Ok, for the humor impaired, the blog item has no technical merit. So, keep moving along.] On a whim, after getting through a bunch of email this evening, I decided to check in on the Apple Store and ran into the good ol’ We’ll be back soon yellow note. The last time this happened, the Intel-based MacBooks appeared without a lot of fanfare (though several rumor sites had correctly predicted its Tuesday arrival). This time, though, none of the rumor sites were predicting any new products until WWDC in August. In fact, even then, the rumor sites were cautious in predicting what may be announced (although some kind of hot rod tower MacPro is a slam dunk prediction).

We’ve been hearing a lot about AJAX and Web 2.0 — especially around here on the O’Reilly blogs. And while I agree the technology is flexible and fun (what’s a Widget other than a mini AJAX app, after all?), I really haven’t grokked what all the hullabaloo is about. I mean, I understand the code that makes my movies look like they’re talking is pretty cutting-edge stuff. But if it’s as pointless and/or annoying as what most Web 2.0 sites have offered up by way of features, the whole thing might as well be another blink tag.

Nike/iPod Sensor Photos [Tewks]
Someone cracked open their Nike sensor sneakers and Tewks.net has the pictures.

iMovie Rentals? [ThinkSecret]
And now for something completely different: movie rentals through the iTunes Music Store? ThinkSecret reports this “represents a coup for the movie industry, which will have succeeded in standing its ground against Apple’s pressures to offer consumers the option of owning movie downloads.”

Safari Enhancers [5ThirtyOne]
Still using Safari? Be proud. It’s not just a Firefox world. Derek Punsalan offers a great case for Safari on his 5ThirtyOne blog, noting its terrific load time, page rendering and extensibility. Pop over to read an excellent round-up of free or nearly-free Safari enhancers. They range from David Watanabe’s Inquisitor, a Safari extension that adds live search and keyword suggestions, to Hao Li’s Saft, which adds ad-blocking, keyboard shortcuts and a session saver, to the OmniWeb-like sidebar of SafariStand. Punsalan may not convince you to switch back permanently to Safari, but he may entice you to discover some great new features that you weren’t aware of.

Yet another “I I Dropped It and Now It Works” iPod Story [SpillingCoffee]
Today’s “I thumped my iPod” story comes courtesy of the Spilling Coffee blog. Author “Tom Coffee” relates his encounter with a sad-face iPod, a lot of googling and the standard “thump-it” advice: “I couldn’t quite bring myself to dropping my $300 iPod to the hard tile floor on the off chance that it would spin or wobble on the way down so I did the next best thing: I held it and slammed it onto a pad of paper on my desk (providing some cushion so I didn’t crack the case), charging port down. And like mana falling from heaven, the tunes started playing.” This weblog does not officially endorse dropping, slamming, pounding, thumping or any other percussion-based iPod repairs.

Surveys Reveal Podcast Special Interests
According to CNet’s News.com, MacWorld.com and StarTrek.com dominate the podcasting world, according to the number of visitors to their respective podcast sites. Nielsen/NetRatings have been tracking podcast popularity recently with surprising results. Did you know that more podcast listeners download their content using Safari than any other browser? This demonstrates yet again a strong Apple-centric tinge to the overall podcasting world.

iPod firmware reveals iPhone/iMessenger clues [AppleInsider]
Quoting: ‘While Apple has been relatively mum on any plans for iPod-branded cell phone, the latest iPod software includes references to an “t_feature_app_PHONE_APP” application and variables such as “kPhoneSignalStrength,” “clPhoneCallHistoryModel,” prPhoneSettingsMenu,” “prPhoneSettingsMenuView,” prPhoneEnableSetting” and “prPhoneMenuItem.”‘ Want to search for yourself? Grab a copy of the latest update and issue the strings command from the Unix command line interface: cd /Library/Packages/iPod2006-06-28.pkg/Contents and then strings Archive.pax | grep -i phone or strings Archive.pax | grep -i movie, etc.

Sorry about the delay. Apple finally got around to updating the iTMS quite late today.

US: Lonely Train by Black Stone Cherry
This isn’t your grandmother’s grunge. Black Stone Cherry have all the creeping dread of Alice in Chains, but the powerhouse band turns the music into a pummeling mixture of speed metal and classic rock. “Lonely Train” is our free Single of the Week.

US: You're My Kind by Elektrochemie
With Thomas Schumacher and Stephan Bodzin churning out an infallible tech-house background groove and Australian vocalist Caitlin Devlin on the microphone, Elektrochemie carve out their own icy, robotic synth pop on our free Discovery Download. Cold, crisp, and precise, “You’re My Kind” is a cry for emotion from deep within the dark recesses of the machine. Following on the heels of last year’s “Pleasure Seeker” single, this track is yet another winner for the Get Physical label.

Australia:Yesterday by 78 from Home
When a band has three guitarists, you know it doesn’t do things by halves. 78 from Home embrace the whole rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle: the attitude, the chicks, the rider, and the pants that would be inappropriate in any other occupation. The Melbourne group brings back the adrenalin of hard rock with a tunefulness that keeps the music completely relevant. Make plenty of room in your collection for our free Single of the Week.

Canada: Who Taught You to Live Like That? by Sloan
A very special Single of the Week comes courtesy from the veritable Canadian institution of power pop known as Sloan. “Who Taught You to Live Like That?” is available exclusively on iTunes this week. Next week, the rest of Canada will discover what you will already know - Sloan’s newest track has a glam-rock stomp and huge chorus that you will not be able to get out of your head. Sloooooooooan!

UK: Not One Bit Ashamed by King Creosote
Honing his songwriting over a series of self-released CD-Rs, King Creosote drops us a sublime Single of the Week in the form of “Not One Bit Ashamed”. If you’re looking for pretension or glamour, then the surreal folk troubadour’s maudlin pop might leave you befuddled at best. But for those interested in finding the lucid beauty within the everyday, Creosote delivers the goods by the barrelful.

France: My Delusions by Ampop
Reykjavik a désormais son groupe pop au romantisme façon Coldplay, aux vapeurs type Sigur Ros et aux mélodies tendances Keane… qui après avoir passé la moitié de l’année dans l’obscurité la plus totale s’apprête enfin à sortir au grand jour. Ampop, trio venu du froid, rafraîchit la scène pop avec son nouvel album, My delusions, déjà disque d’or en Islande, faisant suite à Made For Market, considéré par la critique comme le meilleur album islandais de 2003. Leurs nouveaux singles « My Delusions » et « Don’t Let Me Down » sont à leur tour devenus des incontournables des ondes au pays de Björk.

Ok, sorry for the lack of a true Mac item, but people interested in virtualization might find this interesting anyway. I installed the newly free-ed Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 on an unsupport Windows version (at least it is not listed as supported in the Microsoft downloads area): Windows Media Center Edition. I decided to try to install Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition (also free) on Windows 2000. So, I found a copy of Windows 2000 Professional Edition and the Service Pack 4 disc for it and installed it under Virtual PC 2004.

I recently bought a USB headset to make Skype calls, and wanted a quick way to switch the Mac’s audio output between the built-in line output (which feeds my speakers) and the headset. Rogue Amoeba’s free SoundSource provides a handy system-wide menu bar for doing that, but every time I switched to the headphones, they blasted my ears. So I cobbled together this AppleScript to switch between sound sources and adjust the volume with one click.

This past Tuesday was Patch Tuesday for Windows XP users like me. There were also a bunch of anti-spyware, anti-virus, and a bunch of other stuff that had me rebooting my Windows PCs a bunch of times over the past few days. So, with my Mac user hat on, I read the following Symantec web-article with great interest: Mac OS X: Viruses and Security that says (in part) Let’s start with the hot-button issue of Mac OS X viruses. Simply put, at the time of writing this article, there are no file-infecting viruses that can infect Mac OS X.

Psych: Pilot
James Roday plays the somewhat eccentric Shawn Spencer, a police consultant who solves crimes with powers of observation so acute that the police think he’s psychic — or so he lets them think. With the reluctant assistance of his best friend Gus (Dule Hill), Shawn opens up a PI Agency named Psych, and together they begin solving cases even the most seasoned detectives cannot crack.

Project Runway: Road to the Runway Season 3
Emmy®-nominated Project Runway returns for a third seam-busting season. Supermodel and host Heidi Klum, her fellow judges — fashion designer Michael Kors and Elle Fashion Director Nina Garcia — and everyone’s favorite fashion mentor, Tim Gunn, are back to decide which of the new crop of 15 aspiring fashion designers will be in…or out. This season promises more surprise guest judges, more unexpected challenges, and of course even more drama on and off the runway. Aspiring designers vie for the chance of a lifetime as they tackle tough challenges and attempt to wow the fashion-industry judges.

More after the jump…

Microsoft changed its Virtual PC 2004 product for Windows XP desktops and notebooks from fee to free on July 12. This follows making its Virtual Server 2005 R2 product free earlier in the year.VMware also made its Virtual Server 1.0 product free (its predecessor GSX Server was for-fee) this week. Its VMware Workstation product is still a for fee product, however. So, all of a sudden Microsoft Windows users (I use pretty much everything) have all kinds of free virtualization products to create safe testing environments on the desktop. On the Mac, we’ve got the wonderful for-fee Parallels Desktop for Mac, of course. And, it seems like Apple is giving it official attention on their website. VMware says they have their product running on a Mac in their labs. But, where’s Apple in this mix? Boot Camp (not for me)? Hmm. I wouldn’t mind if Apple put Parallels Desktop for Mac on every Mac like they did with ComicLife recently :-)

How to get Mail to export messages in mbox format. A nice tip.

Why I love Camino; not much to argue with here.

Office 2004 owners; make sure you grab the latest 11.2.5 update which contains some security and bug fixes.

How to create a quick slide show in Lightroom Beta 3.

Real world experiences with Win XP in Parallels Desktop: “I am delighted that I can get rid of two major heat generators and a lot of wiring and the electronic KVM box that I needed with the two machines (the G4 Mac and the HP PC). Now, I just have one computer running in my office, the 20-inch iMac Intel CoreDuo, and it doesn’t generate all that much heat.”

Automator Virtual Input gives Automator complete control over keyboard and mouse, so you can simulate clicks and key presses. Shareware, $25.

An astute observation in What is this Windows of which you speak: “Apple only needs to compete with its own prior best.”

The following is a section that we left out of this week’s Mac DevCenter article What Is Vim (It’s Easier than You Think) because of length constraints. I hope you find it useful as one more point on your radar screen as you ponder the productivity that Vim may be able to add to your daily workflow.

Save Time With Vim Macros

Do you find yourself frequently whipping out the python interpreter or cooking up regular expressions in Perl just to munge some text? Even if you’re already really good, I bet Vim macros can still make you even better. A Vim macro is simply a set of keystrokes that you can record and use over again to perform repetitious tasks.

But wait a tick. “What’s wrong with regexes,” you ask? We’ll, consider this conventional wisdom:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. –Jamie Zawinski, in comp.lang.emacs

Although I do commonly use regular expressions in production level code that I write, day-to-day events involving a quick transform of a text file hardly require the effort of cooking up a regex. Read on to see why.

Don’t let their small size fool you, Dashboard widgets are surprisingly CPU hungry. Take each widget’s intensely graphical nature and penchant for polling and parsing files from the internet. Add to this Dashboard’s slew of special effect and the fact that your average user keeps 5 or more widgets running at a time, and it’s not hard to arrive at a resource situation that can make the fans on your G5 kick up in anticipation.

But that’s ok, because these processor cycles are only used when Dashboard is activated. As soon as your widgets fade away into their OpenGL-accelerated purgatory, their resource usage drops to zero and your full-sized applications have the undivided attention of your CPU again. Right?

A blogger by the name of Paul Souders (aka axoplasm) posted a screenshot today that speaks volumes about the current state of GUI:

I hit F9 just now and my mind boggled at the number of multi-paned interfaces I saw. Of the 14 windows I have open, 13 of them have panes or sidebars. (12 if you don’t count GMail). I’m also not counting the columns view in the Finder….

Of course I felt compelled to hit F9, which produced not as many windows (or panes) as Paul, but still — lots of interface elements, both in number and in diversity.

With toolbars, drawers, sidebars, tabs, etc. spreading like a game of Qix, the multitasking sure is, well, tasking sometimes. Wasn’t there some sort of one-window-per-app ideal back in the day?

I recently had occasion to pick up a CD full of medical images and needed to display those images on my Mac. When Photoshop failed to support the DICOM format, a google search turned up OsiriX, a “100% Free DICOM/PACS Viewer for MacOS X”.

The GPL open source OsiriX medical imaging software worked exactly as promised: fast and easy-to-use. It read the data directly from the CD without fuss and loaded it into an interactive framework which, if you try to think like a radiologist, rather than a normal person, made perfect sense.

There are options out the wazoo. You can import data, export data and query the data database. You can work with two and three dimensional data and time series “4D” data for heart studies. You can adjust the color lookup tables, magnify, and mensurate. You can store pictures and source data on your iPod or burn data to recordable discs or produce a text report. In short, you can thoroughly inspect all kinds of radiological medical data in a well thought-out interface.

As a final note, I personally use a two-button scroll-wheel mouse on my Mac, which turned out to be exactly the right kind for this program. You can interactively assign the left and right mouse functions to manipulate the image while using the scroll wheel to move between images in a given series.

Read more about the OsiriX project over at Apple.

US: “Triple Plays”
New to the iTMS, 3 for 2 “Triple Plays”: buy a 2-track bundle for $1.98, get a third track free. Let’s get this sorted out right from the get-go. We at iTunes have decided there’s nothing wrong with a little free music now and then. Our Single of the Week and Discovery Download features have shown that to be true. Now we’re offering you a free track whenever you buy one of the bundles offered below. For our initial launch of this feature, we’re focusing on Hip-Hop. Just pay for two of the tracks and get the third one free. Sound good? Good.

US: The Storm by The Procussions
Inspired by the “Golden Age” of hip-hop in the ’90s (starring groups like De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest), this Los-Angeles-by-way-of-Colorado act has taken that blueprint and moved on to create something new. Their organic hip-hop calls to mind friends and co-conspirators Talib Kweli and Aceyalone. “The Storm” is our free Single of the Week.

US: Love Found Me by DecembeRadio
These Virginian newbies crank it up like your older brother used to, with the top down and the riffs blazing down the highway. “Love Found Me” is hard rock paradise with a spiritual message underneath. Give it a chance and turn it up — it’s our free Discovery Download.

Australia: Real Luv by Blak Genius featuring DL
This week, get something a little different from your friends at iTunes. Blak Genius burst onto the Australian hip-hop scene earlier this year with the catchy “Show Me What You Workin’ With.” Our Single of the Week, “Real Luv”, is lifted from this dynamic artist’s debut album, The Prophecy. It’s a rap-meets-R&B crossover track that features the soulful melodies of DL and proves Blak Genius’ talent, appeal, and versatility.

Canada: Kick Up The Dust by Blood Meridian
While it would be hard for most humans to conjure up the type of violence and madness Cormac McCarthy gets into in his novel Blood Meridian, the Vancouver band does its best to live up to its namesake. Led by Matthew Camirand (Black Mountain), this dirge-like blues ‘n’ booze number is a rallying cry for debauchery, sung by a man who sounds like he’s on his last legs. No doubt this is our free Single of the Week.

UK: Slo Fuzz by Sol Seppy
Fans of ’90s dream-rockers Sparklehorse might recognize the voice of Sophie Michalitsianos, who was with the group for two of their most acclaimed releases. Michalitsianos returns under the guise of Sol Seppy, and it sounds like she’s trudging through the bottom of the ocean, conducting pop symphonies in slow motion. The gelatinous haze of this free Single of the Week feels like bliss to us.

France: Royce featuring Robust/Girls On Bikes (Featuring Robust)
Né à Chicago, le groupe Royce s’attaque aux problèmes d’actualité (les filles en moto) avec un mélange de douces mélodies de rock indé et de rythmes issus du hip-hop de la vieille école. Alliant innocence jubilante et rythmiques studieuses, « Girls on Bikes » exploite un nouveau filon dans le monde de la pop. C’est également notre Single gratuit de la semaine.

Developers wanting to test new versions of their apps (or users who insist on having more than one copy of an app hanging around in their Applications folder) can now make their lives much easier with a clever little app called rooSwitch.

The app’s purpose is to help you manage multiple data profiles for pretty much any app you have installed. Drag an app on to it, and it will quickly hunt down all the appropriate data, cache and plist files. These are collated as a saved profile (a .rooswitch file); then you can start having fun by making copies of profiles, or creating entirely new ones. This last feature is particularly useful for seeing an app as a new user would see it.

Describing in words what rooSwitch does is tricky, so your best bet is to watch the short explanatory screencasts that the author has produced; these make the whole idea abundantly clear.

For a geek, the second best thing to finding a new solution to an existing computer problem, is finding a new problem to an existing solution. While fiddling around with Mail.app a few weeks ago, I stumbled over the window that pops up if you choose “Get Info” from the action menu at the bottom of the mailboxes column. Its most interesting feature is a list of all the messages stored in the selected email account on the server.

The list conveniently states the size of each message and can also be restricted to those messages that have already been removed from, or downloaded to, your Mac. Messages that have not been downloaded yet, are marked with a blue dot. The thing that makes this list really useful is the “Remove From Server” button: make a selection from the list, hit that button, and you can delete messages right there on the server — no need to download them first. Very neat!

This feature provided a welcome solution to a problem I ran into this week: sometimes when getting new email from my server, the download will stall: the progress bar will freeze, and even clicking on the stop sign in the Activity Viewer to abort the download will not help, either. Unfortunately, force-quiting Mail, relaunching the app, and restarting the download doesn’t help much: since Mail apparently hasn’t marked the downloaded messages, all downloaded messages are re-downloaded and the download stalls again at the very same message. While I still haven’t found the source of the problem, I can at least manually remove the messages I have successfully downloaded thanks to the Account Info window, and then download the rest of the mail as usual.

There are other uses for this feature, as well: if you’re traveling and only have access to a slow Internet connection, being able to manually delete very large incoming email messages (especially if you have a colleague who just loves to send you the “hilarious TV ad du-jour”…) may be a God-sent. The thing that baffles me, though, is this: why haven’t Mail’s programmers included a “Download From Server” button as well? Being able to download only the few messages that you care about, instead of having to remove all the others first, would be so much more efficient.

P.S.: If you have any ideas as to what may cause those email downloads to stall in the first place, please feel free to share them in the comments. Thanks!

Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to home automation. One is to have a personal computer that’s dedicated to acting as a central controller. Clearly I’m a big advocate of this approach, and I practice what I preach (as the saying goes), because it allows you to build the most flexible and “smart” home automation system.

The other approach is to deploy individual semi-smart devices, each with a special purpose and single function, but none of them communicating with each other. This is a valid approach too, of course, and if you have just a few things that you want to accomplish its often the least expensive route. For some, these devices are the “gateway drug” to full home automation. That’s my story, I started with this approach then quickly moved on to a centralized controller when I wanted a more integrated system.

Nevertheless, lately I’ve begun to re-discover the simplicity of dedicated, disconnected hardware. I’ve written about my standalone webcams before, and they’re still among my favorites, but a couple of new toys have caught my eye lately.

First up is the TeleSpy. It’s a telephone with a built-in motion detector and microphone. Turn it on before you leave the house and if it detects anyone entering your home it will silently ring your cell phone and allow you to listen in for 30 seconds. More than enough time to determine if there’s something going on that you should worry about. It’s a regular phone, too, so it doesn’t appear suspicious and has utility beyond home security. (If you have pets, of course, you’ll need to consider where you place it in your home. One of the contributors to Smart Home Hacks suggests that putting it in a room with a closed door adds an extra layer of security. This will reduce false alarms and when you get the call you know that someone has opened the door, a good indication that Fido isn’t the culprit.)

I’m also intrigued by the Water Warning Leak Alarm. It’s a battery-powered box that emits a shrill alarm when its sensor detects moisture. If you have a damp basement or a leaky water heater, this can bring you peace-of-mind. Edward Cheung describes how alter a smoke alarm to build a water detector in Smart Home Hacks (See page 169) but the low cost of the Water Warning makes the pre-built approach well worth considering.

The bottom line? When the cost of a standalone device is relatively low, and its utility immediately beneficial, I no longer hesitate to consider adding one to my home.

If you’ve been using a Mac long enough to rememeber Acta, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for. Acta was one of the original outliners, right up there alongside MORE as one of the most popular and well-loved applications of its kind back in the Classic OS days. (See Robert C. Eckhardt’s 1987 article Inside Outliners for a guided tour of what was hot at the time…)

And it hasn’t died. People have continued to use it in Classic mode - at least, they did until the switch to Intel. When that was announced, Acta’s creators at A Sharp software decided that the time had come for something new.

Opal is the result. It’s a Universal Binary and requires 10.4, but it’s been designed to appeal to long-term Acta users and should, according to A Sharp, “open 20-year-old Acta documents” without a problem. Now that’s legacy support.

Opal is still very much beta, but it feels nice. It’s not a power-outliner like OmniOutliner, but it has a responsive, minimalist feel to it at the moment which is quite appealing. Outliner addicts, give it a whirl. Tell us what you think.

I’ve be using, and happy with, the Sony Ericsson T637 phone. But it’s starting to act up, and it’s time for something new. This leads me to the same of dilemma that I always face when updating my handset: what should I get?

I’m leaning toward compact, such as the Motorola RAZR V3, hoping that it syncs well with my Mac. All I need are contacts, calendar, and good Bluetooth connectivity for file transfer and SMS messaging (I like to use Address Book for sending SMS because keyboards are easier than phones for typing).

My plan is Cingular, so I don’t have the hottest phones available such as Motorola’s Q. I can’t even get the latest Treo…

So, my fellow Mac user, what do you recommend? I’d like to hear what you’re using. I’ll need to make up my mind by next week.

Technorati Tags: equipment, Mac, gadgets

For the past few days, the blogging world has been abuzz with that “dashboardadvisoryd” thing. Indeed, it seems Mac OS X v. 10.4.7 contacts Apple’s servers ever eight or so hours and ensures you did not inadvertently download a malicious widget. This, however, raises a great many grave questions.

It almost borders on the cliche, but there are two common motivations for wanting to get involved in home automation. In most cases you either want a home security system or you want to automate your morning coffee pot. Seriously, while obviously not everyone falls into one of these groups, you can do a good quick sort of the community by dividing among these lines.

That’s why I had to laugh at the CommoCoffee 64. It is a 1985 peripheral for allowing a Commodore 64 computer to directly control a coffee maker. The text is not in English, but there’s a nifty photo scanned from the Italian magazine Microcomputer. Whacky, but not all surprising given the holy grail status of coffee pot automation. (Thanks for the link, BoingBoing.)

I almost didn’t include coffee pot automation in Smart Home Hacks, but a close friend and tech reviewers insisted that it was necessary. Thus, if you have the book, turn to Hack #37 for full details on how to accomplish this using more modern techniques with your Mac, Linux, or Windows computer. Ahhh, progress.

VoodooPad 3 is out and sporting a bunch of new features. It now includes tabs (what self-respecting text app these days doesn’t?), faster search, support for huge documents, and (something I’m particularly pleased to see), support for Linkback.

That last thing means you can paste in stuff from OmniGraffle or Nisus Writer (and in future, OmniOutliner - take note, GTD fans) and when updated in its native application, that data with automatically update within VoodooPad. Nice.

Back to the new features, what else is there? Text styles, full screen editing mode, customizable shortcuts in the preferences (another great feature). There’s plenty more.

Gus Mueller has also announced a new Pro version of VoodooPad, which will have additional features including encryption, better metadata (betametadata?) and a built-in webserver. Phreeow.

Next, MyNotes. I downloaded this and had a play with it a week or so ago. If you’ve used Mori before, the layout will be very familiar, but MyNotes is not nearly as powerful a program. It has strong emphasis on the visual presentation of your notes on screen or on paper, neither of them things I tend to pay much attention to myself. I just wanna write. But MyNotes is nicely made and attractively designed; it may well appeal as a simple notes and snippets box.

Finally, Mori itself. I keep coming back to this notepad application, for the simple reason that I love using it. It would fit my style of working very well, if it supported Markdown. Yes, I know I can simply install HumaneText.service and get all my Markdown done that way, but I’d much prefer to avoid the Services menu if at all possible. I spent an hour or so using Mori this morning, but couldn’t bring myself to switch to it completely. I shall return for another try in future, I’m sure of that.

Finally finally: Journler 2.0.1 has just been released by Phil Dow. I’ve not had a chance to try this since version 1.1 or thereabouts, so I shall add that to the todo list…

Have you had any interesting adventures in notebookland recently?

I’ve learned the easiest way to end up with good audio is to record it cleanly from the start. After testing various set-ups, I’ve settled on two important pieces of hardware that help me record crisp tracks for my podcasts.

My expectations weren’t that high when I ordered M-Audio’s Podcast Factory — it was so affordable at $149 US. The kit included software, a mic, desktop stand, and USB interface. The gem of the kit is the Fast Track interface. If I had to do it over, I’d just order the Fast Track interface separately for $99 and save a few bucks. Regardless of which way you go, this hardware interface paired with Audio Hijack Pro — or software of your choice — produces clean, full bodied recordings. (You can check out my podcasts on The Digital Story as an example.)

One quick note… when using an audio interface with your Mac, be sure to choose your “quietest” machine. I have an older PowerBook that the fan never goes on — perfect for audio recording. I usually restart before the session to make sure I don’t have any other processes running that might fire up the CPU and kick in the fans.

For those situations where lugging my Mac along is inconvenient, I’ve been using the MicroTrack 24/96. This super-compact digital recorder captures stereo or mono audio in .wav or .mp3 formats and writes it to a common CF memory card. I like that it’s a USB 2.0 mass storage device, so I can plug into my Mac and simply drag the files from the MicroTrack to my hard drive. It has a nice variety of input and output jacks, especially for such a small device. For example, you can use both 1/8″ and 1/4″ mics. If you have an XLR mic you will need to get an XLR female to 1/8″ TRS male cord.

I really like the audio captured by the MicroTrack, and it’s so light and small. it fits in my top shirt pocket. The only downside is the battery — it isn’t accessible. I’d love to be able to swap out batteries in the field. You can read a review of the MicroTrack on our Digital Media site.

One final thought: be sure to shop around if you’re considering any of these items. For example, the MicroTrack lists for $499 US, but can be found for $399 or less with a little research.

Apple has released a new, lower-spec version of the 17inch iMac, on sale to students and teachers via its education store.

The machine includes the standard 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor and 512MB RAM (two 256MB sticks. The specs that are reduced are a lower-capacity hard disk (80GB), a Combo rather than Superdrive, and shared video graphics instead of a dedicated ATI Radeon card. All yours for $899.

So, I did it at last: I switched to Gmail. The change happened unexpectedly and suddenly, when after years of sponging from generous friends, I needed to start paying for my own hosting for once.

This switch meant reconfiguring a whole bunch of things, including email accounts, and I came to the conclusion that this was as good a time as any to put Gmail to the test, and properly this time.

The first task was to get all my mail from an existing IMAP account and into Gmail. There’s no easy way to do so using my client of choice, Eudora, but a friend gave me a great tip for doing it using Mutt; simply tag all the messages required (this was easy: all messages in my archive folder) then bounce them en masse to a specially-created address at my Gmail account which archived them them all, bypassing the inbox.

That done, I just had to settle down with Gmail. Little things took time to get used to; things like remembering to switch to a browser tab for email tasks, rather than hit Command+Tab to switch to a different application. And things like adding attachments via a dialog box, rather than just dragging them into place.

The tool chest available to widget developers is surprisingly robust. If you can put it on a web page, you can put it in a widget. AJAX and other Web 2.0 technologies are right at home inside Dashboard. If you need to do something slightly more radical, plugins can be written in Cocoa. And, of course, the wide wealth of unix command line tools are available to widget makers through the widget object’s system() method.

But having access to a command line tool and having the permissions needed to use it are two completely different things. I ran headlong into this when writing Share Switch. I wanted to be able to turn file sharing on and off inside Dashboard. Turns out there’s a command line tool called AppleFileServer that does just that! But there’s a catch: one must be root in order to run it.

• iTMS free selections are free for a limited time, typically a week or less. They will not stay free in your cart. You must add the song to the cart and buy it during that grace period.
• Sometimes, “free” selections…aren’t. Apple forgets to turn on the “free” part for a day, or longer, or in one memorable case until the next week’s selections are loaded. Always check your cart before pressing Buy.
• You cannot “gift” free items. Not to people in your country, not internationally.
• You cannot download free items from international stores unless you have an account specific to that store. Setting up an account usually involves both a credit card and a billing address for the card in the store’s country. I do not personally have access to any store but the US one. Stores with freebies include Japan, Australia, Canada, the UK, France, and the US.
• The Japan store’s freebie updates about a day after all other stores. I no longer list the Japanese freebie because of (a) the update time difference and (b) posting with the proper Unicode listing is painful.
• The French freebie is called the “Single de la Semaine”. All the other free selections (with the exception of Japan) are marked in English as “Single of the Week”. The US store often offers “Discovery Downloads” in addition to the Single of the Week and newly added TV series often have free episodes or trailers.
• TV Shows are, to the best of my knowledge, only available in the US Store. Free videos/TV shows often show up on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday rather than Tuesday. Some stay free for a long time; most expire the next Tuesday. To spot free TV shows, visit the TV Shows area and watch the ads at the top of the iTunes page. It takes several minutes for all the ads to cycle through.
• All free downloads use digital rights management, as would paid tracks.
• Free tracks are usually given their own unique album page with the description of why they are the Single of the Week or a Discovery Download.

Tracking the iTMS Freebies is a volunteer effort. If you find it valuable, please say so in the comments or drop me an e-mail with your thoughts.

US: Girl and the Sea by the Presets
On “Girl and the Sea,” this Australian electro duo conjures up minimal atmospherics and the plight of attention-starved club kids (after the club has closed). It’s synth-pop with a warm heart: the blips and bleeps keep the party shuffling along while the melody pines for something more real. “Girl and the Sea” is our free Single of the Week.

US: Red, White and Blue by Rockie Lynne
Rockie Lynn rose up out of the South, and there’s definitely a bit of American pride hanging over his music. But “Red, White and Blue” is more than just a rally-rousing cry for patriotism — it’s actually willing to admit that flag-waving isn’t enough anymore. The rousing country tune preaches tolerance, but doesn’t shove it down your throat, and is our free Discovery Download this week.

Australia: Stares & Whispers '05 by Weapon X & Ken Hell
“Stares and Whispers” features a depth and maturity not previously associated with larrikin emcees Weapon X and Ken Hell. The song pairs the top-notch rhyming ability of two of Australia’s finest rappers with vocals from diva/Aussie soul legend Renee Geyer, who oozes soul. Taken from Sneakerpimpin’ Aint Easy, “Stares and Whispers” is our free Single of the Week.

Canada: Downtown by Peaches
If we made a list of things we’ve learned from The Teaches of Peaches, well…let’s just say we couldn’t print it anywhere. So it’s a bit of a thrill to be able to say that our free Single of the Week, “Downtown,” offers even more of the raucous, sexed-up electro-pop we wouldn’t feel comfortable bringing home to mother.

UK: Hende Baba (Let's Go, Father) by Thomas Mapfumo
Thomas Mapfumo is one of the key voices in the dynamic world of music from Zimbabwe. Recording since the early ’60s, Mapfumo draws extensively on the traditional rhythms and melodies of the Shona people, but his music also carries an overt political theme: decrying social ills. This chiming gem of a tune is our free Single of the Week and is taken from Mapfumo’s 2006 release, Rise Up.

France: Venus Paradise/Good Bye
À l’écoute de Electric Melody, il ne fait aucun doute que nous tenons là l’album d’un des meilleurs compositeurs français pouvant rivaliser avec la scène pop rock anglaise actuelle. Les mélodies pures, portées par des voix cristallines, soutenues par des rythmiques tour à tour pesantes et aériennes, des arrangements finement ourlés donnent à ces titres une pop imparable. Extrait de ce premier opus, « Good Bye » est notre Single de la semaine sur iTunes.

Although I like my MacBook and OS X a lot, I also work a lot with (and like) applications that run in Microsoft Windows too. This includes beta-testing a lot of Windows-based software. I tried upgrading Internet Explorer 7 Beta-2 to Beta-3 and found it just would not using the same procedure I ran on a Dell notebook PC running Windows XP a few days ago. Since IE is so ingrained in Windows, the possibility of reformating the hard drive, reinstalling Windows, and reinstalling applications would be a good possibility under normal circumstances. Fortunately, this problem was happening in a Virtual Machine running in Parallels Desktop for the Mac.

CodeWeavers says it will soon be releasing a version of CrossOver for Intel Mac machines.

Relying on Wine to do most of the hard work, CrossOver Mac should allow you to install and run Windows programs without having to install a copy of Windows anywhere on your machine.

Of all the different ways of running .exe files on a Mac that have popped up in recent months, this one sounds the most appealing. It’s cheaper (no need to buy a copy of Windows) and, if it actually works as advertised, offers a simpler way of working. No need to switch between different OS environments, or to reboot the machine to move from one OS to another. The apps all simply run alongside each other.

This is definitely something for Intel machine owners to keep their eyes on.

So what progress, if any, has been made on the mysterious discoloration of white MacBooks?

The weird yellow-brown ’stains’ were reported a few weeks ago. Pics appeared on Flickr, a discussion began on the Apple forums (sadly, this was closed by the moderators after a few days worth of posts), and a poll at our esteemed colleagues TUAW suggested that the problem was not isolated.

More recently there have been reports that Apple is now acknowledging this problem and affected computers returned to the mothership (or a nearby Apple Store) will be replaced or fixed up with new casing parts. But those are merely reports, I’ve seen nothing ‘official’ to back this up.

Is your white MacBook unexpectedly dirty? Have you joined the protestors at StainedBook?

This is one of those occasions when Apple’s well-oiled PR machine could do with being a bit more responsive. There’s clearly a problem here, even if its limited to a small number of machines. Instead of stamping out discussion of it on the forums and remaining publicly silent, Apple would be more highly regarded by all concerned if they simply acknowledged the complaints and said they’d look into it.

WriteRoom is certainly a nice idea. From the makers of Mori (formerly known as Hog Bay Notebook), it’s a free little app that simply enables full-screen editing; the aim is to get rid of your distractions and force you to get writing.

I confess that I was very excited to see a link to something called “WriteRoom” at Hog Bay. I thought perhaps it might be a great new notebook app for writers, sort of an iTunes for texts. It isn’t, but that doesn’t make it any less useful or helpful. And anyway, Hog Bay’s Mori already does that job pretty well.

WriteRoom is nicely configurable. You can edit all the colors for text, background and page, and of course pick any font you wish. The page can also be stretched to any width (in pixels) of your liking. Instead of the default green-on-black, I’ve opted for a slightly less Old Skool white-on-blue, which makes for an eyestrain-free writing environment.