Mac Software

If you have a Mac laptop beginning with the PowerBook G4, one feature you may or may not know about is the Sudden Motion Sensor. If you drop your computer or it is suddenly exposed to strong vibrations, the Sudden Motion Sensor will park the hard drive to reduce disk damage--even before your laptop hits the ground. When the sensor detects your computer has returned to a stable state, it "unparks" your hard drive and you can continue computing.

What's fun about this feature is that some savvy developers have made apps that take advantage of the … Read more

The browser wars are heating up again, and the first major browser update of 2008 is Opera 9.50. Available for Windows and Mac, there are some impressive new features worked into this release, even though it's not listed as a major-point update.

There's no reason to repeat the basics of why Opera is such an excellent browser to use. Suffice to say that it covers the essentials with built-in tabbed browsing, mouse-over previews, a customizable search bar, advanced bookmarking tools, simple e-mail and chat integration, mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, and drag-and-drop functionality.

Truly, it's Opera's … Read more

Correction on June 13: The spelling of Johnathan Nightingale has been fixed.

On Wednesday, Mozilla announced next Tuesday, June 17, as "Download Day" for Firefox 3. The company also released Firefox 3 release candidate 3 as a final step toward full release.

With Firefox 3, Mozilla is attempting to set a Guinness Book of World Records for the largest number of software downloads within a 24-hour period. There is currently no Guinness Book record for that accomplishment.

Firefox 3 includes a new rendering engine, so pages load faster. It also uses fewer system resources, addressing a complaint in … Read more

Making simple edits to videos of all formats shouldn't be tricky business, but most tools out there either do way too much or are so belabored with ads that who knows what evil lurks within their code.

Originally written by a French programmer known as Mean, and gloriously open-source on the GNU license, Avidemux is a breath of fresh air and available for both Windows and Mac. Cropping a video is as simple as selecting the section you want to remove and then hitting the Delete key. Re-encoding a video is equally painless: Merely select the output format from … Read more

Updated at 12:30 p.m. PDT on Wednesday with links to the newly debuted release candidate.

If you were planning to host a Firefox 3 launch party this week, keep that bubbly on ice a bit longer.

Mozilla on Wednesday released Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3. Windows and Linux users won't likely feel a thing; the new browser is considered stable on those platforms.

The extra release candidate addresses some lingering issues on the Mac OS X operating system. The changes are internal.

The previous test version, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 2, can also be downloaded for Windows, … Read more

The cult favorite Opera browser is moving into the next cycle of "the browser ring." After beta testing, and before the final version, we get the release candidate for Windows and Mac OS. What does this mean for fearless Opera fans?

There's a massive spate of bug fixes in this update, so if stability issues kept you from using previous 9.5 betas, this version should be much more appealing. Other improvements include fixes for downloading e-mail message bodies from all POP accounts, the introduction of a new skin, and smoother upgrading from Opera 9.2. Mac-specific … Read more

Simple, small, and free, Google Desktop for Windows, Mac and, Linux indexes your hard drive the way the company's own servers index the Web. Your search results are returned in a Web-page format that's similar to the Google Web site, and the app's sidebar shows regular updates to your favorite programs, from e-mail to your My Pictures folder to RSS feeds and weather.

Although the initial indexing process can take a long time--especially if you have a lot of e-mail, contacts, chat transcripts, and documents for it to parse through--it's well worth the wait to be … Read more

Despite occasional oddities and a distinct lack of polish, Scribus offers up an open-source freeware desktop publisher robust with a full complement of useful features. Available for Windows, in a portable edition, and for Macs, too, they compare very favorably against more expensive competition.

The detailed Web site includes a wealth of documentation, tutorials, and notes on everything from installation problems to drawing a grid to creating a text frame. As with other similar open-source apps like Blender, the online resources for Scribus are nothing less than invaluable. The interface doesn't sing, but it does hit all the right … Read more

Summer is fast approaching, and Power Downloader is fielding lots of vacation-related questions. Kitty Kilobyte wants to know what's the best way to send her friends and family photos and video of her upcoming trip to South America. Pando for Windows and Mac is the way to go, says Power D.

Power then explains that with Pando installed, Kitty can drag and drop her large folder of images and WMVs into the Pando interface, which lets her send Power D, Francois Foto, and virtually anybody else in her address book a message with a link. When Power clicks that … Read more