Mac Software

As the self-imposed deadline of June approaches, Simplify Media remains in beta for Windows, Mac, and mobile users. The iTunes and Winamp plug-in that lets you share your music with friends has, however, added three new features: chat, a "now playing" message that displays what your friends are listening to from your collection, and a built-in password reset for the forgetful among us.

The chat feature is the strongest, allowing you to directly communicate with friends, family, and even enemies with whom you've shared your music. It's a great way to give and get some direct … Read more

The New York Times is bringing its e-reader desktop application to the Mac this month. The newspaper publisher unveiled its latest efforts last night, with a slew of screenshots. The Times' First Look post notes that the application will be running on Microsoft's Silverlight technology, enabling rich-media effects and rendering. Users will be able to read, browse, and search the entire publication while offline.

The big difference between the PC application and the Mac version will be the ability to view pages in three different sizes, all of which have been crunched on the company's servers instead of … Read more

While Apple's market share gains are cause for consternation for many in Redmond, one unit is clearly benefiting.

Microsoft's Mac unit is set to disclose on Tuesday that copies of the new Office for Mac 2008 are flying off the shelves at three times the rate of its predecessor. The company wouldn't disclose sales numbers, but said the sales are the highest in the 19-year history of the unit. That continues a trend that has been going on for some time.

Senior marketing manager Amanda Lefebvre declined to give all of the credit to Apple, but said … Read more

The volunteer developers of The GIMP have been working hard to develop a polished, user-friendly, and freely distributed image editor. Available for Windows and Mac users, and in a portable edition for the PC, the separated palette windows may disturb those users who are used to more traditional layouts. Still, your comfort level should grow exponentially as you discover how pain-free the program is.

One of the most powerful general-purpose image editors around, the GNU Image Manipulation Program is eminently comparable to Photoshop. Older features include channels, layers and masks, filters and effects, tabbed palettes, editable text tools, and color … Read more

Emailing large attachments has never been easy, but Pando for Windows and Mac combines P2P tech with a clean interface to make sharing files or folders as large as 1 GB a cinch--and free.

Circumventing FTP servers, online storage, and tertiary e-mail accounts, Pando either generates a link for instant messages and Web pages, or e-mails your recipient a tiny attachment. When you click that attachment or link, Pando connects to its server and downloads the "package," as the Pando people call the contents of your attachment. You even have 14 days to grab the "package" … Read more

Sun Microsystems has released the first beta for OpenOffice.org 3 for Windows and Mac. The new version of OpenOffice, which is a popular open-source competitor to Microsoft Office, looks to offer users improvements on every component from interface to features to behavior.

OpenOffice now natively supports OS X, so Mac users won't have to install the X11 module before running the suite. Full Vista support is also included in the beta, and didn't cause any problems during light testing. Notably, OpenOffice 3 includes filters for the new Microsoft Office document formats such as DOCX and XLSX as … Read more

As the Web-browsing world waits for Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8, Apple makes its intentions known with a hard push of Safari for Windows and Mac. No, the sky has not fallen, and we have yet to see the spontaneous evolution of avian bacon.

Much like iTunes, the Windows version of the Mac application works fine but lacks a certain tightness. It feels unfinished because it is, but its browsing engine is solid and has been independently clocked at speeds faster than that of Firefox 2. Still, Safari lacks most customization features. Skins and other aesthetic options exist in … Read more

There are several solid newsreaders for Mac OS X including the popular NewsFire and NetNewsWire which I've talked about here before. But I found an application today which puts a different sort of visual spin on the standard newsreader. It's called Times and it organizes feeds in an entirely different, though immediately familiar way. One quick note: this application only works on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Most newsreaders offer a three-paned interface with your feed list on the left, headlines with summaries on the upper right, and full stories (once clicked) in the lower right. What … Read more

Note: Yoono is in private beta. We've got invites set aside for Webware readers. To get yours see the link at the end of the post.

Tonight Yoono, a browser add-on for discovering and sharing Web content is launching several new features designed to help you track what your friends are up to online.

The tool now integrates with several popular social networks and microblogging services including Twitter, letting you access and interact with the communities of all of them in one place. Previously users were limited to sending links to friends via e-mail, or interacting more easily with … Read more