RateMe! is very basic in what it does, but it does it so well that it just will not disappoint. Simply displaying five spots on your menu bar, you click on one of the five positions to transform the small white square into a star. Right click on it and you can select from the pop-up Increase or Decrease which will do so in half-star increments. Yes, half-stars are here baby! Man, I can’t tell you how long I’ve wanted this feature in iTunes and now here it is. Your half ratings will also appear in the iTunes interface as well. Sweet!
RateMe! lets you play, pause, mute, loop the current track, and perform other minor tasks. It also displays the track name and artist for a brief moment at the start of each song. SvenOnTech confirmed with RateMe! author Michael Markert via email this morning that this feature will be configurable to show longer or toggle in an upcoming release.
RateMe! is freeware but Market would appreciate any donations from you elated users. Give it a try and do thank him for his work if you continue to use RateMe!
I can still remember my first piece of spam. It was way back in 1996 and I just sat at my computer staring at the screen for the longest time trying to comprehend how this “person” got a hold of my sacred email address and why they were trying to sell me something I had no interest in. About four years later, I had to retire that email address because the spam became unbearable (over 500 pieces of spam a day.) But with each new address I created, spam eventually found me.
Through the years of my spam fighting career, I’ve used many different weapons in this ongoing warf. Software on my computer, server based fighters, and challenge response schemes. Really, nothing worked until I discovered the beta of SafetyBar about five or six years ago. Using software that installed in Outlook as a plug-in, it would take the community of SafetyBar users response of what was and what wasn’t spam and then “rate” those votes. The higher the rating of validity, the more likely that spam would never be in your Inbox but rather be moved to your Spam folder. My Inbox was over 90% clean of spam an achievement never yet accomplished to that point in time. It was great! I used it all these years until I came to the Mac. SafetyBar, now Cloudmark Desktop, was only for Windows and only for Outlook and Outlook Express (when I left it behind a couple of years ago.) But rejoice Mac fans, now it is here for you as well!
Today Cloudmark has announced the public beta of Cloudmark Desktop for Thunderbird on the Mac! If you’re a user of Mozilla’s freeware mail client that looks and feels much like Outlook Express, then you’ll be a happy camper to know that you can now protect yourself with one of the best spam fighting vehicles out there! You can download Cloudmark Desktop for Thunderbird (OS X) and use it free for 90 days after which you can sign up for the monthly subscription. Knowing how good Cloudmark is, I highly doubt you will even notice that this a beta while using it. I strongly encourage anyone looking for spam control to download this now and use it today!
Now my only gripe is where is the Mail.app and Entourage versions?
With SplashMoney, Mac users now have access to a complete personal financial manager that enables them to securely record transactions, track account balances, generate reports and budgets, and manage finances while on the go. SplashMoney features wireless access to online bank accounts – an ideal feature for laptops and smartphones, a streamlined user interface, charting of financial data, the ability to assign icons to transactions, transaction filtering, and bank account reconciliation.
SplashMoney supports most account types, including checking, savings, credit card, cash, asset, liability, and money market accounts.
Mac users of SplashID have been anxiously waiting for the release of SplashID 4, which includes substantial updates such as Web Auto-Fill, a feature that simplifies entering user names and passwords by using a web browser to go directly to a site and then retrieving the username and password directly from SplashID to auto-fill in the record. Other key features in SplashID 4 include improved ways to view and find information, such as the new Panel and Tree views, and an Auto Search feature that retrieves records simply by entering a few letters in the Find box.
Advanced users of SplashID 4 can use the new Database Sync feature to select multiple databases to synchronize with on the Mac desktop and easily share data with other users, even across a network.
The security of personal financial data on mobile devices is of chief concern to many, and SplashData has incorporated secure password protection in both SplashMoney and SplashID using 256-bit Blowfish encryption to protect against malicious hacking or other threats.
The SplashMoney and SplashID versions that include both handheld and desktop applications are available now for $29.95 each at www.splashdata.com. They are also available as part of the SplashWallet Suite, which includes SplashID, SplashPhoto, SplashShopper, and SplashMoney, at a 50% discount. The desktop-only versions of SplashMoney and SplashID, available for both Windows and Mac, are available for $19.95. Full functioning 30-day trial versions are also available for download.
Continuing to raise the bar in file transfer technology Interarchy 9 introduces over one hundred new and improved features, including a brand new protocol built upon SSH, numerous enhancements to the product’s interface, plus much more.
“For close to 15 years Interarchy has led the way with its advanced file transfer capabilities,” said Matthew Drayton, founder and CEO of Nolobe. “Interarchy 9 builds on this by adding a number of exciting new features to enhance our customers’ productivity.”
The new SSH protocol is a major addition to Interarchy’s already comprehensive set of supported protocols. SSH provides a number of advantages over incumbent protocols such as FTP and SFTP. Not only is it faster than SFTP but it offers much greater flexibility.
“Interarchy’s SSH protocol offers significant speed improvements, especially when mirroring. We are talking seconds versus minutes for large websites. This is a big deal.” adds Drayton. “Better yet, SSH puts us in the driving seat. Users will no longer will we be shackled by the limitations of SFTP or FTP.”
Pricing and Availability
Interarchy 9 is available at a suggested retail price of US$59.
Interarchy 9 can be purchased directly from The Nolobe Store:
A US$29 upgrade offer is available to all registered owners of
Interarchy 8.5.4 or earlier.
http://store.nolobe.com/upgrade
Volume discounts are also available. For details visit The Nolobe Store at http://store.nolobe.com/ or send an email to
sales@nolobe.com.
Interarchy 9 requires Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later.
Netflix has wisely been adapting to the future fairly well with adding Blu-ray and HD-DVD (yanking the last from the queue just recently, however) to the mix. Netflix has also playing around with movie downloads. Many have been excited by the latter and with only a Windows version currently available, Macintosh fans are sitting at the table with fork and knife, ready to dive in. But you may want to put down the silverware as it’s most likely you’ll never see Netflix downloads on your Mac.
According to a source at Netflix, Apple is making things very difficult for it, and every other company with digital content, to bring this new exciting technology to OS X machines. The difficulty? FairPlay. Apple has a long history of not playing fair with it’s DRM (digital Rights Management) from shunning RealNetworks’ Rhapsody to work with the iPod to ignoring Sonos‘ constant requests for access to FairPlay to allow the music player to play content from the iTunes Store. Apple simply does not want to license out its DRM scheme as Microsoft has freely done with its Windows Media format.
Hollywood is very stringent with its content and has signed onto Window Media and FairPlay after much work by Microsoft and Apple. To add another DRM to the fold may not go down very well with Tinsel Town. Further, the cost of coming up with a new protection scheme may be too extreme for many companies. Lastly, the “bullet proof” aspect of the DRM would be questioned by all the studios and that would become the deal breaker. In the end, it has to be FairPlay on the Mac.
As long as Apple plays deaf to all the outside requests for licensing of FairPlay, one will never see Netflix movie downloads on their Mac. With Apple having its own movie rental scheme now, it’s highly unlikely Netflix movie downloads will come to the Mac. Like RealNetworks, Apple doesn’t want competition on its platform. In the end, if you really have to have those movies from Netflix on your Mac, get Parallel’s Desktop.
Ettore Software Ltd. today started shipping an enhanced version of its long-standing text expander for Mac,
TypeIt4Me, introduced at Macworld Expo in January.
Since 1989, TypeIt4Me has allowed users to set up short abbreviations which expand to words, pictures, phrases, paragraphs or indeed entire pages when typed.
New TypeIt4Me version 4.0 will now automatically correct spelling mistakes.
Unlike competing products which require the user to set up long lists of typos and their correct spelling, TypeIt4Me’s AutoCorrect uses Apple’s built-in OS X spell-checker, AppleSpell and requires no user set up.
Users can turn AutoCorrect on/off via a hotkey, which also allows changing among up to three supported languages (including English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish and Portuguese).
Company founder and CEO, Riccardo Ettore says: “Users have long been able to define commonly mistyped words to expand to their correct spelling. With 4.0, they can now leverage the power of OS X’s built-in spellchecker and have their typos automatically corrected while they continue typing, instead of seeing it
underlined in red.”
Also new in 4.0 is Autocue, which allows users to define boilerplate text with variable parts to be typed when prompted at expansion time.
For a complete list of features, see: http://ettoresoftware.com/EttoreSoftware/TypeIt4MeFeatures.html
Available now for download from http://ettoresoftware.com TypeIt4Me 4.0 costs $27 ($14 for students/teachers). Upgrades are $9, but free for users who bought the previous version after 1 August 2006.
You will finally be able to truly conquer Time Machine and Spaces with Apple’s latest update, 10.5.2. With the ability to turn off Space’s funky spring view of the folders, you’ll be able to go back to that great simply listing of Tiger. Also fixed is Time Machine’s inability to see some external hard drivers as well as automatically popping up the status window when running. Also noted by Apple is, ” Improved general stability when running third-party applications.” That would be nice since 10.5.1 seems to crash so many of my applications when I was on that awful rev. No specifics if Windows Network shares are fixed, but this comment, “Addresses a hanging issue that may occur when connecting to an AFP network volume,” on Apple’s release notes seems to indicate maybe you mixed network folk should have no more issues.
Leopard users can initiate download via there Software Update on their Mac.
For a complete list of fixes in the near 400 MB upgrade, take the leap below…
SuperDuper! 2.5 (84) Brings Full Compatibility for Leopard Users and Some Sweet New Features to Boot
After a long hard journey through months of coding and testing, Shirt Pocket has finally mastered Leopard’s changes and added some sweet new features to make this $30 archive utility something worthy of a Must Have on any Macintosh HD. SuperDuper! 2.5 (Build 84) not only backs up your existing hard drive to a bootable archive, but it also lives side-by-side Apple’s archiving utility, Time Machine. The release notes also specify that, “You can now store a bootable backup side-by-side with a Time Machine backup on a single volume.” Further, you can now copy Time Machine backup volumes to other drives as well as being able to execute scheduled tasks immediately with the “Run Now” button. Other changes include Exposé, Time Machine, Spaces and Front Row are added to the Leopard Sandboxes as well as the ability to ignore Google Desktop Index files.
All in all, this is a long anticipated update and we here at SvenOnTech highly recommend it for those looking for a simple, easy, and robust archiving utility that will work in conjunction with Time Machine.
equinux has just released the fifth generation of its award-winning online auction management solution, iSale. iSale 5 offers all Mac users a way to flexibly create and manage their online eBay auctions. The Template Editor allows each of the 222 templates, included with iSale, to be easily edited to fit the user’s needs. Additionally, iSale 5 simplifies the search for product information and pictures and can display running auctions on Facebook platform.
Import and search for product information
With the new Research Assistant, product descriptions can be easily taken from FileMaker databases and Delicious Library and then added to an auction per mouse click. Additional plug-ins allow you to research product information, as well as pictures, using Google, Amazon, the ISBN Database for books and any other website a user might wish to use. The Research Assistant saves all of the information it collects in folders, so it can easily be copied and pasted into your auctions.
“All iSale users will greatly benefit from the new version. iSale 5 not only gives you the possibility to manage and create your auctions, but it now also shortens the time it takes to look up information about the items you’re selling,” says equinux CEO Till Schadde. “iSale 5 is the most powerful and comprehensive online auction management software that equinux has ever released. iSale 5 includes an all-new Template Editor that allows users to edit every iSale template, we ever shipped and save them as your favorites.”
Manage and Archive Auctions
Anyone who wants to let his contacts know about any upcoming auctions, can post running auctions on his Facebook profile. And iSale 5 makes it possible to manage multiple libraries, allowing users to archive old auctions.
Full power with Mac OS X
iSale 5 takes full advantage of new functions and capabilities in Leopard. The user interface reflects the style and design of Leopard, as well as the other features from Leopard that seamlessly integrate into iSale. iSale 5 used the systemwide Calendar system so users can manage their deadlines. The QuickLook preview allows all users to find any auction with Finder. To benefit from all of the new features, iSale 5 requires Mac OS X 10.5.
Prices and Availability
Upgrades for iSale 5 are available starting today for $19.95. And all customers, that purchased their iSale license after December 15th, 2007 can upgrade for free at my.equinux.com. Full version of iSale 5 are available, starting at $39.95.
Mariner Software, developers and publishers of professional and personal software, today announced the release of MacJournal 5.0, the latest release in Mariner Software’s award-winning line of writing and creativity titles.
Totally redesigned and built for Leopard, MacJournal 5 allows users to add any kind of content, PDFs, QuickTime movies, images, and text. In addition, bloggers can now blog video to their blog on Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal or .mac account. Even record video from your iSight and attach it to an entry. MacJournal 5 also introduces Smart Journals, which allow specific criteria to be searched upon. Assign each entry a rating, status, and priority, and sort any journal by those values. Also significant in the latest release:
-Open more than one MacJournal document at a time and save them to any location.
-Create aliases to entries that you can store in other journals.
-Performance enhancements for working with large amounts of entries.
-Resize images in any entry.
-Picasa integration.
-Quick Look integration.
“MacJournal 5 is our most significant update yet,” said Michael Wray, President of Mariner Software. “Not only did we improve the user interface, but, behind the scenes, we also recreated the architecture. Now users can have years, even decades, worth of photos, video, or graphics, and MacJournal will still be blazing fast.”
MacJournal 5 is the world’s most popular journaling software for the Macintosh. Users can easily create a personal journal with two level security (password protection and encryption), record daily ideas, manage lists, and idea and export them to multiple file formats, or generate blogs to any of the popular blogging services in two clicks of the mouse. MacJournal 5 even podcasts.
Availability
MacJournal 5 is now available for download and requires Mac OS 10.4 or higher (including Leopard). Pricing is set at $34.95 for the download version and $39.95 for the boxed version. Registered MacJournal 3 and 4 customers can upgrade for $19.95 on the Mariner web site with their serial number. MacJournal 5 is available for purchase at the Mariner eStore at http://www.marinersoftware.com/shopproduct.php or through various retailers such as: The Apple Store, Amazon, MicroCenter, MacMall, or Fry’s Electronics.MacJournal can also be purchased through numerous international distributors across the world.