Judging by the excellent Crunch Gear review of the forthcoming release of Snow Leopard, the new version of OS/X, this isn’t going to be the kind of release that makes you say “oh wow”.  Sounds like even at the $29 upgrade price, you might wonder what you get for your money.  It’s really is a refinement to the current Leopard 10.5 release.

It appears to be one of those OS releases that fixes some problems and puts new technology i place that will eventually allow developers to build cool new stuff, but for now, CrunchGear’s conclusion is probably going to be right for most users – it’s a release that you can wait for. 

Buy it on your next Mac.

You close everything that seems obvious and then try again and you still can eject the darn thing?

At this point you either give up, restart or just throw caution to the wind and pull out the plug on the disk.

With this small free utility you don’t have to get frustrated– WhatsOpen will tell you what files are open on the  volume you’re trying to eject and allow you to close them so that the disk will eject. Simple.

Download WhatsOpen install and rid yourself of one of those frustrations that makes you want to toss you Mac out the door.

While to call me a developer would be a gross misuse of the term, I’ve been using the browser ever since it was released last week.  It is so cool.  Well actually so fast!

The team admits it’s far from finished.  Among other things, it doesn’t print, it doesn’t display YouTube-like videos and there seems to be not much in the way of bookmark management.  So let’s give it a number and say it’s 75% done. What it does well is render a web page really fast and when I’m digging around the web that’s what’s most important to me.

The Chronium Blog warns you not to download this version unless “take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.

How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.”

It hasn’t crashed for me in about 20 hours of use.  The only gotcha for me was when checking a blog post and panicking when I couldn’t see the YouTube video, but I had been warned.

Anway, if you live life on the bleeding edge and are so Type A that anything faster is better, download the browser and give it a try on Mac or Linux.

As for me?  I’ll probably use it for most of my work on my slight aging Macbook because it just makes the experience so darn fast!

Sometimes when I either need a break at my desk, or it’s late and I want a little non-challenging entertainment before bed and don’t want to have all the noise associated with turning on the TV and the risk of waking the family, for this I use Hulu.

The big recent news for Hulu is that they have created a set of experimental projects and are offering them for use to the public À la Gmail labs.  The coolest of the new offerings is a desktop Hulu video player that let’s you watch Hulu content without a browser.  The picture is sharp and clear and will look on your computer monitor or laptop.

If you’d like to give Hulu Desktop a try, visit Hulu Labs and download it.  Or just stop by in an idle moment and watch a show in your browser.  I just watched Jay Leno’s last Tonight show episode.

If you’re interested in the background of the company, it’s owned by NBC Universal, News Corporation, and Disney.

You can even use Hulu to watch a little something while your working, like I did here.

Oh, yeah, this site is supposed to be about productivity.  Never mind.

I’ve happy to report that at this week’s MacWorld, Google has released a beta of their superb free photo organizer and retoucher, Picasa. 

Picasa was available first on Windows, then curiously on Linux, all before the Mac.

My own first use and other reports show that the Mac implementation of Picasa is both very feature-true to the Windows version and seems faster than Apple iPhoto which since included with a Mac has always been the top choice for Photo organizing on that platform.

I could say that having Picasa now available for the Mac eliminates on the few remaining deficits in the Mac vs. PC debate, but it’s probably more accurate to say, having Picasa for the Mac eliminates one of the last reasons for using Parallels or VMware Fusion to  run Windows on a Mac.

From the Google Press Release:

Picasa for Mac makes it easy to manage large photo collections and helps users make professional-looking edits without any technical knowledge, including:

• A drag-and-drop photo collage tool that gives users control over layout and content
• A retouching brush to wipe out scratches and blemishes – and repair old photos
• A slideshow movie maker that uploads users photo montage videos to YouTube with a click
• Smart auto-cropping that guides user

Picasa for Mac "plays nice" with iPhoto, and takes a read-only approach to editing photos stored in the iPhoto library, duplicating files as needed, so that users’ iPhoto libraries are never affected when they use Picasa. Avid iPhoto users who currently use our Picasa Web Albums Uploader plugin can continue to do so, although features like automatic web sync, photo collages, and more will only be found in the Picasa application.

This first beta of Picasa for Mac matches the speed and most core features of Picasa on Windows — and we’ll be working on more refinements to the Mac interface and feature set as time goes on.

Download Picasa for Mac (beta)

Picasa for Mac running on my laptop.

We got the rumor from the Googling Google blog over at zdnet and it would make sense. The story of a Mac version of Picasa has been kicking around at least a year since TechCrunch carried this one, Google Developing Mac Version Of Picasa , Due To Be Released This Year.

Why the excitement?

No matter what the PC or Mac fans tell you, there’s not really much difference between what you can do with a PC or a Mac, but Picasa is one of the coolest, most useful pieces of software that  can’t be run on a Mac (the other, if you really want to know, is Microsoft OneNote).  Making Picasa available directly available for the Mac would be one less reason to need to run a solution likeVMware’s Fusion which allows you to run Windows on a Mac.

There is already a slightly lame version of Picasa that runs on Linux.  It’s somewhat lame because it uses WINE technology to work.  WINE is the famous, this-would-be-so-cool-if-it-only-actually-worked way of running Windows on other platforms without needing Windows, kind like how useful it might be to have your blood pumped through your body without needing a heart.

Related articles

• Picasa for Macs Might Launch at Macworld 2009 [Picasa]

We’ve written about possible malware on Macs and the built-in Mac user belief that those bad things only happen to folks who use Windows.

The debate continued recently as Apple updated their tech note advising which anti-virus programs worked with Mac. A minor firestorm started with folks writing that Macs were now becoming more vulnerable to attack by malware, and the deluge was ready to start, articles full of PC schandenfreude.

Next up several writers read a little more closely and realized that Apple had just updated an old advisory with the new versions of the anti-virus programs — and then the Mac-faithful counterattack was launched — along the lines of “of course Macs can’t have viruses — OS X is too secure”.

Well maybe Apple didn’t issue a new advisory, but eventually it will happen. There will be malware on Macs. Mac users represent an increasing audience to monetary-incented malware authors and just too good a target to the rest.

For me, this is not schandenfreude, I’m writing this on a Mac (with no anti-virus running).

Related articles

• Apple Pulls Anti-Virus Advice Due To Bad PR? [Apple]
• Apple says users should install anti-virus software
• Giz Explains: Why OS X Shrugs Off Viruses Better Than Windows [Giz Explains]
• Apple Now Says Macs (Maybe) Don’t Need Added Security

Probably just as well a wake-up call clangs every so often.  Last week it did in the form of a new Trojan and a new “backdoor tool” aimed at Mac users.

Here’s what ZDnet News says about the Trojan:

The Trojan — called ‘OSX.RSPlug.D’ by Intego, the Mac security specialist that discovered the threat — is a variant on an older piece of malicious code but with a new installer, Intego said.

“It is a downloader, and it contacts a remote server to download the files it installs,” Intego said in an advisory. “This means that, in the future, the downloader may be able to install payloads [other] than the one it currently installs.”

In other respects the Trojan is similar to previous versions of RSPlug, which first surfaced in October 2007, Intego said. It installs a piece of malicious code known as DNSChanger, which routes the user’s internet traffic through a malicious DNS server, leading users to phishing websites or pages displaying advertisements.

The Trojan is found on porn websites posing as a codec needed to play video files, a technique used to trick the user into downloading and installing it.

While the threat from this Trojan is not great (and besides you probably need to be digging around low budget porn sites to have the chance to be contaminated – naughty, naughty).  It’s good for users to remember that as the Mac platform gets more popular, it will eventually catch the eye of the real virus authors and then chaos.

Image by ibuzzo via Flickr

Related

• Lame Mac Trojan limps into view

• Twin Trojans attack Macs

The full-featured XMind, mind-mapping, application that previously sold for $299 a copy has been open sourced and is now available without charge.  It’s cross-platform and available for Windows, Linux and Mac.

It has been one of the better professional applications for creating the mapping diagrams that are an intuitive way to take notes, brainstorm, collaborate and manage projects (among other things).

Here’s the XMind mind map of it’s features.

Download XMIND [via TUAW]

Related articles

• Mind Map 101
• Mind Map Recipes
• Conveying Information with Mind Maps

I have an Apple MacBook laptop and boy that sucker can get hot!  On hot summer days I’ve wondered whether it could get so hot it could damage itself?

Popular Mechanics answered the question for me.  It seems laptops are generally designed to withstand temperatures of at least 95 degrees (presumably Fahrenheit) for years without a problem.  Besides they will problem give you a warning or shut off before they damage themselves.

The problem you should actually be considering is your hot lap, especially for us men.  A study by the State University of Stony Brook suggests that laptop-generated heat in a guy’s lap can provide a sort-of unreliable form of birth control, as in lowering your sperm count.

Popular Mechanics’ recommendations for keeping your laptop cool include keeping the fan unobstructed, working on a surface that dissipates heat like a marble countertop and using a laptop pad or stand.

Image via Wikipedia

If you have a MacBook like me, you might also consider using the free utility Fan Control to increase the speed of your MacBook’s internal fan.

Read the Popular Mechanics article.

Download Fan Control for the Mac.