MacDust is a small and lightweight application designed to clean up your computer. MacDust performs many tasks that could easily take you another five seconds if you weren’t using MacDust. The application also removes hard to get at files, and even files you forget about. The Caches folder can get rather large, so using MacDust at least once a week can save you hundreds of megabytes!
Firefox
• Eat (Erase) Cookies
• Erase History
• Erase Download History
• Complete Reset
Safari
• Eat (Erase) Cookies
• Erase History
• Erase Download History
• Complete Reset
• Empty Icon Cache
Camino
• Eat (Erase) Cookies
• Erase History
• Erase Download History
• Complete Reset
• Empty Icon Cache
Chats
• Erase Adium Logs
• Erase Colloquy Logs
• Erase iChat Logs
• Erase Yahoo Logs
Finder
• Empty Caches
• Empty Logs
Torrent
• Remove Azureus Active Torrents
• Remove Azureus Inactive Torrents
• Remove Azureus Logs
• Remove Azureus Temporary Files
• Remove Transmission Torrents
Third Party
• Aquisition Incompletes Cleaning
• ARD Cleaning
• Internet Explorer Cleaning
• XSlimmer History Removal
• YummyFTP Recent Connections Clearing
• DVD Player Cleaning
• Stuffit Deluxe Cleaning
• Warcraft Cleaning
It’s rare to see a good application to test out the performances of your Mac. HighLoad seems to get the job done.
You control all the tests from one simple, two tabbed interface divided in tests and utilities. Your Mac’s performances are shown as load average and Mach factor at the top of the interface. What I liked about this application is that you can perform all the major troubleshooting tasks quickly: set to CPU maximum, launch the graphics visualizer, image rotate and test available memory. HighLoad can also allow you to quickly disable specific features like sleep and screen saver, to get a better testing environment. The time spent testing will be indicated at the top of the interface.
Apart from these operations you can launch the Terminal and create a disk image and even perform more common tasks like purging cache, verifying preference files and rebuilding the index in Spotlight and Mail.
In all, HighLoad is very handy to test the general and specific performances of your Mac and see if something is going wrong. The simple interface makes it accessible to anyone. Recommended.
Review by Cyril Roger
LightZone, a breakthrough in digital photography, is a better way to correct and retouch your photos and create stunning images and prints. Based on photographic principles and the Zone System method, LightZone is a more natural and intuitive approach for photo retouching, allowing you to focus on what to do with your images rather than how to do it.
Librarian Pro is a very flexible application to organize all your books, movies, games or whatever you wish to keep a list of. Although the program still feels quite unstable (importing or exporting didn’t work properly for me), we’ll let that go for now as the program is still a pre-release. What makes Librarian Pro interesting is how easy it is to view your list and create new smart collections.
You can customize the layout of lists you export and send them to the web or to your iPod. Librarian can also import elements from mulitple sources, like borrowers from your Address Book or item information from a number of sites. You can view your Amazon cart from the application and even retrieve things like album covers.
Librarian Pro is a great program to keep updated lists of your favorite items and always be aware of who’s borrowed what from you.
Review by Cyril Roger
Flock is a browser for blogging and social network addicts. Based on the Mozilla infrastructure, it offers many features found in Firefox like tabbed browsing, quick RSS feed aggregation and customizable toolbars. Thanks to the web clipboard, you can copy any image or text you find on the net. Favorite links can be saved with tags and you can customize your own world, where you showcase your favorite sites, feeds and media. This brings us to one of the main features of Flock, the media bar, placed at the top of the browser. This tool lets you search and view any sort of media from sites like YouTube, Facebook or Flickr.
However the real strength of Flock comes in its social networking integration. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Xanga, Magnolia and more can be opened up from the “accounts and services” sidebar. Thanks to the people sidebar, you’ll be able to quickly see all your friends from your different networks. Flock also offers up a blog editor, from which you can write up all your posts. News junkies will also like the RSS reader, also accessible from the sidebar.
While we were impressed with all the major improvements found in this new release of Flock, we felt that the sidebar was probably a bit overused. RSS feeds, social networks, favorites, and the web clipboard all open up in the sidebar, meaning you can’t have them on all at once. The blog editor is a nice touch, but it’s a shame that it doesn’t allow you to upload images to your blog.
If your high on social networks, Flock is definitely the browser for you.
Review by Cyril Roger
Pandora (formerly known as Netscrape) combines the power of a web spider with an easy-to-use image browser. It generates resizable thumbnails on the fly, and allows you to preview, examine, save, and print images. Give it a URL, and it will "scrape" all of the images from the site; feed it some keywords, and it will Google you some relevant images in no time flat. You can configure NetScrape to ignore images under a certain size or of the wrong type, to stay on a particular site or wander the web, and even specify how quickly Pandora should do its work
iTunes is the best music player out there, but don’t you wish you could control it without interrupting your task at hand? Now you can. Control iTunes. Whether it’s to pause the player, adjust the volume, skip a track or rate a song, you can do all that and more with simple customizable keystrokes.
Why bring up iTunes just to see what track is playing? SizzlingKeys features a floating window that shows you the current song name, artist and more. Place it anywhere you wish on the screen by simply dragging it. Having all the features you can imagine is useless if the app is difficult and confusing to use. That’s why we make ease-of-use our top priority. Customizing SizzlingKeys cannot be easier.
What SizzlingKeys lets you do:
• Control iTunes player
• Rate songs
• Select a playlist (searchable!)
• Search for songs
• Shows you the current song
Geekbench is a completely awesome cross-platform benchmark that measures the performance of your computer’s processor and memory. Geekbench also offers the sexy Geekbench Result Browser which lets you compare your Geekbench scores with other Geekbench users.
Transmission is currently the best torrent client on Mac thanks to a beautiful interface and a simple set of intuitive features.
This new version brings many more improvements to an already solid release. You can set different priority levels for torrents and establish stall limit times. The speed limit mode, represented by a turtle icon at the bottom of the interface, is extremely useful if you’re looking to control the amount of bandwidth you use for uploads and downloads.
Transmission has consistently improved over time, offering many more options to view your torrents. You can now filter your torrent list according to downloading, seeding, or paused. The client can also organize transfers by queue order, date added, name, process. Transmission also allows you to label, filter and sort torrents by groups and total activity. You can also encrypt your torrent activity in case you want it to stay private.
We really like the new interface, which blends in perfectly to the new Mac OS X Leopard. Transmission manages to display all the essential information without actually seeming crowded, which is no easy feat. The only little nag we’d have with it is that it doesn’t offer as many advanced statistics as you’d find in Azureus.
Despite no advanced statistics, Transmission is a beautiful and incredibly intuitive torrent client for Mac.
Review by Cyril Roger
iTuneMyWalkman is an iTunes script that will help you synchronize the contents of iTunes playlists with your mobile phone or other portable device. The purpose is to make this happen as automatically as possible, almost like it does with an iPod or an iTunes-compatible Motorola phone. The script is able to detect automatically when you connect your phone.
Features
• Synchronizes the contents of specific iTunes playlists to your mobile phone/other device.
• Detects automatically when the device is connected.
• Creates directory structure according to information for artist/album, playlist or genre.
• Recognizes albums with various artists and tracks with featured artists.
• Copied files can be re-encoded on the fly to save space.
• Play counts can be incremented automatically when songs are transferred.
• Pictures and videos taken with the phone camera can be automatically moved to a user-specified location on your hard disk during synchronization.