MediaCentral turns your Mac into the ultimate home theater system. With support for numerous audio, video and multimedia formats, MediaCentral brings it all together at the push of a button.

MediaCentral includes a slick and intuitive interface that can be adapted to a variety of window sizes and controlled by numerous remote controls. Its functions make it the perfect entertainment application.

equinux will deliver fresh content to your Mac. New movie trailers, wallpapers, radio and TV stations will keep your MediaCentral up to date. Depending on your preferred language, you’ll get updated with German or English content. Nicht schlecht, was?

MediaCentral has been enhanced to provide you with more information about its content. An active on-screen display – which you can show and hide with a single keystroke – displays content-related background information. It’s easy to handle and extremely useful – especially when watching movie trailers or watching IP TV. Just hit the "i" and you’ll get informed!

Did you ever want the games section to be on top of the menu list? You don’t need the radio feature? No problem, you can now easily activate and deactivate MediaCentral’s menu items and you can even re-arrange their order to make your MediaCentral a bit more yours. Customization at its best.

MediaCentral supports three window sizes in addition to the full-screen mode. A menu bar and hot-keys have been integrated to make changing between the small, medium, large and full-screen modes even easier.

Build your own media library with "My MediaCentral". Just add your favorite pictures, songs, movies, flash games or animations and TV streams to give your digital theater a personal touch.

All your favorite media content can – of course – be stored directly on your Mac. You don’t have enough free space? No problem: Just go ahead and create a media repository on a network server and put an alias in your "My MediaCentral" folder that refers to the content. MediaCentral will recognize the aliases and play the files – wherever they are stored.

MediaCentral is a truly multi-talented application: Enter any disc containing pictures, videos and music to have it automatically analyzed. The content will be displayed in the appropriate categories. Isn’t that intuitive?

TV shows are broadcasted in 4:3, movies feature 16:9 or even 20:9 – how can a single piece of software handle all this? Nevermind – simply choose the appropriate ratio for your current media.

MediaCentral is the most versatile media center solution for the Mac, and we made sure to include exciting online content for many languages. Today we’re taking the next step with the release of MediaCentral 2.2 – fully localized in seven languages. With the help of the user community, the interface has been translated to Chinese, Danish, French, Italian and Russian. Many thanks to all contributors! English and German are also still available, so you don’t need to learn Chinese just to use MediaCentral (although it does not hurt to know some Chinese).

Everyone loves visual documentation. It is so much easier to see a picture of what you need to do as opposed to reading lengthy instructions.

ScreenSteps makes creating visual training almost effortless:

1. Capture each step of the process you are trying to teach. The images are automatically sequenced in the order you took them. Crop images and add highlights to focus on the pertinent areas of the screen

2. Go back and add text describing each step. You shouldn’t have to write too much since the pictures will show each step of the process.

3. Export your lesson to PDF or HTML. You can even create your own HTML and XML templates.

That’s it. You can literally create visual, detailed lessons in 5 to 10 minutes.

Tinderbox stores and organizes your notes, ideas, and plans. It can help you analyze and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs. Tinderbox maps your notes as you make them. Build relationships by arranging notes, organizing them with shape and color, linking them. Tinderbox lets you record ideas quickly and keep them where you’ll find them again when you need them.

Tinderbox gives you maps, charts, outlines, and more — and you can have many views open at once. Tinderbox notes can have prototypes, saving you time and keeping your work organized. A note is just like its prototype — except when you’ve said it’s different. Change the prototype, and the change is inherited instantly.

Tinderbox agents scan your notes continuously, searching for notes that meet your criteria. Agents can look for tasks that are overdue, or notes you need to complete, or topics that you find especially interesting. Tinderbox can even automatically update notes and RSS feeds from the internet.

Tinderbox is fast. Want to make a note? Just type! Want to edit a note? Just click. Need to search? Tinderbox starts looking for the answer as soon as you start typing, and often finds your answer before you finish. With Tinderbox, your data is yours. Tinderbox files are XML, and Tinderbox shares notes with HTML, xHTML, XML, RSS, and OPML.

Tinderbox works beautifully with Web standards. The presentation assistant helps build attractive presentations for lectures and for use on the Web. The new Flint weblog assistant helps you design and build sophisticated weblogs using the latest web services.

Everything is stored on your own computer: you aren’t dependent on a distant server. Write anytime: on airplanes, in cafés, at home or away. If you share notes on the Web, every aspect of your Web site is up to you. Your site looks the way you want. You can host it anywhere you please.

Tinderbox is a deep product with an active and friendly user community. The Tinderbox Wiki hosts ongoing discussions and tutorials. Tinderbox weekends — held throughout the US and Europe — give Tinderbox users a chance to get together to share ideas and to explore Tinderbox with the Tinderbox developers in person. The Tinderbox Public File Exchange hosts a range of templates, assistants, and samples. You can arrange private Tinderbox training for you and your team.

Tinderbox is personal. It works the way you want, and adapts gracefully as your needs change. It’s small and agile, so you can get started right away, but it’s got the power you’ll need to handle all your notes. Your Tinderbox agents work constantly to keep things organized. A rich portfolio of views — maps, charts, outlines, and more — keeps you in touch with your information. Work the way you want.

coconutBattery doesn’t just show you the current charge of your battery – it also shows you its current maximum capacity in relation to the original capacity your battery had when it left the factory.

You also get information about the battery-load cycles (how often did you fully load your battery), the current charger (coconutBattery even warns you if you plugged in a wrong charger for your Notebook) and last but not least information about the age of your Mac. coconutBattery gives you all these information just in time because of it’s live-feedback interface!

Of course you are able to save the current maximum capacity of your battery – with just one click! coconutBattery uses Apple’s new and really powerful technology named "CoreData" to realize this comfortable saving option.

Make no mistake: the media industry has changed significantly in the last couple of years. Big corporations are now starting to consider the possibility that their traditional business models could well be about to crumble around them. Newspapers are facing the blogging threat, podcasting is the cool alternative to radio, and now the big TV stations must be starting to sweat a little following the dawn of free online video services such as YouTube, Joost and the one we’re about to review: Miro.

After a few months in beta stage, Miro has reached version 1.0, which is considered as a new milestone in the production and development of video and TV content for the Web. Miro is defined by its developers as “the open-source Internet TV platform”. In fact, it’s been built by a non-profit organization called the Participatory Culture Foundation, which aims to bring together a community of broadcasters to create, what it calls, an ‘Internet video ecosystem’. But besides all these elaborate definitions, Miro is simply a great application to watch online videos.

You could now be wondering what’s the point of using Miro if you can get those same videos from other places? Well, Miro makes the process faster and much easier. The program uses open protocols to let you subscribe to video channels and video blogs that are fed in via RSS, and uses BitTorrent to download the files. You can also watch videos from Youtube and Dailymotion, or use it to subscribe to a Youtube channel you like, for example. The program supports video playlists and can resume playback just where you stopped.

The inclusion of the ‘Channel Guide’ is a welcome one, as it helps you get started with the program and also lets you search and browse the various channels effortlessly. Not only can you browse through the existing channel list, but you can easily add new channels simply by clicking a button to subscribe. There are more than two thousand channels available, and all of them are free. Beware, however, that the video quality may vary from one channel or video source to another.

Another great benefit of Miro is that it can handle a wide variety of video formats and, as a good open-source project, it ignores DRM and patents. These and other interesting features are used to compare Miro to Joost, but I think there’s no reason for this comparison: they’re just different applications with different purposes. In any case, Miro’s first public release is an excellent example of how video content from different sources can be integrated into one single application and served directly to your PC in a fast, easy and elegant way.

Review by Elena Santos

Elegant, beautiful, powerful. Journler is a place for your thoughts and everything they touch. Featuring iLife integration, audio and video entries, extensive document importing and instantaneous searching and filtering, not to mention Mail, iWeb and Address Book integration, a dash of blogging and AppleScript and Spotlight support.

Journler is a daily notebook and entry based information manager. Scholars, teachers, students, professors, scientists, thinkers, the business minded and writers of every persuasion use it on a daily basis to connect the written word with the media most important to them.

Features:

• Word processing capabilities
• Audio, video and photo entries
• iLife integration: iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie and Safari bookmarks as well as iWeb, Mail and Address Book support
• Awesome importing/exporting capabilities
• Print and export a single entry, collections of entries, or any date range
• The Lexicon for discovering connections between your entries
• The Drop Box and JPanel for getting stuff in

Spyder makes it easy to keep in touch with your friends or fan-base by message or comment. Add as many friends as you want, Spyder allows you to send friend requests too. Organize your friends or other users the way you want. Use the friends view to quickly scan for users by picture if your better at faces not names.

Spyder also helps you manage all your accounts, whether you have just a personal account or an additional band or business account you can easily switch between your different accounts in Spyder. And for people that remember faces better than names Spyder downloads users pictures automatically.

• Add friends without even thinking. Simply select users you’d like to know and Spyder does the rest.
• Keep everyone informed. With Spyder it’s easy to post comments and let your friends and everyone else know where the party is at.
• Stay connected. Send messages to your friends or other users.
• Deal with CAPTCHAs directly in Spyder, without ever having to open a web browser.
• User pictures are automatically downloaded making it simple to find friends by face.
• Control your network connections with precision, pause and resume your downloads, and twiddle connection preferences.

Been bitten by the Sudoku bug yet? Color Sudoku is a variation of the popular timewaster except that this time you’ll have to fill the grids with colors instead of numbers. As any other Bakno games, Color Sudoku provides clear instructions and enough settings to tweak your playing board. You can customize colors and choose between four different tops. Color Sudoku also gives you a choice of 4*4 or 9*9 grids, the latter being much harder.

We like the little palette of colors that appears when you click on an empty space. You can add color annotations by CTRL clicking. The timer at the bottom adds a bit of pressure to the game and lets you aim on improving your speed and logic.

As any Sudoku game, Color Sudoku quickly gets addictive. Although the difficulty bar is fairly imprecise (you drag it from easy to hard), this game is ideal any time you have five minutes to waste.

Review by Cyril Roger

Widget lovers on Mac have either the built-in Mac Dashboard or the Yahoo Widget Engine to work with. The trouble with both services is that they lack customization. Amnesty Widget Browser lets you manage widgets the way you want.

The application works independently of Dashboard, displaying all your widgets in the menu bar. Working just like independent applications, these can be launched individually, without running Dashboard, thus saving up a considerable amount of RAM. Widgets can float like they do in Dashboard or appear like more traditional applications.

Amnesty Widget Browser also lets you fully customize how widgets appear on your desktop. You can tweak the transparency and size of each of them and rotate them around on your screen. We also particularly liked being able to save workspaces with different widgets. This means you can organize widgets by themes and open up groups of them instead of each one individually. If you want to, Amnesty Widget Browser even allows you to hide individual widgets or all of them at once.

Amnesty Widget Browser truly gives you the liberty to organize and run your widgets the way you want.

Review by Cyril Roger

New Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom™ software is the professional photographer’s essential toolbox, providing one easy application for managing, adjusting, and presenting large volumes of digital photographs so you can spend less time in front of the computer and more time behind the lens.