Adobe released it’s Air product today making it official and peeling off the cliche` beta title. Adobe Air allows developers to build desktop applications using web technologies like HTML for structure, CSS for presentation, and JavaScript for behavior. Flash and Flex, Adobe’s own web technologies, are also rolled up in the mix. Professional authoring tools like Flash CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3 saw updates today to allow development within the popular tools. Aptana also offers a free plugin for their open-source development tool Aptana Studio.

I have been playing with Air apps for the last couple of months while the product was still in beta. There are a lot of clever applications that are more like widgets then conventional full-blown desktop programs. For example, the Adobe sample app PixelPerfect was a simple ruler overlay letting you measure anything on your screen. This little tool comes in handy for web development where there aren’t any rulers on the side or measuring tools like in Photoshop. Powerhouse auction site eBay created their own Air app that banishes the concept of refreshing the page so bidders can watch their auctions in real time. But perhaps the biggest crowd of Air apps belongs to Twitter clients. Thwirl, Spaz, Tweetr, and Snitter are just a handful.

I thought John Ballinger had let his Twitter client, Tweetr, go to pasture without an update since the end of November. With each new Air beta release more functionality would break edging me towards Jonathan Snook’s Snitter. But alas, Tweetr is alive again with version 3.0 launching today to coincide with the official Air release. I’m happy as a clam to have my favorite Twitter client back and to see so many great ideas that have seemingly sprung out of Air.

Even though their are loads of more powerful laptops out there, the tried and true PowerBook can still be a nerds best friend. I’m running the slowest of the slow 867Mhz 12″ PowerBook. This is the bottom rung of supported hardware for Apple’s latest operating system, Leopard. But I keep chugging away on it. In fact I write most of my blog posts on this machine while out in the living-room after work. Below are a few things you can do to get the most out of your second hand machine.

Max out the RAM

RAM prices are always in a constant free fall until you reach the point where the particular type your machine takes is officially classified as an antique. But for the most part upgrading your RAM is the best bang for the buck. Check out Crucial.com which can help you figure out what type of RAM you need as well as how much it will take to max out your system.

Upgrade Firefox to 3.0

Most of my computer use happens within a browser. Firefox 2 has been a particularly frustrating release filled with memory leaks and sporadic crashes. I found it particularly unstable on Macs, both Intel and PowerPC systems. Firefox 3 is a completely different story with much quicker startups and a more responsive interface. Surfing sites on my pokey PowerBook is a joy once again and not a chore like it used to be. Note: As of this posting Firefox 3 is in beta (See the changes). You have nothing to lose by trying it out and I have been running it for a couple of weeks without a hitch.

Install SideTrack

Those newer MacBooks and the Air have such a snazzy trackpad that lets you use all sorts of finger gestures to manipulate your windows. PowerBook users can use SideTrack to get at least some of that functionality. The biggest improvement is the ability to use the edges of the trackpad to scroll horizontally and vertically as well as assigning actions to corner taps. The software is fully functional and free with an occasional nag screen or you can purchase the full version for just $15.

Further Tweaking

If you really want to squeeze out every little drop of available performance then you will need to tweak some settings. First set your desktop background to a solid color instead of a picture. Head into your dock settings and uncheck the ‘Animate opening applications’ option and turn off magnification. If you don’t use Spotlight then consider unchecking all of the categories in the system preferences pane to stop the search program from scanning your hard drive for changes. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty details check out TinkerTool which uncovers hidden menus and options that let you do all sorts of things.

Now with a little sacrificing and tweaking you can get some good use out of your old, trusty Mac. If you found these suggestions helpful or if you know a tip to further spruce up your PowerBook let me know in the comments.

The clever hackers that brought a media center platform to the original Xbox are at it again. Last May the group announced they were porting the Xbox media center platform to Linux and needed some help from other Linux developers. Now they are putting out a call for OS X developers to help port the software to the Apple operating system.

The original XBMC project brought photos, music, and videos from the PC to the TV. While not the easiest to set-up, I found XBMC to be the most flexible media center software I have ever dealt with. Since September of 2005, I have been watching all of my downloadable content like podcasts and webisodes from the comfort of my couch. Using a hacked Xbox and my home network I could easily stream standard definition content to my TV. Remember, there wasn’t a big boon of HD content available back then like there is now, not that the old Xbox hardware could handle the demand of even 720P video.

So if you know a Mac geek that can do some C/C++ programming send them over to the XBMC guys. The more open-source media projects that are available to compete against Windows Media Center and Apple Tv/Front Row the better it will be for digital media as a whole. And this time around XBMC won’t need to be hacked together to get it working though a name change for the project might be necessary. Just imagine this thing running on an Apple Mini in your living room connected to an HDTV. Sweet!

Firefox has a noble goal of changing the world, one web surfer at a time. Makers of the popular open source web browser, responsible for giving the dominant Internet Explorer a swift kick in the butt, are at it again with a new viral marketing effort. The video below features a plethora of Internet stars singing a song to Fight The Boredom. They’re mocking those over-dramatic public service infomercials asking for money to stop world hunger, adopt a child, or save the birds. The video is fairly amusing and there was a website to go along with it at FightAgainstBoredom.org which now redirects to the Firefox download page.

The facts that scroll against the bottom are as follows:

Compared to Internet Explorer users, Firefox users are

• 21% less likely to be a sales representative or agent at their current place of business.
• 45% more likely to have gone on vacation in San Francisco within the last 2 years.
• 33% less likely to live with others suffering from high cholesterol.
• 6% less likely to have eaten any meal at Chick-fil-A within the last 7 days.
• 24% less likely to live with others suffering from heart disease.
• 66% more likely to have viewed or listened to audio or video about politics or public affairs news within the last 30 day.
• 89% more likely to have purchased database software for work in the last year.
• 38% less likely to live with others suffering from breast cancer.

Was that Tay Zonday of Chocolate Rain fame?

Duncan Riley from Techcrunch talked to a Google employee at the annual Macworld conference who happened to slip up Picasa for Mac is in development. If anyone has used Picasa, which is currently only available for Windows and Linux, you know how easy it is to sort through your mounds of photos and do basic editing. By contrast iPhoto, which comes bundled with every new Mac, is clumsy and hard to use. I certainly welcome a new photo organizing competitor to the Mac. Hopefully it will force Apple to improve the long forgotten app.

Duncan couldn’t get a specific launch date for Picasa Mac, but the Google employee did mention it will be released this year. All I can say is the sooner the better. Then I might consider switching to a Mac for good.

I’ve had my T-Mobile Dash for just over a year and it was starting to show it’s age. The Windows Mobile operating system was dragging to a crawl. Applications were taking 30 seconds to load and the overall experience just started to feel muddy. It’s horrible when a device can’t keep up with you.

I then found SKTools Lite for smartphones which cleans up temporary files and frees up storage space. After running the program it found 542 files that could safely be removed and my phone felt new again. Apps would open up right away, there was no lag when typing, and the Internet even seemed a bit speedier. So if you are frustrated with your Windows Mobile phone because it’s as slow as a rainy weekend then give SKTools a try. And if you are looking for other great WinMo apps, check out this thread.

The default color picker in OS X offers a variety of ways for selecting a color. Sliders, color wheels, pallets, and even crayons are used for dialing the general hue you might have in mind. But what if you know exactly what color you want? And what if you like Hex format colors like #CCCCCC (Gray) or #FF0000 (Pure Red)? You might think Apple left you high and dry, and they totally did. But Waffle Software has you covered with their free Hex color picker plugin.

Installing it is a cinch. Just copy the component to the ‘colorPickers’ folder in your ‘Library’ folder. Now when you need a specific color just enter in the appropriate 6-digit value and you’re good to go. I’m glad to have stumbled on to this little gem.

I recently spent a weekend ripping all of my old CDs to my music hard drive and got me thinking about all of the great MP3 freeware that is out there. Here are my five must have freeware apps for MP3 nirvana.

Audiograbber - This CD ripper is the easiest way to convert your CDs to MP3s. While it may look like any other CD rippers, Audiograbber has lots of tweakable options to make your ripping session more flexible. Features worth noting are per track checksums to ensure each file was duplicated exactly, normalizing to prevent jarring sound levels from track to track, delete silence from the end and/or start of a track, encode to a variety of formats including WAV, MP3, or WMA (other encoders can be set up in the Settings menu), and automatically load track information from the freedb CD database.

Picard (from MusicBrainz) - Gigabytes upon gigabytes of MP3 files collected from various sources can lead to some wacky, hodgepodge ID3 tags. ID3 tags are MP3 metadata that describe things like the album title, artist, track, and genre. The MusicBrainz service aggregates metadata from various community members in an attempt to house the largest music information database in the world. Songs can be uniquely identified by their sonic pattern which is used to match up the MP3 file with the correct metadata. Picard is a piece of software which lets you easily drag a bunch of files to batch process all at once. When the program is done you can overwrite the ID3 tags and live in MP3 organization utopia for the time being.

MediaMonkey - Lots of people rave about the brilliance of iTunes but I just don’t see it. Winamp was my player of choice for years until it became too system resource greedy. Then I found MediaMonkey which is fast, flexible, and incredibly organized. Remember all that talk about properly tagging MP3 files with MusicBrainz? MediaMonkey uses that information for searching. In addition you can edit the ID3 tags right in the interface as well as download album covers from Amazon. A bunch of Internet radio stations can be streamed from the player when your days of MP3s become repetitive. If that is not enough you can also batch rename the filenames of your music files matching their ID3 tags, connect and sync with a variety of MP3 players, and generate reports and statistics based on your listening habits. The MediaMonkey system also supports an open plugin architecture as well as scripting support to extend the functionality. All of this from a lightweight music player that won’t bog your system down without skimping out on features.

Music IP Mixer - Do you find it hard to come up with a good play list to listen to? Does the random shuffle option not do a good enough job satisfying your musical pallets? Music IP has a free download that lets you make play lists based on their acoustic fingerprints. When you first start the program up it scans your music directory and analyzes each and every MP3 file. Then using a specialized algorithm based on a variety of factors, the program can create a sophisticated mix based on a selected “seed” song. The MusicIP Mixer lets you tweak the mix by selecting songs and selecting “More like this”, “Less like this”, or “Replace this song”, “Replace this artist”. After specifying the number of songs you can save the play list for later use of send it directly to your audio player of choice.

SoundControl - Controlling your media player by clicking on the software interface is for people with too much time on their hands; Real power users set up hot keys to do their important music tasks. I originally stumbled on Sound Control while looking for a program to visually display the volume level when I turn it up or down like an on screen TV display. But it turns out there are a lot of hidden features in this puppy. For one, I set up hot keys to play, pause, play the previous track, or play the next track all without bringing up the program. Another hot key lets me mute, increase, or decrease my sound volume just like those keyboards with dedicated keys.

So as you can see, it is important to have a properly tagged and organized MP3 collection, that you ripped from your old CDs, that can be easily made into play lists based on moods, that you play on your light-weight music software, where the volume is controlled via customizable hotkeys all for the price of zilch.

While there is nothing quite like Napster anymore for free music, AlbumBase.com certainly was close. The site was like a P2P network except instead of downloading questionable software and hosting the files on your own computer/Internet connection you would upload full albums to various gray-market file hosting sites like Rapidshare.com and then send the link to AlbumBase.com. AlbumBase acted as a middle man letting you search their database of links that would take you off site to download a complete album. The community really blossomed for the couple of years I have been using it. And the devoted fans constantly keep the selection of music up to date, they had pretty much everything I was looking for all the time.

But on November 7th, the site went dead. Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired reported on a rumor that the RIAA/FBI was responsible for the 404′d site but none of the rumors were ever confirmed. Calls to the Seattle police, the Seattle FBI department, the IFPI, the RIAA, and the BPI (the IP address of AlbumBase’s web server puts it in Great Britain) to try to figure out what exactly is going on turned up nothing. It’s a sad, sad day for mooching-music lovers like myself. Now what will I do?

Oh wait, AlbumHunt.com does pretty much the same thing and has an extensive collection of links already. Never mind, the beat goes on. Piracy never dies.

This past Sunday I joined the boys and girls FCA flag football teams for their weekly practice. I was taking pictures, they were working out. This marked the second outing with my new sports lens and I had been reading up on football photography tips that I wanted to try out after the first practice I attended.

At the end of the three hours that I was there I snapped off 342 photos. A lot more were keepers this time around thanks to two simple tips I picked up. First, I set the auto focus to the center point which meant the camera would only focus on things in the dead center of the frame. Before I was getting lots of background objects near the edge of the frame in focus leaving the action blurry and out of focus. Since I was trying to fill the whole frame with the action, only having a center focus point didn’t bother me. The other thing I did was bump up my ISO speed from 100 to 200. This allowed me to use a smaller aperture which resulted in a deeper depth of field. In English, this means more of the subject would be in focus which decreased my chances of getting something blurry.

Besides football there was also a cute chihuahua that was literally the size of my hand. It provided for a few good dog shots to break up the monotony of sports photos. In between water breaks I also took some leaf macros from a small, nearby tree.

The worst part of taking so many photos is processing them all. I quickly rushed through them in Picasa resorting to just cropping and sharpening before pushing them out on the web. I have no idea how others find the time to carefully tweak their images in Photoshop. Picasa is by far my favorite photo app because it is so simple to use and quick to get through a ton of photos. Google really needs to get Picasa onto the Mac because iPhoto is a pain to use.

You can see all of my photos from Sunday in Album 1 and Album 2.