Twisted Melon has a product on the market called Manta, which remote enables any Mac G3, G4, G5, or MacPro. It is also a good product to have if you store your mac in a different room (i.e. media closet) and want to use your Apple Remote from the couch. Combine Manta with Twisted Melon’s Mira software and you’ll be able to control most of your Mac through your Apple Remote. Buy it here.
Perian enables QuickTime application support for additional media:
- File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
- Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture
- Audio types: Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), and MPEG Layer I & II Audio, True Audio, DTS Coherent Acoustics, Nellymoser ASAO
- AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3
- Subtitle support for SSA/ASS and SRT
This is a great free tool to use if you find yourself wanting to play additional audio and video file formats through Quicktime and/or Front Row. Available for download here.
Warranties are a fickle thing. Everyone buys extended warranties for the added insurance or relies on the standard one, in case a product fails prematurely. But hard to remember when the warranty runs out. This is where Warranty Hero can be incredibly useful. With a focus on ease-of-use, adding new product (or service) information is as simple as entering its name, vendor, purchase date and a time the warranty expires.
Warranty Hero Benefits:
Warranty Hero comes with a 30-day free demo and then costs $9.95 for a single-license copy or $14.95 for a 5-user license.
TuneUp is a must-have organizational tool that automatically cleans up your digital music collection. Get 10% off TuneUp Gold with promo code: UNCRATE2. Promo code powered by Uncrate.
Please check out Modality (http://www.modalitylearning.com) for a number of iPhone applications geared toward people (students & professionals) in the Medical and Law industries, students K-12, and world travelers. If you don’t have an iPhone, they offer products for clickwheel iPods over at RayBook (http://www.raybook.com).
Came across an alternative to Google Analytics and Urchin today. The product is called Mint (http://www.haveamint.com). “Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referrers, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint’s flexible dashboard” (Source). The product costs $30 per site.
I’ve been an avid user of dot Mac (now MobileMe) for years now and have always satisfied with the service, but not impressed. I only keep it at this point because of my email and it syncs well with my iPhone. However, I’m not sure if it’s worth the money anymore. The reason being is that SugarSync offers a Mac & PC software program that competes with MobileMe quite nicely. It’s much cheaper and seems to work a lot smoother. They offer a 30-day free trial with 10GB of space. You can upgrade/downgrade anytime and it syncs with Smartphones now too!!
There tech support is very helpful and the response time is great. I had a support inquiry last week and they responded via email within 5 minutes of my inquiry. Tech support over the weekend was non-existent though. I have been syncing files on five of my Macs and two PCs for over a month now and have had very little complaints. It still needs to add some crucial features (Address Book and iCal support) but they are headed in the right direction.
Right now it only supports Leopard 10.5+ and Windows
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I have five of my Macs sharing my single iTunes account and, up until now, have had five separate iTunes libraries with unorganized playlists. I want the ability to have one centralized iTunes library that I can stream and retrieve my iTunes files from no matter where I am. There were a few different solutions I tried out, but the final solution calls for using Dot.Tunes iTunes plugin. For my circumstance it was the most suitable solution.
Dot.Tunes allows me to share my centralized iTunes library remotely. If you have a dynamic IP address, swing over to DYNDNS.ORG and set up a free hostname that will update every time your IP address changes. This will ensure that you will be able to connect to your library when your IP address is changed by your ISP.
Dot.Tunes also allows me to download my iTunes files onto my remote machines and loads them directly into my remote iTunes. This is handy when I either want to add songs to my iPhone when on the road, or if I want to bring a playlist on a trip where I know the Internet will be limited. The ability to Download through Dot.Tunes costs $20 per machine, but worth it in convenience. I don’t think it would be worth more than $20 at this point. It would also be great if they offered some sort of unlimited or bulk license option.
I would only use Dot.Tunes for personal use. Dot.Tunes is set up in a way where you can invite your friends, family, etc. to share your library and download your songs, but that crosses the line of copyright infringement and I don’t condone that.
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