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Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 8:09 PM

Amit Singh, author of the excellent book Mac OS X Internals, has published a Mac version of FUSE, a kernel extension that allows various data structures to be “remapped” as a local file system. Even internet-dependent sources like Flickr photo albums, RSS feeds, and remotely-connected SSH sessions can be represented as files in a folder. If you’ve never seen technology like this before, this video demo shows just how cool this stuff is. There’s already a FlickrFS extension that can be implemented with FUSE, so it shouldn’t be too much trouble to implement it on the Mac, making Flickr photo managing as easy as drag-and-drop. After backing up my current system (this is unsupported software), I’ll try installing MacFUSE and a handful of plugins.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 8:09 pm and is filed under Apps, Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 8:35 PM

Today at Macworld, Roxio released an all-new version of Toast Titanium for Mac. Notable features include support for Blu-Ray burning, transferring video from a TiVo to your Mac, spanning data across multiple discs, better DVD handling, audio mixing, and tons more — all in a shiny new interface. You can check out the new look by viewing the photos I’ve posted on Flickr.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 8:35 pm and is filed under Apps, Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 5:10 PM

Often when dealing with Xbox content on the Mac, it’s useful to be able to create a bootable DVD, perhaps of a game or Xbox Dashboard program. While Xbox Media Center doesn’t run well from a DVD, games, utilities, and other programs are designed to be playable from a disc.

The Xbox can’t normally read computer formatted CDs like ISO 9660 and Joliet (XBMC can, though), but to make a bootable disc, it must be of the proper format. Microsoft designed a custom disc format for the Xbox in an attempt to stop piracy and secure the system, however it was quickly reverse engineered to allow for all kinds of uses. Xdisc is an Xbox disc image creator/extractor for Mac OS X, built on top of the open-source extract-xiso utility, which can be compiled for most operating systems. It can build an Xbox ISO file (disc image) from a folder on your computer, or can directly FTP into the Xbox and create an image of a folder or DVD, including games. It can also extract the contents of an Xbox ISO, producing the original files that make up the software. FTP is fully integrated into extract-xiso — and thus Xdisc — making for a great solution that can communicate directly with the Xbox to get the job done.

The author, known as “trackfive,” does not have a personal site that I can find and link to, so I’m hosting a copy of Xdisc right here, so you can download away. Also included in the download are several drag-and-drop applets to quickly create and extract XISOs without launching the application and messing with settings.

1/7/2007 Update
Trackfive has also produced some Automator plugins, which allow you to Control-click (right-click) on a folder or file and create or extract the Xbox ISO in one simple step. What could be easier?

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Apps, Mac, Xbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 12:07 AM

I’ve been a long time NetNewsWire fan and have readily dismissed most other RSS readers in favor of it, however I just tried out NewsLife, and I’m quite impressed with it. While it doesn’t sport all the bells and whistles of NetNewsWire, NewsLife has just the right feature set, making it seem more of a NetNewsWire Elementsâ„¢ application.

Working on only one Mac now (with Core 2 Duo hopes for 2007), I no longer require NetNewsWire’s great syncing abilities, and I never really used the built-in browser tabs. I tend to browse straight through the news list, opening any interesting links in the background, and rifling through the pages after they’ve all loaded. NewsLife works with me in this fashion, offering a News Bin, where I can store pages to-be-read-later. Stories in the News Bin persist across application launches, meaning what you put there stays there until you remove it. It’s a clever little concept I find very useful, especially when just skimming the news with little time to spare right then.

Like NetNewsWire and a few others, NewsLife is a uniquely Mac application (you can tell from the screenshot alone) which combines the best of NewsFire and NetNewsWire, making for an RSS reader that may actually win me over. I’ll be using it throughout the next week or so to see if it really holds up.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 12:07 am and is filed under Apps, Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.