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.

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?

As often as I use Toast and refer to it in postings here, it’s easy to overlook some of the freeware options that will usually work just as well. Burn is one such program which allows you to easily burn data, audio, video, and disc images. Unlike Toast — and more like Disk Utility — Burn uses Apple’s disc burning APIs, which are provided for developers to add CD and DVD writing capabilities to their programs with little effort. It can handle Mac and PC formatted discs, audio and MP3 CDs, all kinds of video discs (DVD included), as well as a number of disc image formats. While it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles Toast has, Burn may provide all the features you need for free. Download it here.

The Unarchiver is a replacement for Apple’s relatively hidden “BOMArchiveHelper” application, which is responsible for the Zip, Tar, and gzip abilities built into the Finder. Not only does The Unarchiver come pre-loaded with much better icons, but it handles Zip, Tar, gzip, bzip2, RAR (including multi-part RAR), 7-zip, StuffIt (but not SitX, sadly), and many other formats. Installation is as easy as dropping the program somewhere on disk, perhaps in /Applications, and then associating preferred formats to be opened with The Unarchiver. I find it’s a much better archive handler than Apple’s own, and the “brown box” icons help differentiate compressed files from regular documents.

On a reader’s blog, I just discovered Textpander, a small utility which turns small segments of text into large, expanded ones. Back in the Mac OS 8 and 9 days, I used to run TypeIt4Me to catch common typos and handle a few conversions, and I’m delighted to find Textpander is a perfect companion to Mac OS X. When the preference pane is opened, Textpander launches a small background process to watch your keystrokes for a given trigger from the defined list. Personally, misspelling “and” as “adn” is one I always look for when proofreading, but now those days are gone. What’s more impressive is that Textpander can match the case of the misspelling such that the replaced word is exactly what you intended to type. Great software that Just Works. This handy utility is offered as donationware, so I highly recommend giving it a try and sending the author a tip if you find it useful.