My app pick for the week is TVShows for Mac OS X: A nifty little app that allows you to stay up to date with your favorite TV shows by “subscribing” to RSS data from tvrss.net

Depending on your settings, TVShows will download the episode which last aired or the episodes that follow a specific episode.

Thanks to Rico for the tip.

[Recorded using ScreenFlow by Telestream]

Apparently the new OS X Leopard doesn’t scrimp on new features and its impressive feature set stretches farther than its semi-transparent menu bar and reflective dock as it boasts of over 300 new features(And seriously, is anyone even surprised? I mean if they released Leopard as a mere cosmetic update then they should’ve called it “Vista.” See what I did there?).

Because it’s all over the Internet and A-list bloggers can’t shut up about it, I’m pretty sure that you have an idea of what Leopard’s marquee features are; I mean I’m sure, vague as it may be, that you have an idea of what Time Machine, Stacks and Leopard’s integrated Bootcamp features can do.

But what do all these bells and whistles translate to for the normal, only-slightly-geek people like us? I mean sure the new Applescript, Dashcode and XCode 3 features may prove useful for those programmer types but for average macheads like myself, what is there to be excited about?

For me, there are three reasons.

Spaces

Back when I was still a Windows user, one of the biggest encumbrance to both my efficiency and productivity would be the fact that the Windows desktop can get overly crowded and cluttered if you go about doing enough tasks and opening enough windows. I solved this problem by using a nifty little application called Yet Another Desktop Manager (Yod’m 3d) which is a virtual desktop manager which allows users to switch between virtual desktops using a rotating cube effect.

I still have the same problem with OS X and I’ve tried a couple of virtual desktop managers but never really found anything I’d be happy with as most of them have really confusing navigation as far as switching between desktops would go.

Luckily, Leopard comes with an integrated virtual desktop manager called Spaces which allows you to create multiple workspaces, and lets you easily switch between them. Within each workspace, you place whatever application windows you desire. This is particularly useful if you want a dedicated desktop to host all your work applications, another one to host applications you use for personal projects.

The neat thing I see in spaces that I didn’t see in other Virtual Desktop Managers is that it has an Exposé-like feature; this means you can press a hotkey and a bird’s eye view of all your workspaces will appear. You can also drag and drop windows from one workspace to another.

I’m not really sure if this would appeal to everyone but for people like me who likes things organized and clutter-free, spaces is a welcome feature.

Quick Look

If you can see the files in my computer, you’d notice that my files look like they came from a piñata that just got run over by a truck. Generic filenames, duplicate files, documents in wrong directories, etc.

So you could only imagine how tedious a task looking for a particular file would be for me. I typically use Spotlight to search for the files I need but since I employ naming conventions like CHRISTMASDOCUMENT1.DOC and CHRISTMASDOCUMENT2.DOC to name my files, I have to launch applications associated to my documents and from there, check whether or not it is the document I’m looking for.

With Leopard’s new Quick Look feature, all I would need to do would be to click on a file, press the Space Bar, instantly see the file’s contents and even flip through its pages.

Time Machine

Backup utilities are a dime a dozen but what puts Leopard’s Time Machine in a league of its own is the ability to show the user what his or her computer looked like on a specific date and have the option to search for files (deleted or modified) from that date in the past and bring it to the present. It also allows users to “restore” files from a specific date in the past to their original locations as if nothing ever happened.

The cross-OS platform uses HTML, Flash and AJAX among others to make highly-functional Rich Internet Applications and deploy them as desktop clients.

Currently, my favorite AIR apps include  Snitter, an AIR-based Twitter client for Mac OSX; Airpress, a WordPress compatible blogging client; and of course, Pownce‘s desktop client.

However, AIR being a relatively new runtime environment, applications tend to be buggy and I find myself installing and trying to uninstall apps a lot.

Usually, to make sure that I delete all files associated with the app I am trying to uninstall, I use either App Zapper or App Delete.

The process is pretty straightforward. I go to my applications folder and drag the program I wish to uninstall to App Delete or App Zapper and that’s that.

I’ve been trying out a lot of Adobe AIR-based apps in the last couple of months and until lately, I haven’t found a way to uninstall them as they do not appear in the applications folder.

What I found out was the AIR installer and apps are, by default, installed in your Home/Applications folder rather than your root Applications folder. So for a user named TedGrubb, AIR-based apps are installed in /TedGrubb/Applications rather than in /Applications.

Hi Mike – I work for TechSmith (makers of Jing) and would like to thank you for
your nice post about Jing. I also wanted to let you know that you can embed
video. Check out the following screencast to see how and let me know if you
have any other questions or feedback.

As a proof of concept, I recorded a video you could watch that should show you how to go about doing exactly that.

Thanks for the info Dave.

Now, I know a lot of you have your own ways to shorten this process. Personally, I use a combination of OSX’s grab, Adobe Photoshop and this handy ImageShack Image Upload Dashboard widget for the Mac.

I’ve been pretty much happy with the aforementioned combination until I found something that does the job in a more convenient, more streamlined fashion. Techsmith, a company specializing in screen capture and recording software has a service that does exactly that. And more.

The concept behind The Jing project is an always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video from your computer to anywhere. Aside from providing a simple yet functional desktop interface which allows you to take screen shots, Jing also also allows users to make simple annotations to screen captures before storing and allowing users to share them using Techsmith’s ScreenCast service.

This is particularly useful for people who frequent message boards looking for an easy way to share things they find on the web or for people looking for a way to provide support using a robust instructional aid.The features I highlighted are impressive enough but Jing takes it to an whole new level by allowing users to create a video of anything you see on your computer. So instead of typing thousands of letters explaining how to enable POP in Gmail to your computer illiterate dad, you can simply use Jing to record a video showing him exactly how to do it step by step, click by click.

Jing’s blog has this sample video.All in all Jing is a solid service. My only gripe so far is Jing’s output is limited to sharing images and video hosted on ScreenCast. It would be nice to see direct link outputs for images and an embed feature for video. These would be extremely useful to people looking to embed instructional material using Jing-captured images and video on their site.

Update: A member of Techsmith’s development team emailed me to let me know that you can, in fact, embed video on your site.

So here’s a little something for all of you lucky, proud new owners of an iPhone:

Seriously.

Anyway, my biggest gripe with my Macbook is its limited hard disk space. Now, for most people, 80GB of disk space is more than enough but if you’re anything like me, you’d have gigabytes and gigabytes worth of bestiality, bondage and clown porn so 80GB would be nowhere enough. I stumbled upon a nifty little app called Monolingual which strips out language localizations you never use on your Mac.

You see, Apple is very considerations in installing language localization packs for a LOT of languages. This way, whether you work in English, German or Afrikaans, you can use your machine.

However, I do not work in Afrikaans so this particular localization is pretty useless to me.And face it, chances are you’re not going to learn any new languages in the near future (the last time I actually tried to learn a new language was 2 years ago. I tried to learn French to impress ladies–you know so I could say to them “Listen to the elegant language I speak, look at how cultured I am. I belong to a rich country like Monaco while you, obviously, belong in the slums of Tondo. Come now, make haste, suck my bird.”) let alone be fluent enough in them to want a localization pack for it on your computer.

The interface is pretty straight-forward to, just check the retarded languages you want to remove from your system and click the “remove” button and you’re done. When I ran monolingual on my machine, I ended up freeing up 125MB of hard disk space–space which would be put to better use by downloading more interracial porn for my collection.

Download Monolingual via SourceForge.