The bottom line I gave to my review of ScreenFlow, Vara Software's screencasting studio software, last month was that " ScreenFlow does deliver on the promise of providing a one-stop-shop tool for creating high-quality screencasts with excellent visual effects, and it does so in a polished, modern, and totally Mac-like user interface." Apparently, ScreenFlow also appealed to this year's Apple Design Awards jury.

When, three weeks ago, I blogged about Patrick Stein's "SmartSleep" preferences panel, which lets you configure a Mac laptop's sleep and hibernation (aka "Safe Sleep") settings, I explained that I wanted to use this software to switch off Safe Sleep altogether, because that feature had failed on my MacBook so many times that it was basically useless. I didn't expect SmartSleep to restore Safe Sleep's usefulness, but it did.

One of the fundamental concepts used in OmniFocus is that of "Next Action." Each project has a Next Action, and it is the very next task you have to get done in order to keep that project moving. Being able to focus on such Next Actions is tremendously helpful for managing a large number of projects without losing track of what literally needs to be done next. Due to a curious problem with the way OmniFocus determines what a project's Next Action should be, however, you may overlook some tasks without even noticing that they are being hidden from your view.

One of the few "dangerous emails" that made it past my rather aggressive SpamAssassin setup recently was a phishing attempt, claiming to have been sent by Google's AdWords service. When I took a closer look at this email, I noticed a header field that I hadn't come across before, and which adds another useful little helper in the fight against spam-n-scam emails.

The Safe Sleep feature in more recent Apple laptops is a good idea in theory: every time the computer goes to sleep, the entire contents of its RAM are written to disk so that the machine's state can be quickly restored in case the computer runs out of juice while sleeping. No data loss, no waiting for the computer to reboot, and very handy for exchanging batteries without having to shut down the machine, too. In practice, though, this feature may not work quite as advertised, so you might just as well want to deactivate it, and you can.

Thanks to cross-platform GUI libraries, writing an application that can be deployed on more than just one computing platform is reasonably straight-forward. But there is more to making an application truly Mac-like than just compiling it for Mac OS X.

Commenting on my recent review of ScreenFlow, my esteemed colleague David Battino wondered if this screencast recording software could also serve as a replacement for Apple's iMovie for quickly editing videos. The short answer to that is, no, ScreenFlow can't replace iMovie, but -- it does have some tricks up its sleeve that you can use to create cool effects not found in iMovie.

Sometimes, new phenomena show up in Internetland that, at first sight, make you wonder about who would really need this. But keep an eye on them for a while, and you may notice a few things about them that make it well worthwhile to try them out yourself, after all. Twitter is one such phenomenon, and now that I'm finally ready to give it a try, I could use some help.

The Internet has revolutionized the distribution of software: search for what you need (or want), download it, install it -- instant digital gratification! And yet, some developers still manage to make this process a highly unpleasant experience. Here's one example of how _not_ to distribute your software. Plus a few ideas to consider when publishing your own software as a download.

Psystar, the company that caused a bit of a stir recently by announcing a Mac-clone called "Open Computer" have now posted a video which, they claim, shows that machine in operation.