Here's what I looked at last week: My City: Facebook Silverlight App/Game, Snackr: Adobe AIR based RSS Scrolling Ticker, Google vidnik: Record with iSight Then Post to YouTube, and Google Search Blacklisting Mystery.

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.

To back up an attached device, you must specify its target ID. This is the name used for the folder in the MobileSync/Backup directory. The target ID also appears in the Info.plist file. Issue the following command using the target ID for your device.

Thinking Home, an award-winning home automation application from the Mac's past, returns with an all-new version. Its tradition of easy and friendly setup continues, and it has new tricks, too.

Whenever the iPhone backs up to your Mac, iTunes copies certain files to your computer. These include your settings files, from the preferences library, and databases, such as your calls, notes, bookmarks and so forth.

What is the new iPhone Hacks really hacking?

OpenOffice 3.0 for Mac Beta finally lets us run OOo without X11. It has some compatibility issues with Microsoft Office 2008 formats. But, it runs faster than Office 2008. And, the price is right. Read on a for a few more initial impressions of OOo 3.0 Beta for Mac.

Here's what I looked at last week: Transmission BitTorrent client, Microsoft Live Search, Yahoo and McAfee partner for web security, NetBeans IDE 6.1.

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.

A lot of people have been asking about using the existing open SDK for 2.0 application development. A few betas back, my answer was "Hey, no problem". But with the last two betas, I'm not quite so sure. We haven't seen pwnage compatibility since the third beta and there hasn't been a concerted effort that I've seen to upgrade the open headers to match late frameworks. (I know I haven't documented headers because of NDA concerns. That's probably goes for many other programmers.)