When browsing your media library by genre in the new Grid View that debuted with the recently released iTunes 8, each genre folder is adorned by gorgeous genre artwork -- as long as you stick to iTunes's default genre names. When using custom genres, or if you're unhappy with the Apple-designed artwork, however, there's a way to add your own custom artwork to iTunes 8.

I've been asking developers lately if they'd want the App store to start selling apps for their Mac and most are enthusiastic about the possibility. But ...

Sun VirtualBox 2.0 was released on Sept. 4, 2008. I tried this free Open Source cross-platform virtualization hypervisor on an iMac running OS X Leopard. Microsoft Windows virtualization looks somewhat improved. But, running Fedora 9 Linux resulted in problems that I did not see with VirtualBox 1.6.2 a few months ago.

Little more than four months ago I signed up for Twitter. While I am still not able to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes this webservice so appealing, I have since used it regularly to keep up-to-date with what some of my friends are up to, learn about 'net-related news that lies beyond my own radar, and find the odd gem of wisdom as inspiration. As much as I like Twitter per se, I am still a bit disappointed by the Twitter clients that are available for the Mac.

VMware Fusion 2 Release Candidate 1 addresses the major problems I ran into when I tried the Beta 2 release a month ago. There are a few glitches I ran into. But, it looks like Fusion 2.0 is on track for a production release soon.

Matthew Paul Thomas has written a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay on the state of usability in Free and Open Source Software. In "Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it", he gives a concise and well-presented overview over the issues that often plague software projects maintained by volunteers and also lists some suggestions on how to tackle these very problems.

VMware Fusion 2.0 RC1 includes free McAfee VirusScan Plus 1-yr subscription for Microsoft Windows Guest OSes on your Mac. But, IMHO, it is a pretty "heavy" product and you might still want to look around.

I sorted through the various versions of the GIMP bitmap editor available for the Mac last week. This week, I report on what I found after playing with GIMP on my slightly underpowered Macbook. The results were good. In fact, very good IMHO.

Sometimes, small events deserve some blog coverage well beyond their target audience's locale to make sure that the word gets out. One such event is Macoun, a new one-day conference aimed at OS X developers, which will debut in Frankfurt, Germany, on 25 October.

I wanted to install a free (Open Source if possible) image editor on my MacBook. After looking around, I returned to look at GIMP whose multi-window interface always bothered me. Here's what I found about GIMP for Mac OS X 10.5.