Transmission is an Open Source Mac (also Linux) BitTorrent client that seems to be getting some buzz. I've never used a BitTorrent client on my Mac (the only place I used it is on my Linux box to download various gigantic Linux ISO files). If you've tried Transmission, let us know how it is working for you.

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If you've used McAfee's SiteAdvisor to flag potentially dangerous web searches, the new Yahoo/McAfee dangerous web site team-up will look familiar to you. I went to Yahoo Search and searched for free downloads since I was pretty sure it would result in a few dangerous sites being listed in the search results. I found it interesting that McAfee highlighted the sponsored search result as a dangerous site. This is a good thing since it indicates that they aren't playing favorites.

I'm not a fan of Java or Eclipse. So, I didn't expect much from Sun's recent Java-built IDE release...

NetBeans IDE 6.1

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Hobnox Audiotool is an online electronic music studio based on emulations of Roland TR-808, TR-909, and TB-303 drum machines and synths. You also get a selection of modeled Boss effect pedals to drag around the screen and plug together. (Click to enlarge.)

ReBirth, of course, is the pioneering virtual studio composed of two software drum machines and two software bass synths, all modeled on old Roland hardware. It rocked the world when it came out more than a decade ago. I remember being in the hotel room where it was announced and watching a horde of weary, jaded journalists spring from their seats and rush the computer at the front of the room. Propellerhead has long since moved on to the vastly more powerful Reason program, and now offers ReBirth for free in the ReBirth Museum.

Audiotool has its own rough edges. As Eliot Van Buskirk reports, the online app has to use a Frankenstein of Flash and Java to offer interactive audio; Van Buskirk points to a campaign to bring Flash up to speed sonically. I spent an hour playing with Audiotool and found music-making tedious. When you have only a mouse to adjust a studio's worth of knobs and buttons, progress is sloooow. (ReBirth supports MIDI control, so you can map actual knobs to the onscreen ones; here's hoping Flash gets MIDI support soon as well.) Audiotool's sound quality isn't up to the ReBirth level yet either, and there's currently no way to export the music you make as a WAV file. I started to use a streamripper to capture the music from the browser, but then made an adjustment and lost sound completely.

Adjusting controls with a mouse is tedious, but the tutorial offers some shortcuts: Press Shift-1, 2, or 3 to zoom in and out, and Shift-A to bring up a navigation box. (Click to enlarge.)

But just as hardware evolved into software in the first Roland-to-ReBirth transition, it won't be long before online instruments like Audiotool settle comfortably into mobile devices. Already, top synth manufacturer Korg has released a virtual MS-10 synth as a Nintendo cartridge. I wouldn't be surprised to find the iPhone soon ships with software instruments the way GarageBand showed up as a full-fledged member of the Macintosh. And this time, the interface could be a highlight. It's amazing what you can do with the basic x-y pad on a Korg Kaossilator synth; couple that with the iPhone's multitouch screen and we could have gorgeous new instruments to go.

What are your favorite handheld virtual instruments? Please leave a link.

The longer answer to David's question is that, in principle, ScreenFlow does have the required basic features for using it as a simple movie editor, like cutting clips and arranging them on the time line. However, the set of video transitions is limited to fades, resizing, panning, and rotating the movie pane in 3D space, and there are no iMovie-like video or audio effects whatsoever.

What's more, in its current incarnation, handling the transitions that ScreenFlow does offer -- "Video Actions" in ScreenFlow-speak -- is a bit awkward, as they cannot be copied. Consequently, every Video Action you add to a video track is created with default settings for duration, etc., so you have to manually fine-tune each and every one of 'em, and you can't save templates for these Actions, either.

Still, ScreenFlow has one specific feature that sets it apart from iMovie and, even with the limited set of transitions, lets you create some very cool video effects. That feature is multiple video tracks.

Editing one of four video tracks in a ScreenFlow project

In iMovie, video clips are arranged on a single video track, meaning that you can only place a video project's clips in sequence on that single time line. Not so in ScreenFlow: you can have multiple video tracks and individually place each track's video on the canvas of the movie you're creating. The only limitation is the performance of your computer, because, according to the developers, there is no hard-coded limit to the number of simultaneous video tracks you can use in a ScreenFlow project.

Thanks to the flexible settings for a video's size, placement, opacity, and layering in ScreenFlow, creating picture-in-picture videos or even mosaics with multiple videos is a snap. Add animitation to the mix -- independently for each track, of course! --, and you can create some seriously cool effects!

If a picture's worth a thousand words, then a video's worth a cool 50k per second (depending on frame rate, of course...), so here's a quick example of a few of the things you can do in ScreenFlow, and can't in iMovie.

Unfortunately, getting to the result shown in the example movie is very tedious. The main obstacle to an effective workflow for this kind of editing is ScreenFlow's lack of copy-n-paste functionality for the "Video Actions" that generate all these transitions and animations, as mentioned earlier already. As a result, being able to flexibly configure each video action is both a gift and a curse (my apologies to Adrian M.), because you not only can fine-tune each transition individually, you must.

For example, should you decide that you'd like to swap two video clips in a project -- say, the top right and bottom left in the example movie above -- you cannot just move them on the Canvas and copy all the edits from one track and apply it to the other to preserve video positions, animations and transitions. Instead, you have to manually re-create every one of the Actions for both videos.

But let's not forget, though, that ScreenFlow was never designed for this kind of usage. It's a welcome by-product of its support for picture-in-picture movies, e.g., for showing the presenter's face while demonstrating a piece of software. And yet, if you're willing to invest a bit of time and effort, it does make for some very cool effects for your videos that you simply cannot create in iMovie. And, as you could see in the example, the resulting video quality is excellent.

To learn more about ScreenFlow, have a look at my review and visit the ScreenFlow website.

Have you also found unusual ways to coerce a piece of creative software into doing something that it originally was not designed for? Please share. Comments are open below, and there's also a discussion thread welcoming your stories.

INSTEON thermostat control: One of the main reasons people get interested in home automation is to save energy. And while automatically turn off unnecessary lights might save a little, I think home heating and cooling is where the real payoff can be found. But until recently, thermostat automation has been complicated and too tricky for most users. This has started to change with better computer-controlled thermostats, and now with Indigo 3 natively supporting an INSTEON thermostat adapter, it should be much simpler and easier to manage. There are other hardware goodies that Indigo supports, of course, and there's a handy list at the developer's website.

DB logging: Indigo 3 stores its logs in a SQLite database, or in a PostgreSQL database if you choose to install the latter. While this is surely the geekiest of the new features, I think it offers a tantalizing opportunity for others to create utilities that mine the logged data for patterns that are interesting, if not useful.

Improved Web control: Indigo has long had a client-server architecture that allows for browser-based access to your automation system. This has been improved in the new version, and now adds support for plugins that extend the functionality. And mobile users will be glad to hear that access from iPhone and iPod touch is fully-supported. For a basic demo of the web interface, visit the sample house at the developer's website.

Have you taken the leap to Indigo 3.0? If so, feel free to leave a comment with your impressions and favorite features.

Apparently Yuto is already a pretty serious classic rock fan; he does covers of Clapton, Ozzy, and more. Not only that, he uses full-size instruments (like the Flying V pictured here) -- that are bigger than he is; and he even attempts to sing along. Check out his performance video(s) on YouTube by searching under his name. This one's an eye opener.

The background rested on a board and rod placed between two chairs. I positioned the flower so sunlight was striking it from behind and to one side. Then I used a large piece of soft gauze to soften the sunlight.

Falling in Love, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

In Photoshop, I combined three exposures at times from 1/2 a second to 2.5 seconds to capture the full dynamic range of the light falling on the delicate pink petals.

[Nikon D300, 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), three exposures one at 1/2 of a second, one second, and 2 1/2 seconds, all exposures at f/36, ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Related story: Here are some shots of the Dawn Chorus variety of Papaver rhoeas.

http://www.google.com/mac

This where you can also find Notifier for the Mac, Toolbar for Firefox, Google Earth, and SketchUp. And, don't overlook the Search Mac Sites button that focuses your search on all things Mac.

Other end-user friendly applications from the Playground include AppMenuBoy and Statz. AppMenuBoy brings back hierarchical menus to the Leopard dock. Statz lets you simultaneouly change status information across various net-presence services such as iChat, Skype, Tumblr, and Twitter.

Some Google Playground tools are not so end-user (non-programmer) friendly though. One example that comes to mind is the powerful MacFUSE that implements FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) for the Mac. This is, however, a third-party contributed Open Source software in Google Code called MacFusion that places an end-user friendly graphical wrapper around MacFUSE to make it more accessible.

You can find other Mac related projects on Google Code contributed by people/teams other than the Google Mac Team too. Check out this list (linked in the previous sentence) for other Open Sourced software for the Mac.

Neverball is an Open Source multiplatform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) graphical game. I haven't tried it yet. The reason it interests me is that it can make use of the the Apple MacBook's sudden motion sensor and played by moving that notebook in space.

The Google-ians have been really busy lately. Here's what's new according to the Google Docs Official Google Docs Blog...

1. Speaker notes for your presentations
2. Inserting YouTube videos into slides
3. View (but not edit) presentations and spreadsheets offline using Google Gears

When Twitter arrived on the 'Net scene, my first reaction was, "Right, I so need even more information to flood my already ADD-stricken digital life. Who wouldn't want to know which of their friends has packed which sandwich for lunch break today..."

However, it seems as though, when used thoughtfully, Twitter is a nifty extension to blogs for those things you'd care to share, but which aren't really worth launching your favorite blog editor for. Using Twitter for asynchronous status messages looks especially enticing: share your availability status like you would via the status menu in a chat application, but without having to remain online and without requiring your friends and contacts to be online at the exact time your status changes. And the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter may be just what some folks -- myself included, methinks -- need to keep their messages short, sweet, and to the point.

Well, theorizing is fun and can make for great -- and very cheap -- "brain training," but personal experience is something different entirely, so, having just signed up, I'm all set to give Twitter a go now. And this is, where you, dear valued and hopefully Twitter-experienced reader, come in.

What Mac desktop client would you suggest a Twitter newbie should use? From what I could gather so far, Twitterific seems to be the benchmark for Twitter clients on the Mac. Would you agree? Are there any services or utilities that you consider essential when using Twitter? TinyURL seems to be a pure necessity when sharing longish URLs. Any others? And what about "best practices" for maximizing Twitter's usefulness?

If you're using Twitter yourself, I'd appreciate any tips and hints you'd be willing to share, either in the comments below or in the discussion in our forums. And just in case you'd never even consider signing up for something like Twitter, that would make for some great insights, too, so please chime in as well!

Many thanks in advance for any choice morsels of information you'll be sending my way. Oh, and don't worry about the length of your comments: there's no 140 character limit on O'Reilly's websites just yet...

For a long time, the machine had run Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X without problem. Certainly, an iBook G3 (Late 2001) at 500 MHz shipping with 256 MB of RAM didn't exactly scream under Tiger, but it performed its duty reliably and never once complained of the load. Its hard drive is as robust as it ever was and the casing has not wrinkled in the least. However, the Apple-installed 128 MB SO-DIMM had been swapped with a Dane-Elec 512 MB SO-DIMM with no ill effects a while ago.

After a bit of shelf storage, I thought it best to clean-install Mac OS X, giving the machine a good test in the process. Unfortunately, this was not to be. While applications on the old system worked perfectly, no installer ever wanted to work, whether from the CD or Software Update. The error? A "codec overrun," which was more reminiscent of Hawaiian shirts, 3D penguins and QuickTime than anything else.

At this point, while I was busy tearing out fistfuls of my hair after hours of chanting and troubleshooting, my hardware and UNIX guru rightly pointed out the iBook was now working with one PC-133 RAM module — the added one — and one PC-100, soldered to the mother board. Theoretically, he added, it should work given he had been mixing PC-133 and PC-100 with no ill effect on similar machines running Mac OS 9. Still, it was a possibility…

For kicks, he decided to swap the added stick with another 128 MB PC-100 one he had lying around. Much to my surprise, this solved the problem. Was the mix causing our trouble or was the 512 stick faulty in some delightfully arcane way? Who knows…

Conclusions? Many! (As Dr. Bronner could phrase it.) No sign of RAM failure were ever apparent until an installer or updater was run. All applications, including rather intensive media applications — OK, intensive for the machine —, were behaving properly and never once did the system throw an error or a panic.

Mac OS 9 installed flawlessly as well and ran quite happily on what it thought was a high-end CPU — hey, it hasn't kept up with the times. Indeed, everything but the Mac OS X updaters worked.

As a software person, I tend to ignore the hardware side of things. Until my Mac starts beeping in scary patterns and displaying the sad Mac forbidden sign, I just assume the error lurks somewhere between the Cocoa and the puffs. Turns out I was wrong!

And there is a great amount of wailing. "Oh why oh why doesn't it work on xxxx. My (mom/customers/developers) need it on xxxxx."

This followed the last six months of "Why isn't Java 6 on Leopard." Which was preceded by a year of "Hey, Java 6 is out. How come it's not on Tiger?"

And although, for the most part, not having Java 6 on the Mac didn't really have any impact on my life -- I could be somewhat sympathetic with this view. I like Java. I like the Mac. I would love for these two taste-treats to get along and work together.

And then something changed.

Sun said they would write the Java port for the iPhone. Whether they end up doing this or not, it told me that when Sun has a platform they value, they will put resources behind it. Sun has written the Java port for Windows and for Linux. They say they will write for the iPhone -- so they could have written for the Mac if they had valued the platform.

I don't argue with the criticism of Apple that so many Java developers are and have been raising. They say "Apple just doesn't care about Java." That's not entirely true. Over the years Apple has committed a lot of resources to Java and has endured public complaints from folks like James Gosling. When you think about it, that is an unusual way for Sun to treat a licensee. Java.net editor Chris Adamson has often blogged that Apple is in the business of selling Macs and they need to evaluate how supporting Java would further that end.

So let's accept for the moment that there is some truth in the statement that "Apple just doesn't care about Java." What about the flip side? How much does Sun care about Mac developers and users? When Sun looks at the Apple mind share and market share what do they see? They clearly haven't seen enough in the past to support development of Java for the Mac.

There is a big message in Sun's choosing to support Java on Linux over Java on the Mac. The decision isn't a bad one. The decision isn't a wrong one. It is a decision that points to Sun's priorities.

What I don't understand is why people are so angry with Apple for making decisions in line with their priorities.

I don't think there's a villain here -- just two companies evaluating how best to allocate their resources.

Before diving into a new setup right away, I've been researching how others have their home office configured and, in particular, how they deal with the arrangement and management of multiple large monitors. One great resource for this Pixel Rig photo pool on Flickr. It's an interesting mix of techno exhibitionism and voyeurism as people share pictures of their private workspaces for all to see. Sometimes I can't help but notice details that are inadvertently shown too, such as desk toys or the view, or lack thereof, out their office windows.

And as an aside, if you're really drawn to peeking into the techno-lives of strangers, don't miss The Items We Carry photo pool.

I was also pleased to recently learn about the results of a contest for the 25 Best Home & Office Mac Setups. In fact, it's a nice way to see a wide variety of different approaches in a short time, although the commentary isn't as fascinating as some of the submissions to the Flickr pool.

So, I haven't yet decided how I'll change my home office, but I've had a lot of fun seeing what my options are. Care to chime in with info about your own setup? Feel free!

The inverted image didn't persist in the screenshot I took, so I had to invert it manually to produce this image, but this could be a timesaver.

What wacky key commands have you discovered?

Why is this man jumping off the wall? The return of DekePod. I shot this on the set of Deke's soon-to-be-released next installment of DekePod, a podcast from our own Deke McClelland that made its first irreverent appearance a while back to great acclaim. The latest round will feature plenty of in-your-face, World-According-to-Deke information on all things digital imaging. Stay tuned this summer.

The third annual Bay Area Maker Faire is this weekend, and looks to be a truly inspiring event. Maker Faire combines art, science, recycling, and entertainment in a hands-on setting that celebrates the inventive spirit.

I was there last night for a pre-show gathering of exhibitors (my family and I will be performing our homemade Japanese storycard dramas throughout the weekend). Some of the people I met:

• A photographer who bolted two cameras together to take 3D pictures
• Two performers from a crank-powered music ensemble
• A man who created an audio-based Pong game for the blind
• The founding editor of Wired
• A woman who built a three-story Victorian house on wheels
• A grad student who turned a $40 Wii controller into a virtual whiteboard sensor, a feat that earned him the #1 video on YouTube for five straight weeks.

Each of those conversations gave us new ideas. For example, as the photographer was explaining 3D picture processing to me, I told him my background was in audio, so I was trying to conceptualize it in those terms. He suggested that the audio equivalent would be binaural recording. I told him I'd made some fun recordings with cheap in-ear mics and a voice recorder, and he got excited, realizing he could add another dimension to his digital storytelling.

Hope you can Make it!