I haven’t been able to produce an episode in what seems like ages for various personal reasons, but I’m back this week with all the news to catch you up on the latest in the Mac community as well as a look at an awesome disc burning application called Disco that just saw a public beta released today. Introductory pricing is available at 15 USD.

This application has been talked about so much in the last few months I was just dying to finally get my hands on the private beta a few weeks ago. The public beta that was released today lets everyone get in on the goods and provides many enhancements and bug fixes to the application. This app is simply amazing from an interface perspective. It is absolutely stunningly gorgeous with all the transparent and sexy black used throughout the app. Everything is liquid-smooth with transitions and so much eye candy that I’m looking for excuses to burn discs!

Overview of Features

Disco has a discography feature that keeps track of every file you’ve ever burnt so that if you need to find it later, you can just search through that and Disco will tell you what disc it is on. A very nice feature indeed. Disco easily lets you burn files that span multiple discs, has plenty of advanced features like multi-session support and even supports burning Video_TS folders for those of you that want to make a copy of a DVD that you’ve ripped to your Mac. Stuff like making copies, creating disc images and burning disc images is so simple and elegant that it’s amazing. The one really cool feature that I can’t use because my Macbook doesn’t have a graphics card that supports it, is the smoke effect. When you burn a disc on a supported Mac, the window smokes and is awesome. Burn baby burn!

If you purchase Disco at this introductory price from MacZot today, you are automatically entered to win one of three awesome Lightscribe Dual-Layer DVD burners. A very cool deal indeed.

Head on over here to take a look at the Disco website and download your beta version today.

Purchase from MacZot and enter to win the Lightscribe drive here.

Music this week is “Tush” by ZZ Top.

 

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Just because I like to blog about all the latest and greatest, Apple did in fact bring out Core 2 Duo based Macbook Pros today. The rumors had been circulating but I didn’t really expect it so soon. Nice to be surprised like this though. Impressive specs and a great price. I just love my Mac!!

I received this email from the ADC team today, so it’s super exciting that I now have access to all of the presentations that I attended and even the ones that I had to miss because I had to choose between some great ones in the end. The source code and all the example stuff that we were promised from many of the sessions is available online if you log in to your ADC area and use the Leopard area of the site. Very nice addition indeed.

Visit ADC site to login and get your WWDC videos here.

I hate to say that we won’t be having a podcast this week since we didn’t have one last week as I was out of time and in general I just feel like I’m a horrible person. However, with work being as crazy as it has been (14+ hour days at Wendys, flopping hamburgers…I’m in the process of switching, it’s just insane) and trying to go to school along with that, something in my life just has to give right now and sadly the website is the one thing that doesn’t feed, clothe, or provide for a tangible future.

All that being said I’ve got an episode about 1/2 way recorded when I find time to polish and release it. I’m having issues getting up with the Cha-Ching developer, Juan Alvarez and getting him to talk with me, so I’m not sure if that interview will be pulled off or not. I’m hoping to get that interview out to everyone this upcoming weekend, but I’ll have to play it by ear. Once again, sorry for the lack of everything and I’ll try to make a few posts a bit later in the week after I get some school stuff done. Thanks for bearing with me.

This is extremely bad stuff for marketing and PR, but Apple sure enough shipped some Video iPods after Sept 12 of this year with the Windows virus RavMonE.exe virus. You can read more here.

In a last fit of procrastination and web surfing this afternoon, I give you the tweel. I find the concept delightful and wonder just how well these tire replacements will actually hold up in real use. However, it’s a great idea and I would love to get a look at some of these in person to just judge for myself. I’m not sure I see any real benefit at this point except the fact that you’re not going to get a flat that easy. You might hit a bump really hard and break some inner spokes, but no flat. I wonder if the tweel would warp over time? I guess we’ll just have to see. I’d like more info on the topic myself, but haven’t found anything as of yet.
Read original article here.

I spend a lot of time looking for useful software (when I should be working on class work, no less) and I’ve been meaning to take the time and play around with some Finder alternatives in the last few months, especially after attending WWDC and getting to talk with a lot of people and learning about some cool stuff that the Finder doesn’t do and really should. So, as of today I’ve replaced the Finder with PathFinder 4 and we’ll see just how long I can last and what features that I find amazing and what I’ll oddly miss from the Finder.

Download your free 21 day demo of PathFinder 4 here.

I’ve started to really enjoy the ads that Apple is turning out nowadays simply because they are so humorous. Apple rolled out three more today and they’re all pretty funny, but the one where PC tries to make a home movie and we see his version next to the one that the Mac guy makes, it’s just priceless. Someone hit gold with this marketing strategy as far as I’m concerned.

Watch the videos here.

There have been a few different apps and installers released in the last couple weeks in response to the interface changes present in iTunes 7. However, none of them were just perfect and didn’t allow any customization. There are parts of the updated interface that I liked and then there were parts that I hated, none of the previous solutions really made me completely happy and doing a complete retrofit just didn’t look right either. However, this release of Aqua4iTunes solves that problem for me and I’m happy to say that it works as it should and that you should give it a try as well, as it also supports an uninstall option as well. A very nice app.

Instead of just a basic installer, you get a five themes to choose from, including whether you want graphite scroll bars or Aqua ones. Each theme (UNO, Aqua, Default, Brushed Metal, and All Aqua) has it’s own preview window so you can easily see what it is going to do and what will change. Then you can easily specify if you’d like to keep the new icon or change it a bit (green or light blue).

Overall a very cool app and someone spent some time hacking all of those resource files to get it working properly. If you like it and would like to further development and keep the project alive, make sure to make a donation.

Download Aqua4iTunes here.

I use Ecto for creating around 80% of the posts for the site. While the built in editor for WordPress is adequate is some cases, the extra features that Ecto gives me greatly sways me towards creating posts for the site locally and then publishing them with Ecto. However, Ecto hasn’t had a Universal build released until today. Ecto 2.4.1 adds some localization files as well as native support for Intel Macs. Just thought that I would share that in case there are any ecto users out there checking in.

Let me just say that the Universal build flies whereas the PPC build was so slow under Rosetta that I was using the WordPress editor more and more. A great addition to hold me over until Ecto 3 is released some day.

Download Ecto 2.4.1 as a Universal Binary released Oct 3, 2006.