I was actually in the process of editing a post discussing how happy I was with my move to NetNewsWire now that it’s free and I can easily keep up with my feeds on my iPhone. However, I just came across a very promising application titled Headline.

Just judging from the website, this will be an awesome release. The website itself is simply stunning, all the graphics are top notch, and there are nice blog updates detailing the progress of the application including screenshots.

I’m not sure what Headline will promise in features that you can’t get in any other current application, but it promises to have a beautiful interface!

More Information | Doseido Blog

The new subsection of the Apple website showcases quite a few impressive video tutorials for those new to the Mac, as well as more experienced Mac users. Take a quick look around, you might learn something!

Found via | AppleInsider

I just wanted to remind everyone that the presidential primaries are well underway and that your vote counts! I say that as early voting takes place on campus over the next few days, giving students a chance to vote out of their district. The official voting day for the primaries is next Tuesday, February 5th.

Please educate yourself on the candidates and vote!

For everyone who has been anxiously awaiting the revised 3rd edition of the wonderful book on Cocoa Programming, the wait is over! The 3rd edition is the first release of the book since Panther and will cover all technologies released in Tiger as well as Leopard. Very exciting news indeed, pre-order your copy at Amazon here.

On the Big Nerd Ranch website, the release is marked simply as “Spring 2008″. However, the publishing date on Amazon is marked as June 2, 2008. Pre-ordering through Amazon will guarantee you receive your copy as soon as it’s available.

Found via | Ranchero.com

For one of my classes this semester, I need to take on a semester long project. I have one or two ideas in mind, but I was wondering if anyone out there had any suggestions for an application you’d like to see brought to life on the Mac? I’m also knocking around doing some creative web design applications as well, so we’ll just see how it pans out. But suggestions would be amazing!

One thing that I quickly noticed when I added a couple WebClip bookmarks to my home screen after the v1.1.3 update this week, was that the icons were useless! A miniature version of the page is fairly useless considering it’s so damn tiny on the iPhone screen.

However, someone was thinking at Apple and created an easy way for site administrators to set a custom icon to appear when users bookmark their page. You can read more into the details here, but basically you create a png image (some sources say 158×158 is much crisper and still works) at 57×57 and upload it to your root directory (of the web documents, not of the server itself) with the name “apple-touch-icon.png”.

So now if you add a bookmark to your home screen for MacFanatic.net (or any other page), there will be a distinctive glassy logo (the rounded corners and glassy effect are applied by the phone, so the image above isn’t exactly what it will look like) to help you out!

I was reading this post from iPhone Alley and came across a really nice feature that I didn’t even realize I was currently missing.

The keyboard now utilizes the screen’s multitouch functionality enabling two-finger typing. That means you can hold shift + a key and it will type in caps, just like a real keyboard.

A nice addition indeed.

For those excitingly awaiting the release of the universe designing game from the Sims and SimCity creator, there is good news!

First, the game is slated to finally be released sometime this year. And on top of that, EA has promised it will be released for Mac and PC at the same time. Now, after WWDC 07 last summer, this was the arrangement. However, that hasn’t been the case yet as far as I know, so hopefully they will play their cards right and make right by this mammoth release.

Anyone have thoughts on this game? I’m not usually a gamer by any means, but the general idea of this and the fact it’s backed by the guy who created my two favorite games….well, it gets me excited.

Found via | TUAW

I simply scanned over this mentioned feature amid all the other keynote buzz and didn’t get a chance to read further into it and see what was up. The basic design strategy here is that you will be able to purchase select DVDs title that will let you transfer that content onto your Mac or PC via iTunes, and easily sync to your iPod or iPhone. Awesome!

Thankfully the guys at iPhone Alley wrote up this article with a hands on experience. Turns out it really is as simple as it sounds. There are two discs in the DVD case now, a regular one, and then one with bonus content. Popping the second one into your computer brings up iTunes with a page from the Disc. You enter a serial code found inside the case, and the copy begins.

This is pretty cool because the studios have started to realize that yes, we would like a physical copy of our favorite movies, but would also like to have a digital copy to watch on our iPods and such as well. For those who currently rip a DVD and then encode it, taking several hours, this will be a pleasant change.

For those who aren’t aware, phpbb is the amazing and free forum software widely used on the internet. The 2.x releases have been around for years and the community has been working hard for a 3.0 release (with about 9 Release Candidates after months of beta releases) for what seems like forever.

I’ve been keeping tabs on the release candidates, but I actually missed the 3.0 release amid the holiday season. v3 was released on December 18, 2007 and is available for download. The changelog is so immense that I can’t even begin to digest the details, but a lot of the gripes I had with the 2.x releases are completely gone and the system is a lot more maintainable and usable for the average administrator.

You can be sure that the moment I have some time, I’ll be upgrading Mac Fanatic’s message boards to the new release. Ability to easily upload files and so much more is very exciting. I’m super excited about better user management and spam control.

Give phpbb a try here.