Title: Toast 8 Titanium
Price: $79.99 [after $20 mail-in rebate]
Availability: Now
Publisher: Roxio

Recently we talked about the TiVoDecode Manager which enables Mac users to download television shows recorded on TiVo over the home network. Now Roxio with its latest version of its award winning CD and DVD burning software, Toast 8 Titanium, has decided to try its hand at it. The difference is Roxio is officially endorsed by TiVo to provide this TiVoToGo solution for the Mac.

For this review, I’m only going to focus on the TiVo Transfer side of Toast 8 Titanium, but will take a look at the rest of the application in a later post. If there are specific questions you might have about Toast 8 that I should address in later posts, please leave a comment below.
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There is a huge new update to the award-winning application EarthDesk. EarthDesk is a program that lets you replace your normal desktop with a 3D map of the world that shows current sun, moon, and city illumination as well as real-time global cloud coverage. This software is sort of like having a screensaver for your desktop background combined with Google Earth. With this latest update of EarthDesk it becomes a Cocoa application and has moved from being a stand-alone application to a Preference Pane. It has an icon in the menu bar for quick and easy control of EarthDesk and the user interface has received a complete overhaul. EarthDesk is $19.95 and can be found at http://www.xericdesign.com. Upgrades are either $9.95 or $12.95 depending on which version you have.

I find dealing with money boring, but at the same time if I have a spending spree my online banking access is not always bang up to date. This can sometimes cause me a problem, as I have all my fresh shrunk wrap purchases on the table, but don’t know if I have enough left for a steak ‘n’ chips or if I will have to manage with cheese on toast.

This is where Cha-Ching steps up to the mark. This superb money manager from Midnight Apps promises to breathe some fun into managing your money. Well, the title gives it a good start, as do the icons within the app. Everything has a feel good factor.

Most of the time the app is split into a three pane view. The vault on the left gives you quick access to your paid and pending transactions, as well as an account list. Setting up an account is easy, you name it, assign a bank name to it, starting balance, and type of account. You can choose from checking, savings, credit or online. There is even space to enter the URL of the bank, which can then be viewed at any time using the ‘online’ tab, instead of having to go into your internet browser. Within the aptly named ‘Vault’ you can also set-up budget accounts, along with folders and smart folders for organizing and sharing across a network.
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Things that save me time are always high on my list of priorities. When presented with a device that could turn typed documents into useful pieces of text I was up for taking a good look. The product is the IRISPen Executive, which is a small handheld pen type scanner, with a small scanning head that captures three or four lines of text at a time.

From the offset, the IRISPen may not sound that impressive, but it is the usefulness of this little device that wins me over. More often than not I find myself reading something in a magazine and wanting to quote it in an article I am writing, or perhaps email it to a friend or colleague. Under normal circumstances I would have to type it, or scan it and send as an image. With IRISPen I can slide the scanning head over the text and, voila! The text is transferred into MS Word or my email application (for example). This alone saves me so much time.
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Better than anyone could have imagined—all in one device. Let’s look at some of the details we know so far:

Here’s what we know regarding the phone capabilities:

• Cingular is US Parter
• GSM / EDGE
• WiFi and Bluetooth
• SMS conversations in iChat-like format
• Visual voicemail—answering machine like technology where all the messages and their contact info are listed on the phone, and can be selected to playback out of order—not sequentially like traditional voicemail. Those who use VOIP will be familiar with this. Not sure yet, but there is probably some “special sauce” that allows the phone to communicate with the voicemail service.
• Email: POP/IMAP/Push (Blackberry-like mail)—Free Yahoo! Accounts with every Apple iPhone
• Full HTML Safari web browser
• Runs a portable version of Mac OS X.

Other amazing iPhone notables:

• Multi-touch screen with onscreen keyboard
• iPhoto, iTunes, Contacts, Calendar, To-do lists, Widgets
• Bluetooth Headset
• 4GB and 8GB memory capacity
• 5 hour battery life, 16h just playing music.

$499 for 4GB, 8GB for $599. Available in June 2007.

I’m sure Adam et al will have much more to say when they get back to posting. Stay Tuned!

Don’t know how long these will be there but as of 5:54 PM PST on 1/3/2007, Amazon.com in the US appears to have listings for both iLife ’07, iLife ’07(Family Pack), iWork ’07 and iWork ’07 (Family Pack).

In case they remove it soon the screen shots are here.

Thanks to Oliver for pointing me to these.

Update: You know the more I think about it… could this just be really, really early speculative pre-marketing on Amazon’s part? I mean, we know iLife ’07 and iWork ’07 will be out one day, right? Some clever marketing exec knew if they posted these now they would tons of link love, right? Look closely. There is no “buy” or “pre-buy” button. Instead you can sign-up to be alerted when (and if) the product is available. Maybe this Macworld buzz is a little too loud? My head hurts.

Apple has just released a beta of their widget making tool Dashcode. This is significant for a few reasons: 1. it’s rare that Apple issues a beta version of their software; 2. Dashcode will be made a part of the official release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Apple made it available to users of Mac OS X 10.4 “in order to get feedback from a broad range of users.”

The idea behind this application—making complex Java/XML/HTML programming simple—is what the Mac experience is all about. Developer tools made more approachable to the average consumer is something a lot of us would like to see. I know I’d love to put a pro-tool like WebObjects to use, but I’ve found the learning curve too steep. Maybe this is an indication of the direction Apple is taking for these kinds of apps.

I’ve never tried previous versions of Dashcode (and truthfully, I’m a fairly infrequent Dashboard/widget user), but I intend to give this one a try. Unfortunately, by downloading and installing it, Apple’s EULA is crystal clear that I can’t discuss anything about it, especially on a blog. Bummer! If there are others in the MacCast community who have used earlier versions of the software and aren’t covered by any legal restrictions, please post your comment below and share your impressions.

The Dashcode beta release will expire on July 15, 2007 (which hopefully also gives us a no-later-than date for Leopard’s release). You’ll need a free Apple Developer Connection login to download it.

When you received your new Mac it included iChat which you could use to connect to AOL’s Instant Messenger service. iChat is a fine application and particularly useful for video chats, but in this article I am going to try and talk you out of using it for normal text based chats and talk you into switching to the free application Adium.

Friend’s List

If you have a number of people that you chat with (I have around 100 people in my buddy list) then I find the Adium a more efficient display. You do give up seeing the current icon for people but most people I know have the same icon day after day. iChat supports groups as does Adium but if you only want to see the people who are online and use groups in iChat you can have all of the friends who are offline moved to a Offline friends group. Adium allows you to group your buddies and also show or not show offline buddies completely independently.
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Parallels Desktop for Mac, the popular choice for virtualization on your Mac has a new beta version available for download now. Beta 2 (3084) has several changes, including partial support for USB 2.0 devices. Parallels Desktop for Mac costs $79, and the beta version is available for registered users who want to give it a try.

This new beta version builds on the functionality of the recent (3036) release, with improved and new features. USB 2.0 support is now provided for devices including hard disk drives, printers and scanners, (which work at full native speeds!). Parallels advises that “isochronous devices” like Bluetooth peripherals and webcams do not yet work, but they’re working on the issue, and we can expect that at some point soon, they will.

You can now burn CDs and DVDs directly in Parallels virtual machines, and play any copy-protected CD or DVD just as you would on a “real” PC. This is a major improvement over the existing capability of virtual optical drives.

Additionally, improvements have been made to “Coherence” mode. “Coherence” lets Parallels run Windows applications from the Mac OS X Dock, and integrates the Windows desktop into Mac OS X, blurring the line between Mac OS X and Windows. With beta 2, users can place Windows apps on the Mac desktop or in the application dock; use command+tab to cycle through Windows and Mac applications and use Coherence in either Windows XP or Windows Vista.

There’s better support for using Boot Camp partitions in Parallels Desktop, full support for both FAT32 and NTFS partitions, easier offline configuration, and other changes.

Users who continue to utilize a Boot Camp partition will also appreciate the lack of having to “re-activate” Windows each time you switch between Boot Camp and Parallels. Activate Windows only once and work in both environments.

The install guides and transporter tools continue to become improved and easier to navigate, as well as other features.

Users can appreciate the speed of development in this software, and the overall stability of Parallels in beta form. My initial testing of this beta has been promising, but I have as yet not tried any USB 2.0 devices, or disc burning.

Any MacCast readers/listeners that try the new features, please leave a comment and tell us what you think.

The download is available here.

ShapeShifer developer Jason Harris has brought together a team of Mac Cocoa programmers for a 3-day event of extreme coding with gifts for the Mac community and for charity. The web site Cocoa Dual has all the details, but in essence the participating developers, including Disco’s Austin Sarner, iClip’s John Casasanta, and VoodooPad’s Gus Mueller, had 3 days to create a holiday themed Mac application. The apps are all available for free download via links on the Cocoa Dual site. In addition, for those truly geeky Mac geeks out there, all the source code for the apps can be downloaded as well. After you download and checkout the apps, you “vote” for your favorite app by making a donation to a charity chosen by the applications developer. The Cocoa Dual web site will then keep track of which app (and charity) garners the most donations and that app will be declared the winner of the “duel”. The competition will run until Dec. 26 at midnight MST when all donations will be tallied. It’s a great idea. We all get seasonal apps from some of our favorite Mac developers and some money is raised for several deserving charities. Now, what about the developers themselves? Well, in addition to the warm feeling of doing a good deed, the developer who’s charity has received the most donations will get a small gift from the other developers in the group. So go grab a couple stocking stuffers for your hard drive and spread some holiday cheer with a donation or two. Heck, there is no rule that says you can’t make more than one donation so why not donate to them all? Happy Holidays.