For the longest time, I have wanted to hook up 2 displays to my Mac Laptop. Thanks to Matrox and their New DualHead2Go and Triplehead2Go, my dream can come true. The DualHead2Go and the Triplehead2Go are both palm sized boxes that hook up to your MacBook or your MacBook Pro’s DVI output and from there you can output to 2 displays. Caroline Injoyan, business development manager for Matrox Graphics Inc. said “Now Mac users can finally benefit from Matrox’s multi-monitor expertise, traditionally reserved for PC environments, by simply incorporating a GXM into their system setup.” The TripleHead2Go makes it so that your laptop has 3 screens (including the one on the laptop), and the DualHead2Go makes it so that your laptop can output to 2 displays (both external). They support resolutions of up to 3849×1024¹ and 2560×1024¹ respectively. The DualHead2Go costs $169 (USD) and the TripleHead2Go costs $299 (USD) from http://shopmatrox.com. Sorry iBook and PowerBook owners, but both the DualHead2Go and the TripleHead2Go are for Intel Macs only.

¹ Note that the maximum resolution that is supported is system dependent. Please see website for details.

Over the years Ambrosia Software has made a number of great games (and utilities) for the Macintosh and the company has done it again with its latest creation Sketchfighter 4000. Ambrosia describes the program this way:

Remember those super-cool space ships you doodled on graph paper in Middle School? Pen strokes furiously waging massive intergalactic battles in History class with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance? Well they have sprung to life in SketchFighter 4000 Alpha!

I know the sketches they are talking about although in my case I drew them on a chalk board and not in my school binder. It is magical to see these sketches come to life. I love the look of the program. I love that when you destroy an enemy it leaves a smudge on the screen as if you had erased the drawing incompletely. I have not mastered the game yet, but look forward to trying.

Seems like the best way to get publicity (and hits) for your web site these days is to report on a highly questionable story with no supporting evidence or facts, tack on a Digg worthy headline about Apple selling porn to minors and sit back as the swarm attacks the honey pot. The original report appears on The Consumerist, a consumer watch dog blog, and as of this writing the 2 sentence post titled, “Apple Sells “Refreshed” Laptop Filled With Porn To 11 Year Old Girl” has garnered close to 1300 Diggs and is rising fast. Now to be fair the post does also include a transcript of a chat with a friend of the owner of the new, porn laden, MacBook. In the transcript the friend says the laptop was sold with a “desktop full of JPGs” containing porn. Later in the same chat though, he admits that he doesn’t know how much porn, what type of porn and there is no evidence of the porn as the owner already restored the machine from the original system DVD. Now of course this is hardly definitive evidence that the story isn’t true, but come on. True or not, my point is not many Diggers will even bother to read that far into the story. Heck, I doubt they even click anything other the “Digg it” link.

Refreshed or Refurbished

Now another problem with this story is that while the headline on the Consumerist website clearly states it was a “refreshed” MacBook, most blogs picking up the story are reporting it as a “refurbished” model. The semantics are subtle but there is a big difference.
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I’m sorry, but this is going to be a bit of a rant…here goes.

Today’s article in the Financial Times titled Studios push anti-piracy rules on Apple reports that the studios are pushing for tighter copy-controls on Apple’s iTunes movie distributions. They write:

After months of discussion, a sticking point has emerged over the studios’ demand that Apple limit the number of devices that can use a film downloaded from iTunes.

And in the very next paragraph, FT.com states that the studios want to avoid piracy—demanding that Apple introduce a new distribution model for movies.
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Much has been made of the delays in getting Adobe’s mission critical pro apps, including Photoshop, onto the Intel platform, a gating item for many PowerPC Mac users considering the move to Intel. The other software category experiencing major delays for MacIntel ports, perhaps slightly less mainstream, is that of audio plug-ins and software synthesizers.

Audio plug-ins are programs that run inside a host program, such as Logic or Garageband, and in many cases in “standalone mode” as well. Without major contortions, it’s fairly impractical to run PPC plug-ins inside an Intel-based host program and nearly impossible to run both PPC and Intel plug-ins in the same host at the same time (see this discussion thread on BigBlueLounge for a workaround that involves some third-party software). Plug-ins typically generate audio (by making sounds), transform audio (e.g., by adding delay or compression), or both, and represent a substantial after-market for the big audio programs
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Some tasks like getting a man to the moon are complicated and the systems needed to accomplish them are complicated. But some things, like keeping track of the things you need to do, are not complicated and the software you need to manage them should also be uncomplicated. ToDo from Omicron Software Systems is just that kind of software, uncomplicated.
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Econ Technologies has released an update to version 2.2.1 of Portraits & Prints. The Portraits & Prints application allows you to use your digital photos to create personal calendars and cards. Over 50 free new templates are included in the update. There are new templates for Christmas, New Year, Calendars and Wanted Posters. There are over a hundred holiday templates available. You can download and install additional templates using the Portraits & Prints Template Manager.

Portraits & Prints will run natively on PowerPC (G3, G4, G5) and Intel-Macs running Panther or Tiger.

Existing users may update to the 2.2.1 version for free.

If you’d like to try Portraits & Prints for free for the rest of the year, request a full- functioning trial version from http://www.econtechnologies.com/site/Pages/Support/support_question.html.

The Portraits & Prints Standard Edition can be purchased for USD$30. The Portraits & Prints Pro Edition is priced at USD$50. A free demo version of the application is available if you’d like to try it out. Visit the Econ Technologies website (www.econtechnologies.com) to upgrade, purchase or download a free demo of the application.

If you are in the US and were watching television last night, you might have been pleasantly surprised to see a new Apple commercial. This new one was for the iPod shuffle, which showed how amazingly small it actually is. The ad gets away from the previous iPod silhouette spots, and instead has a series of people clipping the 2G shuffle to their clothes. The transition effect between each person is neat—all you can see is the torso of each person, and a new one is introduced by removing or adding clothes (don’t worry, it’s G-rated) and then clipping on the new shuffle.

You can see the ad now on Apple’s website here.

MacHeist is a great new web site by the same folks who brought us MyDreamApp. It offers a unique way discover some of the great Mac software developers that are out there and an opportunity to get some of their great applications for free (well, if you are willing to do a bit of detective work). The concept behind MacHeist is that each week members are given a “heist” to pull off. These heists are like little scavenger hunts that take place on the Web and via email. The reward for successful completion of a heist is access to a vault full of great new Mac applications (downloads complete with registration codes). These heists have elaborate story lines and are cleverly constructed. You send emails to bots who respond with more clues (assuming you can formulate the right message), try to solve puzzles, break into secret web sites and attempt to uncover hidden documents and files. The MacHeist team has done a great job producing the phony, but realistic, web sites and has partnered with legit sources like MacRumors to tie it all together and add an air of authenticity. If you enjoy elaborate puzzle style games like Myst you are going to like MacHeist.
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One of the programs that I keep on my doc that is very helpful in updating my blog and my podcast with pictures is a simple and free program called ImageWell from Xtralean Software. ImageWell is a simple image editor that lets you resize, annotate, edit, resize and publish images.

Simply drag an image onto the ImageWell icon and it will open up the program’s small main window. This window let’s you rename, resize and publish an image. Images can be published to a folder or a web site. To publish to a web site the web site needs to support FTP or WebDav (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) formats. ImageWell can also publish the image to your .Mac account. When you send the image to your web site the HTML to display that image is added to the clipboard:

<img src="http://chris2x.com/wp-content/test.jpg" width="320" height="240"/>
You can go and paste that code into your blog or other HTML document. If you are adding this picture to a discussion board instead, you can also configure the program to send the bbcode style syntax used by many discussion boards (such as the MacCast forum):

[img]http://chris2x.com/wp-content/test.jpg[/img]

ImageWell will also allow you to edit the image before publishing. You can crop, add text, add comic strip style caption balloons, add arrows or annotations.

ImageWell can also rotate, add shape masks like a heart (not quite as useful for your blog unless you are a 14 year old girl) and/or add a watermark.

ImageWell is not PhotoShop and will not replace it for general purpose photo editing but when you want to quickly publish a photo to your web site and reference it from an HTML document or a discussion board few programs will compete with the ease of use of ImageWell.