Quick goodies for OS X

Well it's another week and a lot of things should happen. As for me, I am tangled up in some of the shadiest business around, and I don't know where things are going. What I am talking about? I'll explain shortly I promise.

There are some new versions of stuff you should check out. An alternative Mac OS X web browser called Camino finally released v. 1.0 rc1 (for those of you non-geeks, RC means 'release candidate'. Software development goes from Alpha to Beta versions, then to Release Candidate versions, and then final versions or Gold Masters. So RC1 means it's pretty polished). My old acquaintance Josh Aas from Macalester did some development for Camino, so I respect it all the more.

Camino is a side project of Mozilla, so it shares some code with Firefox. It is, however, specifically optimized for the Mac (and now Intel Macs) so it very good, and worth trying out.

There is always a tricky problem of playing Windows Media files on a Mac, and because of Microsoft's petulant bitchiness about how Apple is about to crush them, they quit making WMV plugins for Mac internet surfing. Fortunately a company called Flip4Mac has a free WMV player plugin that works fine.

MacUpdate.com is a good site, and they have a list of nifty new Dashboard widgets, including AirTrafficControl, a sweet Airport optimizing/snooping thing, a digital whiteboard called NoodleBoard, an SMS cellphone text messaging transmitter, Dashlicious to interact with the amazing del.icio.us social bookmark/tagging system, and why not, a molecular protein viewer called ProteinGlimpse (pictured) Keep an eye on your RNA and so forth. There's a lot more dashboard widgets to mess around with too.

At this time I must make sad mention of how dschned's excellent Apple G4 laptop was jacked when he left it behind while coaxing his dog Sam into the car. How tragic. Fortunately he had just made backups of all his old school files, photos and recent work projects the week before, so the only thing truly lost (besides the hardware) was some emails.

Over at Politics In Minnesota we have been having trouble with our email archives as well. BACK UP.