Not content with simply taking high-resolution satellite photos of every last square inch of the planet, Google has just released a new version of their popular Google Earth software with a stunning new feature: Sky.

Google Sky is a photographic record of the heavens, annotated with astronomical data. You can zoom and pan and spin through the night sky, seeing it from any point on Earth you choose. It’s impressive already, and I can only assume there’s more to come in future revisions. Download the newest version of Google Earth and check it out.

Continuing with my new Mac Apps series will be today’s quick look at one of the coolest and oft-used programs in the Mac universe: Adium.

Most Mac-heads probably already know about Adium, but a lot of casual users seem to miss this train, much to their detriment. Adium is a multi-protocol instant messaging client. That means it can simultaneously sign on to AIM,Yahoo!IM, GTalk, ICQ, MSN, and pretty much any IM network you can throw at it. It integrates everything into a single buddy list, allows your status setting to span all your accounts (you only have to set one away message), and generally just makes it really easy to handle one account or ten.

So far, so good…but at this point nothing really is setting Adium apart from other multi-network clients, right? Well, this is where the user interface sets it leagues apart from any competitors. Adium is, arguably, one of the most customizable apps you’ll ever run across. There are thousands of contact list themes, chat window themes, status icons, sounds, and more available on the Adium Xtras web site, and you can easily create your own themes just by playing with color and transparency sliders in the Preferences pane. It’s really easy. You can make your buddy list partially transparent, as I like to do, and keep it unobtrusively locked to a corner of your screen. This keeps it readily available but out of the way. You can specify text color, highlight color, whether or not to display the service icons, whether or not to show the status message of your buddies under their names, window shape, transparency…the list goes on and on.

Functionality-wise, Adium has some very convenient features. The log viewer is the best I’ve ever used. If you activate logging of all your chats, the instant Spotlight/iTunes-style search can filter through the thousands of conversations in a split second to find the one you’re looking for. The chat windows themselves are tabbed, so you can easily keep all your active conversations organized. File transfers work very smoothly with the latest version. Notifications can be customized to your heart’s content — every event (contact signs off, contact initiates conversation, incoming file transfer, message received in background, etc) can be set to play a sound, bounce the dock icon, display a Growl notification (more on that in a later post), display an alert, send another message back, run an AppleScript, or any combination thereof. It’s really quite flexible. The one thing you can’t do with Adium — and any non-native client — is voice and video chat. But, as I always say, that’s what Skype is for, because it does a better job with voice and video calls than AIM or any of those other guys.

If you’re on a Mac and you haven’t tried Adium, go download it now. Start playing with the customization options. If you use IM regularly, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Welcome to a new tag on RogersMJ.com…”Mac Apps.” For some reason or another, I’ve avoided posting much about my experiences using Macs and my discovery of cool software and tricks over the last 11 months, but the initial reasons escape me now. Aside from being really slick computers with a really slick OS, there is a huge abundance of awesome applications out there for the Mac…for some reason, I seem to have discovered a lot more high-quality apps for Mac OS X in less than a year than I did for Windows in nearly 15 years. Maybe it’s the focus on cohesive, intuitive user interfaces that really grabs me…after all, I’m a UI designer by nature. At any rate, I’ve found so many cool applications that I decided I need to share them. And if you don’t have a Mac to use these on…consider getting one. They’re more affordable than ever, and you can now run Windows on them too in case you can’t cut the cord cold-turkey.

To kick off Mac Apps, I’m starting with one that helps you manage all your other apps. It’s called AppFresh and, like many of the applications I’ll be focusing on, it’s completely free.

AppFresh scans your Applications folder (which, for the uninitiated, is typically where your put all of your programs on the Mac) and then goes out onto the Intertubes and checks for new versions of every application, plugin, dashboard widget, and preference pane you have installed. Now of course, like Windows’ Automatic Update, Mac OS X has a built-in Software Update as well…but that only handles Apple stuff, like the iLife (iTunes, iPhoto, etc) apps and OS X itself, just like Windows Update only updates Windows itself. AppFresh handles everything else. When you get upwards of 50 or 100 applications installed on your computer, this is very handy. Many of these apps will check for updates on their own when you run them, but then that takes time and resources at the moment when, ideally, I just want to use the app. AppFresh does it all at once. It’s amazingly efficient, only occasionally presenting you with a web page for the application, asking you to click the download link if it can’t find it on its own. Other than that, everything is done automatically. I’m usually fairly good at keeping my stuff up to date, but even so when I ran AppFresh for the first time on my work-issued PowerBook it found about 20 things that had new versions out, full of bug fixes and new features that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of.

One thing you have to watch out for is that it will pick up new versions of software that you will eventually have to buy, not just incremental free updates. For example, I have Adobe Illustrator CS2 on my PowerBook. AppFresh detected that Adobe Illustrator CS3 is available and offered to download and install it for me. That, however, would be a time-limited demo and would cost several hundred dollars to purchase once the demo expired. Luckily, with a single command you can tell AppFresh to ignore certain applications, so when I run it in the future it will no longer present me with Illustrator CS3. Very neat.

If you’ve got a Mac, give AppFresh a try. After all, it’s free. Granted, it’s not the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s very useful and well-executed. If you don’t have a Mac…well, this just the beginning of my attempt to bring you over to the light side.

Because using Google Maps and Google Earth to peer into your neighbor’s back yard and look for naked sunbathers just wasn’t fun enough, the search giant has now rolled out a new feature in Maps for select markets called Street View. Currently best demonstrated in — where else — New York City, Street View does exactly what it sounds like: you pick a point on the map, and you get a 360-degree view of what the world looks like for realz right down there on the sidewalk. Or in some cases, right in the middle of oncoming traffic (which makes you wonder how they captured the photos).

Is anyone else getting scared? If not, then check out the helpful demo video, with the super-dorky guy in the way-too-tight orange spandex suit. Hey, at least they have a sense of humor while they’re taking over the world.

UPDATE: The first time I submitted this story to Digg.com, it got censored too, even though it does not contain the key anywhere in it!!!

Some of you may know I frequent the popular social news web site Digg.com. On Digg, users submit stores they find from around the web and other users “digg” (vote) those stories.

Yesterday, a string of letters and numbers that completely unlock the new encryption system being used on HD-DVDs (that’s High Definition DVDs) started circulating on the Internet. The MPAA, of course, which is perhaps the only organization that gets more excited about robbing people of their fair-use rights than the RIAA, does not want that key out and about, or people might actually be able to (gasp) backup their movies. So they started issuing cease-and-desist orders to any web site that had the key posted, and most complied.

The real backlash, however, came when Digg started removing story submissions that contained the key. If you’re not a member of Digg, you need to understand that one of the holy principles of the community is that it is governed by the community. Good stories make it to the front page; bad stories get buried. When Digg bent over for the MPAA and immediately started removing stories, the community responded…with unprecedented force.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have 5 additional invites showing in My Joost right now, although this article suggests existing users actually have unlimited invites available. See my last post about Joost for details. Post here in the comments if you want an invite!

Most of the 200 or so planets discovered outside our solar system have been huge gas giants, which are of course incapable of supporting life. But this new planet, about 1.5 times the diameter and 5 times the mass of Earth, is “either rocky, like our Earth, or covered with oceans.” So in other words, it’s a lot like our Earth now, or it might be like Kevin Costner’s Earth in Water World. Together with the water, the planet’s range from its star (Gliese 581, part of the constellation Libra) puts it in a position to support life — surface temperatures are estimated to be between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius (that’s 32 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit, for the metrically challenged), extraordinarily similar to our own humble spot in the universe.

At “only” 20.5 light-years (or 123 trillion miles) away, it’s almost in the neighborhood, relatively speaking. Keep in mind our galaxy alone is 100,000 light years across, and is only one of millions. In the realm of the known universe, this new Earth-like planet is like a neighbor who lives across the street. If we’ve already found a planet that might be capable of supporting life in the 0.000000001% (if even that) of the universe within a 25 light-year radius of us, imagine what else must be out there.

Source: CNN.

After being a member of the Joost beta test for a couple of weeks, they have graced me with three invitations to hand out to friends.

For those of you not aware, Joost is a free internet TV service. It is the beginning of what many of us have hoped for throughout the years: truly on-demand TV. There’s a list of channels, you click on a channel, and then you click on the show you want to watch. It starts when you want it, whenever you want it. There’s already a significant number of channels available, from Comedy Central to National Geographic to MTV. While you won’t find every show from those channels’ regular lineups on Joost just yet, there’s good stuff on there now and the content is growing every week.

If you’re interested, just post a comment here (don’t post your email address in the main comment body so the world can see it — just fill out the comment form correctly or register and I’ll get it from my database). First three to reply get invites!

Update: all invites have been handed out.

Do you frequently use more than one computer? Do you have a desktop and a laptop, or do you use a computer at work in addition to your computer at home? If so, you’ve probably had those frustrating moments of “Where the heck is that one web site? Oh, damn, I bookmarked it on the other computer…” There are a few solutions to this problem, not the least of which is social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. However, probably the simplest one, in that it requires no modification of your existing bookmarks or any sort of tagging scheme, is FoxMarks.

Assuming you use FireFox (and if you don’t, maybe FoxMarks will inspire you to start), FoxMarks can keep your bookmarks synced across computers just by installing a simple FireFox extension. You create a FoxMarks account, enter that information into the FoxMarks extension on your computer, and you’re on your way. The program can be set up to sync every time you close the browser, so that if you are at work and add a bookmark, it will by synced up to the FoxMarks server when you close FireFox before heading home.

As an added bonus, you can log into the FoxMarks web site from anywhere, with any browser, and have your bookmarks made available to you in a side frame without installing anything. I’ve already used this feature many times when I’m on a friend’s computer and need to find a site I bookmarked. Just be aware that by doing this, your bookmarks are residing on a server somewhere. Although they are protected with your password, just be aware of that if you consider your bookmarks a privacy risk (although I don’t know why that would be).

If you’re looking for a simple way to have access to your bookmarks from anywhere, check out FoxMarks!

Expanding on some of the consistency issues I mentioned in my previous post about my experiences using Windows Vista, I feel the need to share this wonderful image I stumbled upon. Someone took a few moments to compile screenshots and label the gross inconsistency with which various types of Vista interfaces are presented. This is why I feel frustrated and have a headache after using Vista for a little while — because it’s all different and everything’s always in a different place. Talk about poor interface design. This is why I cringe whenever I hear someone talk about how “cool” Vista’s interface is…I bet those same people go “ooh! shiny!” and will stare at an SUV’s spinners for half an hour.