Todo is a $10 application that specializes in creating task lists on your iPod Touch or iPhone.  It’s pretty basic in use, but does allow for multiple task lists, priorities, due dates, notes and more.  You can even customize the line that crosses out a completed item.

All of that is good, but one feature took it to the next level; synchronization.  Todo will synchronize your tasks with Remember the Milk (pro account) or Toodledo (free).  This is the money feature for me.  I wanted to be able to put in tasks on a computer yet sync them to my iPod, and the other way around too.  I didn’t want my data stuck online or just on my iPod.

With Todo for $10, and a free Toodleo account, I have exactly what I’ve been looking for!

As a plus, Toodleo comes with many additional features including Twitter integration, Firefox extension, Adobe Air application, Netvibes & iGoogle widgets, Google & iCal subscriptions and so much more.

Screenshots!

I was excited to see iTunes 7.7 this morning and then TUAW tipped us off as to how to get into the App Store.

Excited to check it out, I found a few free applications and downloaded them. Nothing to exciting but the Remote application does let me control iTunes or Apple TV (if I had one) from my iPod.

I did see some nice checklist applications too, which I do want, but I’m waiting for one from Remember the Milk or some other system that can sync online.

It seems a bit empty right now, but exciting none the less!

Now, if I could only get the iPod Touch 2.0 software update so I can use the applications.

Here are a few reasons why I like Plurk better than Twitter:

1. Inline Replies - Keeping conversations together.  This really makes it feel like a community of users and not just a string posts.  In Twitter, when someone replied to a Tweet I put up yesterday, it was hard to follow the conversation.  Plurk however, keeps everything together.
2. Cliques - For sending messages to specific groups of contacts.  I can put all my Minnesota friends or work buddies in one group and send private messages just to them.
3. Built in search. - I can instantly search for other Plurk users or topics from the timeline.  With Twitter, I have to use a separate service.
4. Stars & Karma - I think these are two items that make you want to interact with the Plurk community.  The more posts you make, and the more you interact with Plurk, the more karma, and other goodies, you get.  Post way to often, not often at all, or spam people and your karma goes down.  You can also refer people to get stars on your profile.  Not killer features, but smart ones that keeps users coming back and engaged.
5. Edit Plurks - When you create a Plurk post, publish it and then realize something is wrong, you can edit or delete it.  Yea!!!
6. Friend - Fan Notifications in Plurk - Get notified of new friends or fans within the application.  You can get email alerts too, but it’s nice to see them integrated.
7. Auto Update - The Plurk timeline automatically updates with new posts or replies.  No having to refresh the website.

These are just a few reasons why I like Plurk over Twitter.  There are some downsides too though as with any application.

Since Plurk is newer, it doesn’t yet have an official API and cool desktop applications.  Plurk will get there, but they are the new kid on the block who is focusing on creating a stable application so they don’t follow in Twitter’s recent footsteps with a large amount of downtime.

I do continue to read articles on how Plurk is not as good as Twitter.  But what bugs me is I don’t think those comparing the two are really comparing apples to apples.

When comparing Plurk and Twitter, you must not include Twhirl or Twitteriffic or one one of the many other Twitter apps that were not built by Twitter.  They are third party tools that Twitter fans built.  When Plurk comes out with an official API, they too will be able to have cool third party tools built.

Then there is the timeline.  Yes, the timeline takes time, for some, use to, but it really is easy and fun.  When something new comes along, you really should learn to use it before judging it.  And for those that don’t like it, they can always switch to the mobile version of Plurk.

Plurk really is a great social community tool.  Unlike some of the others out there, it’s taking micro-blogging to the next level and fixing some of the issues that plague other offerings.

Are you on Plurk?  What do you think?

Additional Plurk Resources:

• Plurk - My profile on Plurk.
• Plurkerati - Tracking Plurkers and a nice Plurk search.
• Plurkable - Plurk news & tips.
• Plurktionary - All things Plurk.
• Plurkular - Plurk news, apps, plurkers and more.

Unfortunately the theme is Windows only. However, with a bit of investigating, I was able to extract the jar file and install it on my Mac.

The theme is pretty good. WALL•E is a bit hard to see behind the address bar and I wish the bar was semi-transparent so that he was more visible. It’s also a bit hefty at over 3MB. Other than that, it looks pretty slick and works well. Nothing to extraordinary, but fun none the less. As it makes its way to 1.0, the theme has a lot of potential to grow into something spectacular.

To get WALL•E in Firefox 2, head over to the WALL•E Addon page, log into your Addon’s account and then download. Or you can click here to link directly to the theme file. If you’re on a Mac, you’ll want to choose the direct option.

Thanks Disney for embracing Firefox themes and I hope to see more!

Ohh and If you haven’t seen the WALL•E trailers, you should treat yourself.

1. Coverflow - It’s a really sweet feature, but the album art seems to only match the song that was playing when Coverflow as activated.  It doesn’t seem to update when the song changes.  Why not?
2. Google Search - Google has a great iPhone friendly versions of Google Search, yet Safari’s built in search doesn’t use it on my iPod.  It sends you to the regular Google Search results instead, which are hard to read.
3. Background - Setting the background is great, however it’s not really the background now is it?  It’d be nice to actually set the background behind my home screen and not just on the unlock screen.  Granted, there may be a few readability issues, but I’d at least like to try.
4. Notes - In MacOSX, the notes application comes along with a to-do list.  Not on the iPod Touch though.  I’d LOVE a checklist application for shopping so I can just check things off as I get them.  Super Target doesn’t have Wi-Fi so a web application isn’t going to work.
5. Sideways - Why can’t everything go sideways?  Safari can do it, and so can music and YouTube, but not the calendar or emal or a few other applications.  When I first got my iPod, I kept turning everything only to be disappointed.  It’d be nice to at least have Mail.app work sideways as it’s much easier to type that way.
6. Shuffle - On my old iPod, I could set it to shuffle, then choose a playlist, and a song, and it’d start with that sone and shuffle everything else in the playlist; regardless of where I started.  Now, I can hit shuffle and it’ll shuffle everything in the playlist, however, if I pick a song, it will only play from that song to the end of the playlist.  No shuffling.
7. Help - There seems to be no help application on the iPod.  Yes, the iPod Touch/iPhone is extremely easy to use, but things did get moved around.  It took me weeks to figure out how to rate a song.  And double clicking on the home button is a great trick, once you figure it out.  What else am I missing?
8. Web Apps Site - Did you know that Apple has a great listing of web apps for the iPod Touch?  Did you also know that it comes automatically bookmarked on your iPod?  And that it’s not optimized for the iPod?!  Wouldn’t it be smart to create an optimized version for those trying to find new apps and browsing directly from the iPod/iPhone?

There are so may things to talk about that I just don’t have time right now to go through them all. From the revamped admin menu to the simplified post screen it’s just so much cleaner. The ability to add media such as video and audio is also a great addition. I just love this!

All my plulgins seem to be working fine, however there are some other plugins with issues. The plugin compatibility list can be seen over at wordpress.org.

So much new to play with, to bad I don’t have the time to sit an play all day.  My one tip though, after upgrading, clear your browsers cache.  That’ll help avoid any odd issues like the ‘add link’ window not opening.

Granted our seats weren’t that close, and digital zoom isn’t the best, but I was pretty happy with my pictures.  View them all.

And the concert ROCKED!  Daughtry is awesome and Bon Jovi sings non stop.  His vocal are great yet his dance moves are corny as can be.  Still, one Wild night.

I’ve finally got Ubuntu (7.10) up and running. I tried, and failed, to get it running under Paralles a while back and finally took the time to try again. This time on a Windows machine that had some extra space.

Overall the install was great, but once up and running there are a lot of items that are just to complicated. I understand that Ubuntu is a great alternative, but until it becomes more user friendly in some aspects, it’s going to be a hard sell.

First off, the install was simple. Easy and straight forward. Before to long, Ubuntu was up and running. Not as fun as installing OSX, but way better than installing XP.

The interface is clean and is a mixture of the Mac menubar and Windows task bar. It’s not overly complicated to get use to, but it does have it’s own way of doing things.

If you turn on the fancy window effects, the animations and Jello like windows are quite fun. It’s makes for some nice eye candy.

Ubuntu has all the basic applications like Firefox, Pidgen (IM), Evolution (Email) and OpenOffice (Word & Excel). It installs all the necessary applications to get most users up and running.

However, installing additional applications is to difficult. I wanted to install Firefox 3 and Prism, but once downloaded, it just showed the package contents. No application. Even when I tried to update Firefox 2 and that wasn’t an option in the browser itself.

It seems Ubuntu controls everything via an applications area and you either install or upgrade what they recommend or you have to go to the terminal and figure it out. This applications area is great for any applications in list, but if you want something that’s not in the list, you better know how to install it via the Terminal. And the terminal is uber geeky. I just gave up on installing additional apps.

I also wanted to install the Flash plugin in Firefox. Unfortunately it didn’t install through Firefox and I had to do it manually. After lots of Googling and trying to understand tutorials I finally got it installed via terminal commands and frustration. It’s actually quite simple, but no one tells you that.

How to Install Flash in Ubuntu the Easy way.

Go to Adobe.com and download the tar.gz choice. When the Ubuntu opens the tar.gz file drag the install folder to your desktop. Double click on flashplayer-install and choose run in terminal. Follow instructions.

That’s it! Now, everyone else’s way seems much more complex. But that’s my main issue with Ubuntu; it’s to geeky.

Now, I’m a geek and I’ll admit that. But having to do most everything via Terminal isn’t my thing. I will follow simple instructions, but I’d rather run an installer or copy and program to my applications folder.

I did have a lot of terminal fun though trying to get wireless internet via TrendNet’s USB adapter to work. It’s not officially supported, but through a handful of terminal commends, a lot of Googling and some swearing, it’s possible. This tutorial helped a lot to. Not as simple as it states, but maybe I screwed it up a time or two before getting it right.

Overall, Ubuntu is pretty nice. It’ll be interesting to see where they go with it and I’m just happy to try it out. It won’t be my main OS, but it’s fun to play with. Hopefully some day it’ll be a bit more user friendly for those that aren’t fond of the Terminal.

These are just my personal experiences and thoughts. This is not a professional, in depth, well tested review. Just my first thoughts. If I’m missing some importing things, do share in the comments below.

I was excited about Mozilla’s Prism application when it first arrived on the scene. But then Fluid came out and I realized how un-polished Prism was.  However, Prism 0.9 is quite a large step forward.

What’s new in Prism 0.9?

The big thing is that it’s based off of Firefox 3.   It’s got the speed and upgrades that the Firefox 3 betas have.  Also us Mac users now get native widgets!  It’s no longer got ugly checkboxes and drop downs.

The Firefox 3 rendering engine alone makes it feel much snappier and more responsive than the first Prism 0.7 release.

The file size has also been cut cut down a bit too. Prism went from 43 Mb to 30 Mb.  It’s still hefty, but smaller.  Each individual site is only a few hundred KB though so that’s good.

Another notable update is the ability to add custom icons.  By default it’ll grab the site’s favicon, or you can select your own image.  These can look much nicer than the old globes.  Hint: Head over to the Fluid Flickr group to grab some great icons to use with Prism.

There is also a Firefox 3 extension.  This will be handy once Firefox 3 goes live as it’ll give users easy access to creating Prism desktop applications.

You can now run multiple Prism programs at once too. There were conflicts before, but now each application is independent and you can run Google Calendar and Gmail at the same time in two Prism applications.  You can even run one Google account in one Prism application, and a separate one in the next.  This is very handy if you have more than one account for any online service.  I tested it with two Gmail accounts and it worked perfectly!

So what’s missing?

From what I can see, the only thing that bugs me is no keyboard shortcuts.  I’m so use to using a shortcut key for back in Firefox, that I use it all the time in Prism.  When Prism doesn’t go back, I get annoyed.

Overall Prism 0.9 is a great update and if this is any insight into what is to come, I can’t wait for Prism 1.0!

Here are the top 5 reasons why I dropped Entourage 2008.

1. No Hyperlink Support - You can’t link a few words in emails. This was one that really gets me. I’m always linking phrases to tutorials or additional resources so that people know what I’m talking about.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: This function is not available.
2. No Table Support - Entourage 2008 can read tables, but as soon as you hit reply, the table disappears and you are left with a mess of text. I get a lot of messages with tables in them (copied from Excel and pasted into Outlook) and so I do need to keep the formatting.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: Entourage can *display* complex HTML such as tables but it can not *compose* messages with HTML. That’s why when you reply the formatted is gone.
3. No Strikethrough support. - Another basic HTML item that is just not available. You can’t strikeout any text and Entourage can’t read it. When someone sends me a quick update to a webpage, if I can’t see what they want me to remove, I can’t do my job.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: Neither bugs nor features. Entourage is simply working as it was designed to work. Its HTML capabilities are limited. Strike-through is not one of its supported text styles.
4. Calendar Syncing is OK - I often had conflicts when I had Entourage automatically syncing to iCal. I’d open up iCal and it’d ask me which even was right; the one in iCal or Entourage? Then, trying to update my Google calendar online was another issue in itself.
5. Not so friendly help. - There is a good community of Microsoft Mac MVPs (MVPs are not Microsoft Employees) over at the official Microsoft site (also syndicated via Google Groups) and their answers are sometimes not so friendly. It made me feel bad just to ask questions.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer:
   (on the subject of inserting links into emails)
   Plain text is the preferred method for emails by people who know the internet. It is efficient, safe, virus-free, will be readable by any mail client at the other end, doesn’t impose your font, size, style preferences on others, and has far smaller risk of being filtered out by spam filters.

   HTML email is dangerous because it may contain links to external sites that will do malicious things. For instance, a spammer can include a link to an image, but this link contains a tag as data. The server at the other end will get that request when your *read your email* and based on the tag, will be able to confirm that you’ve read the email and not only flag your email address as active/good, but also use your IP with geolocation servers to assign a location code so that they can then sell your email address to other spammers along with your general location. If everyone stopped sending HTML emails, everyone would block it, and then spammers would be left with very few means to escape spam filters because their messages would have to b simple and without tricks.

   HTML email is wasteful, dangerous, and rude, IMO. It’s just plain evil.

Overall, Entourage 2008 is a decent application. But it’s missing so many small items that eventually, I just got frustrated and moved back to Thunderbird.

Entourage was unable to perform in a business environment for me. If your company never sends, or receives, HTML in emails, than it might work out OK for you. However, I strongly suggest checking out Thunderbird. It is an excellent email application and I’m very happy to be using it again!

Things I love:

• Projects - Projects are cool in the fact that I can group emails together, file them away, yet have easy access to them. I need to dig into this more and use it.
• Full Calendar Support - No more Outlook meeting request issues or confusion. This was a big factor in changing to Entourage at work.
• Notes & Checklist built in. Handy.
• Mac look and feel. I do think it looks pretty.
• Little Growl like email and calendar notifications.
• The day planner window is nice. Kind of in the way, but you get use to it.
• It auto corrects some of my spelling mistakes. That’s quite handy.
• It saves folders as mbox files which makes easy import/export with Mail.app or Thunderbird. Moving everything over was slick. Moving back would be just as easy.
• It links emails replies to the orgional message so I don’t have to go search for them if I want to know what I said.

Things that make me go What the @+#!

• No ability to add clickable links on text to an email message. You can’t highlight any text and and a link to it. You can only drop in a URL and let the other email client automatically link it. This is really bugging me. See the heated discussion.
• When I get links in emails Entourage often picks up the next word in the sentence so I have to manually edit quite a few links I click on.
  Example: http://www.apple.comApple
• Calendar syncing to iCal works great, but Entourage’s calendar files contain information that iCal or Google Calendar doesn’t understand. They then cause issues if trying to export from iCal and import into anything else. Or, I get sync issues and end up loosing half my dates. If there are event sync issues, never fix all of them at once. Do it one by one.
• Syncing up with Google is another issue in itself.
• No way to delete people from the ‘collected address’. Entourage adds everyone you ever emailed, or got email from, to some ‘collected address’ address book and doesn’t allow you to delete them.
• If I have text selected when I hit reply, it only puts that selected text as the quoted message. Personally, I want the entire message every time. At least Apple Mail has a checkbox where I can enable that functionality.
• No grammar check. I really thought I’d have this as I thought Entourage an Word were like BFFs.
• When importing email, it auto accepted all my old meeting requests and then notified me. Not a huge deal I guess, but annoying none the less.

Overall, Entourage 2008 isn’t horrible, but it isn’t fantastic. It’s not Outlook for the Mac, but it’s closer than anything else. For every positive there is a flaw and if there were any other solution that worked flawlessly with Outlook calendar notifications, I’d consider switching away. Ok, I’ll admit, 10.5’s Mail.app is pretty good, but I don’t have 10.5 at work.

Background. This is my first experience with Entourage. I recently used Apple Mail and then Thunderbird 2. My computer is a MacBook Pro with 10.4.x on it.

In my daily use, I’ve tried many extensions and uninstalled most. However, here are 8 that I love:

• Lightning - Having a calendar right in your email client makes it easy to see your schedule and what you’ve got to get done. Plus it brings along the ability to accept Outlook meeting requests which is needed in a corporate environment.
• Provider - What’s better than a calendar? Well a calendar that synchronizes back and fourth with Google Calendar. And for free!
• QuickText - This little buddy saves chunks of text like bookmarks. You then choose the bookmark and it inserts the text to go along with it in your email. Works great for any repetitive items that you find yourself typing over and over again.
• Growl Notifications (Mac) - Get notified of new mail messages without bring Thunderbird to the front. Windows has its own notifications, but Mac users were left out until now.
• GMailUI - This handy extension takes searching your inbox to the next level by allowing expressions to work with searches. Take the 5 minutes to learn it and you’ll love it.
• Nostalgy - Another brilliant extension that makes filing emails, or navigating to other folders, a snap via a shortcut and a quick search. Huge time saver.
• Mail Redirect - Just because the email came to you, doesn’t mean you are the best recipient. Forward emails as though they were specifically sent to someone else. This is handy for me as I build a lot of forms, and sometimes forget to update the ‘to’ email when they go live.
• AttachmentReminder - This handy extension reads the email you’re composing and reminds you if you said you were going to send an attachment, but didn’t attach anything. Very handy!

Yes, there are lots of other extensions out there, but not many that I’ve come across that really bring additional functionally and usefulness to Thunderbird.

Do you have others that you find quite helpful? Post them below in the comments as I’d love to check them out!

New features include:

1. Email client. Fully functional email that’s amazing.
2. Weather app. I love the weather, so this is like candy to me.
3. Notes. I’ve been using address book for taking notes, not so much anymore. I wish I could do check boxes though too.
4. Stocks - Not my cup of tea, but I got it.
5. Google Maps - Not only do they look great, but I can get three types of maps (line, satellite, hybrid), traffic conditions, directions and I can search for business on the map. It’ll tell me where all Targets are for example. It even has the ability to figure out where I am based on my internet connection. Doesn’t work at home, but I’m going to try it everywhere.
6. Web clips. Creating a quick shortcut to Gmail on my iPod Touches home screen is simple as pie. It’s a great way to add even more ‘virtual’ applications.
7. Multiple home screens. Just like the weather, I can flip through home screen after home screen.
8. Customizable home screens. Press, hold and it all starts to wiggle. Then I can move icons around all I want. I’ve already done this a few times.

Here is my short iPod Touch Wiggle movie.*

I do have to say that I’m very impressed with the $20 upgrade. In my mind, it’s better than coming out with new features that are only available on new iPods. Lets just hope that Apple continues to let iPod Touch owners get more software updates like this in the future.

*If anyone has tips on getting better image/video captures from iSight, let me know.

When I wrote about Mozilla’s Prism project a while ago, I was very excited for the possibility of bring web applications to the desktop. Since then, a new project called Fluid has popped up. It’s the same ideas as Prism, however is Mac only.

Fluid is a small application that is used to create stand alone applications for web apps. Think of going into your applications folder and seeing Facebook or MySpace. In the end, they are individual web browsers that are created specifically for one website.

Fluid is moving a quite a fast pace and coming up with a lot of nice features. One cool feature that Prism lacks is custom dock icons. Fluid lets you choose an icon for your application, or, if you don’t have an icon to use, it’ll automatically pull the site’s favicon.

Fluid is also starting to tie directly into websites. Facebook, Gmail and Yahoo mail applications all come with un-read message count badges in the dock just like Apple’s mail.

The biggest downside to Fluid is that it only works on Mac OS 10.5. The main application, and mini applications it creates, don’t work under 10.4. This is the only area I see Prism winning. Neither project works under 10.3 either, even though Prism claims it does.

If you are on Windows or Linux, then Prism is a great project to watch grow. If you are on a Mac, Fluid is a great contender. It’s actively being built with new features and updates every week or so.

One thing to keep in mind here is that neither application is complete. Both are still under development and features will continue to change as they grow.

Prism is basically a version of Firefox with no address bar, no icons, no bookmarks, nothing. It’s just a browser that loads one pre-defined bookmark at a time. It sounds a little weird, but it’s really useful.

When you start up Prism, it asks you for a URL, a name, a few options and where you want to save your shortcut. Then, when you open the shortcut, it loads the website in the Prism browser and you get a clutter free, simple, web application that runs off the power of Firefox.

Prism is cool because it creates a shortcut (or bookmark) that you can add to your applications folder. Then, when you open it, your web application just appears.

The beauty of this is how easy it is to create mini applications for those with less than great organizational skills.

Imagine this, you setup a Google Calendar account for you and your friends to share. However, they never remember how to get there, the login or what’s going on. So, just create a Prism shortcut for them and tell them to open the calendar application from their computer.

Maybe you created a cool ZoHo database application but someone always forgets the URL. Just create a Prism shortcut.

You can also setup a Prism shortcut to go straight to the admin area of a blog. That way a user never has to search for the login link again, they’ve just got to double click on the blog admin application on their computer.

Sure, you’d think that bookmarks in your browser do the same thing, but there are so many people that have no idea how to organize or search their bookmarks. They either don’t bookmark anything, or they bookmark everything and can’t find anything. However, they can always find their applications folder so putting a shortcut in there would be much easier for them.

I use it to keep my Google Accounts separate. I have one I use for Gmail, one I use for branded Google Docs and a third for a shared Google Analytics account. Firefox can’t keep all three accounts separate without logging in and out, but between Prism and Firefox, I have everything under control and easily accessible. Plus, with the shortcuts in my applications folder, my built in search (Quicksliver) pulls them up quickly.

There are a few downsides though. Like all Mozilla applications, it proves to be a bit large at 43.2 MB. I have a feeling that inside Prism is a bunch of theme files and a lot of other useless junk left over from Firefox.

Also, the shortcuts have less than desirable icons. The Prism application has a fantastic icon, but the shortcuts have the standard Mozilla globe. It’s not ugly, but doesn’t go with the Prism theme.

Prism is really pretty cool. Simple idea, but quite handy. Especially for non-techie folks who can’t keep their bookmarks organized. This proves to be a simple and effective way to ensure they have the right URL every time.

As a side note, Fluid just came out. It’s like Mozilla’s Prism but made just for Mac. It looks a bit nicer, but I’m just starting to try it out.

Hulu has a clean interface and is user friendly. It’s not over done with ads or extra stuff. It’s been streamlined and the only thing that could make it better is if the site was created with a black background and not white. That’d make the shows look so much nicer.

Hulu has a great selection of current & old TV shows, show clips, plus movies. Here are just a few of the shows available:

• The Office
• Simpsons
• Family Guy
• A-Team
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer
• Arrested Development
• Doogie Howser, M.D.
• Alfred Hitchcock Presents
• WKRP in Cincinnati
• Monk
• Dr. Steve-O
• Keeping Up with The Kardashians
• Weekend at Bernie’s
• Bulworth
• Andy Barker P.I.
• So You Think You Can Dance
• ‘Til Death
• Scrubs
• Bones
• My Name is Earl
• And many more.

The playback seems to work well on the older Windows 2000 machine we use to stream the shows to our TV. The quality is good also. That is, compared to other streaming TV channels like ABC or the CW. It’s even getting HD quality content which will be even better.

Some Hulu features include:

• Share - Send an email to your friends about a certain show or clip.
• Embed - Put the show on your site.
• Details - What am I watching and when did it air?
• Feedback - Video issues? Report them.
• Fullscreen Playback
• Pop Out Window Playback
• Lower Lights - Makes the site background light gray instead of white.
• Rate - Rate the episode.
• Playlists - Keep track of what you watched. Even comes with RSS feeds and privacy settings.

The commercials are done right too. There are a few 30 second commercials every so often. Just like regular TV, only one, not 5 commercials at a time. Some advertisers are creating interactive and entertaining ads, others are just playing the same boring commercial over and over again.

Hulu is going to be a big hit. It has variety in shows, good playback quality, a user friendly interface and it’s free; well once you get invited.

We’ve been enjoying Hulu for a while now at our house and thank the networks for getting together and creating a great online TV solution!

The Install DMG still doesn’t include an alias to the Mac Applications folder. Come on Mozilla, get this one working please.

Once installed, the new Mac theme doesn’t take effect. You actually have to go download it. But once installed, it looks very nice. (Not sure about the Windows one.)

Bookmarks are integrated better. Simply star a page and it’s added, click the star again to rename it, add tags, put it in a folder or delete it.

More robust bookmarks management that includes import, export and revert options.

New places feature shows up. This is like smart folders or saved searches.

Click on a Favicon in the address bar and you’ll get site information that is usually unknown from a few of my tests. I tested apple.com, techcrunch.com and nytimes.com and all ended up unknown.

There is a new applications area in the preferences to help control how other applications interact with Firefox 3.

As promised, full Aqua widgets for Mac users. And they do look really nice.

When Firefox asks you to save a username and password, a nice browser bar shows up and doesn’t prompt you with a pop-up window

New icon to represent Plugins.

Updated download window with search box and info icons.

Firefox 3 beta 1 is also slightly lighter than Firefox 2.0.x on the Mac. The application is 45Mb as compared to 47.8. Hopefully Mozilla can continue to make it smaller; much smaller.

I’m sure there are other features that I’ve yet to come across. However, Firefox 3 is on it’s way and it’s looking like a nice upgrade.

Have you taken Firefox 3 for a spin? What have you found?

Mario is back in all his glory. The worlds are amazing. You are on round levels that you can literally run all the way around. Fall in a hole and you’ll pop out the other side. Bridges are not always straight across, sometimes they curve around to the underside of the level. Mario walks up, down, left, right and all over the place. Some areas you just feel as if you make one wrong step, you’ll fall into space. However, you merely walk onto the side of the object and it’s very cool!

Another cool thing is that Super Mario Galaxy is not just one player. A friend can help you pick up star pieces and shoot enemies. One Mario, but to people working together to keep him alive. It’s like a 1.5 player game.

Our 90 minutes went very fast. However, we got three stars and about 25 lives. It’s nice to see that getting more lives is easy. Even when you do run out, you just start back up at the beginning of the level.

Now I just have to convince my wife to let us play it all weekend. Or may be call in sick. *cough* *cough*

This is one of the best Wii games we’ve played and if you love the other Mario games, you’ll love Super Mario Galaxy!

Smarter Renaming of Files

When changing a file name in Leopard, the OS selects just the file name and not the extension. Vary handy for those that want to keep the extension intact.

Spotlight Selects The Top Hit

In 10.4 Spotlight would suggest search results and then default to Show All. In 10.5, Spotlight by default selects the Top Hit. This is a very welcome feature and, with the new Spotlight search speed, I haven’t had to launch Quicksilver.

Spotlight Dictionary

Spotlight not only does math, but it also defines words. Put in any word and one of the results will be the definition as found in Apple’s Dictionary application.

New Screen Savers & iTunes Visualizers

Apple has a knack of creating cool screen savers and visualizers and have added some new offerings in 10.5. Shell and Arabesque make up the new screen savers and fit in nicely with Flurry. Lathe, Jelly (shown below) and Sitx make up the new iTunes visualizers.

Lots Of New Icons

We all know that the system preferences and folders were re-worked for Leopard, but so were a lot of other icons. Images have a nice white border around them, HTML files happen to be black and text files have a cleaner look to them also.

Expose and Spaces Applications

Spaces and Expose are features built into OSX and, in the past, features didn’t have a dock icon for the most part. Now they do. Just click on the icons to invoke the features. It actually quite handy as you don’t need to remember yet another keyboard shortcut.

Sure, the features I mentioned above are smaller ones, but it’s those smaller ones that you’ll interact with on a daily basis. I do have Time Machine but have yet to start it up as I don’t have an external drive. The updated Spotlight functionality has already come in quite handy.

What cool little Leopard features have you found?

I love the new dock and the rounded corners on the menus. Small things I know, but Apple is known for the small details.

Safari 3 also rocks along with the folder quick view and stacks. I have a lot more features to go check out so I’m going to go play.