At first I was amazed and awed by Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. When it was first introduced back in 2004 it was very fast and pretty powerful. But after five years of using Firefox, it became old. It was getting bogged down and it frankly wasn’t as fast as Safari or Chrome in my experience.

Firefox 4 brings a lot of great new stuff to the table. It’s incredibly quick, due to new accelerated hardware support and the UI has been polished and simplified. It also comes with support for HTML5/WebM video. Allowing you to enjoy  open HD quality video natively inside of Firefox. Improved crash protection also protects you from misbehaving plugins that usually crash the whole app, now only the plugin is affected, leaving you other work intact.

Other new features include:

• WebGL – web standard that provides a 3D graphics API implemented in a web browser without the use of plug-ins
• WebSockets - a technology providing for bi-directional, full-duplex communications channels (Makes page loading faster)
• Web Console –  web-based application that allows remote users to execute UNIX/Windows shell commands on a server, upload/download files to/from server, edit text files directly on a server, etc

You can find all the new features over at Firefox’s Beta 4 page.

Lets face it, competition is healthy and having your pick of the litter when it comes to web browsers is fantastic. Whether you use Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Camino, you must give the new version of Opera a try.

“With the final version of Opera 10.60, the browser scores more than 50 percent faster than its predecessor – which was the fastest browser on Earth – in key benchmark tests. This translates into a faster browsing experience for users on modern JavaScript-heavy sites such as Gmail and Facebook.” -Opera

That is a pretty big statement to through around in my opinion, but after three days of use I can’t help but be wowed. The difference in speed when compared to Safari and Firefox wasn’t day and night but I did find that return visits to sites like Gmail and Digg were noticeably faster.

“Combined with its unique Opera Turbo functionality, Opera puts you one step ahead on the Web. Opera Turbo compresses the data going over your connection up to a factor of two or more, for those congested connections at cafés or a mobile connection at the summerhouse.”

All in all Opera is a very solid and very fast browser that combines the best features from all over the web into one amazing browser.

Daisy Disk allows you to visualize your disk usage and free up space by quickly finding and deleting big, useless files.

With DaisyDisk you can free up disk space by quickly finding and deleting big, useless files. The program scans any mounted disk and displays it on the sunburst map, where segments mean files and folders, proportionally to their sizes. The map is easy to read and navigate. You can also quickly preview any file and reveal it in Finder to delete.

Features:

• Appealing Sunburst-Style Display
• Fantastic Interface – Easy to use and appealing!
• Find, Preview, Delete. All in three easy steps

Requires: OS X 10.5

Download DaisyDisk Here

Learn More about DaisyDisk Here

Three and half years after Steam was released for Windows, it finally makes its way to a truly worth platform. Although details are still scarce, here is what we know so far.

• Steam’s current line-up of games will available for the Mac upon launch. This means games like Dragon Age: Origins, Battle Field : Bad Company 2, Left 4 Dead 2, Supreme Commander 2, and Star Trek Online.
• Portal 2′s upcoming launch will be the companies first simultaneous release for Mac and PC
• Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac
• True cross-platform online play
• Release date – April
  

First up, Sony’s Playstation 3.

MediaLink. Your PlayStation 3 has been craving the media on your Mac. Finally, complete Macintosh and Playstation 3 integration is upon us. MediaLink can stream Music,Video, and Photos to your Mac. It does so by taking advantage of the UPnP technology of your router.

Enjoying your media through the PlayStation 3 has never been this easy, on any platform — and the Mac isn’t just any platform. Its our favorite platform, so we’ve taken great care to create a seamless solution. MediaLink can stream and copy the following formats to your PS3: MP3, AAC, WMA, WAV-MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4-H.264, DIVX, XVID-AVI, WMV, ASF-JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP-RAW, PDF, PS, EPS, TGA.

Microsoft’s XBOX 360.

Connect360. Your Xbox 360 is capable of playing back your music and videos and viewing your digital photos. With Connect360, your Mac’s ready to share.

Connect360 automatically indexes your iTunes and iPhoto libraries and shares them to your Xbox 360. You can then use the Xbox 360 Dashboard to browse and play your media, organized in the exact same way that it is on your Mac. Connect360 can stream the following formats: AAC, Apple Lossless, WMA-MP3, WAV, AIFF-H.264, DIVX, XVID, MOV, AVI, WMV, ASF-JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, RAW

The Nintendo Wii.

Wii Transfer. Wii Transfer can share your movies, music, and pictures directly to your Nintendo Wii using the Internet Channel. Copy Miis from your Wii back to your Mac and save them as images. Browse iTunes playlists and iPhoto albums on your television. Convert your movies to formats the Wii understands, either streaming directly from your Mac or for playback in the Wii’s Photo Channel. Wii Transfer can even manage saved game backups copied to an SD card. Wii Transfer supports the following formats: MOV, AVI, MPEG4, H.264, DivX,-MP3, AAC. Plus a few other stragglers.

No matter which console you own, it’s going to set you back twenty big ones. But in my opinion, It’s more then worth it. Especially if your computer and console have already gone wireless.

Setting up your own personal web server is always more work and less fun then you think. Enter MAMP. MAMP stands for Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP. MAMP is a packaged bundle that automagically installs the aforementioned services on your Mac OS X computer, whether it be a Macbook or a MacPro.

“MAMP is installed in the typical Mac fashion: very easily. MAMP will not compromise any existing Apache installation already running with your OS X.

Furthermore, if MAMP is no longer needed, it is sufficient to delete the MAMP folder and everything returns to its original status (i.e. MAMP does not modify any of the “normal” OS X)” -MAMP.info

MAMP provides 22 programs and libraries available for your use, free of charge. You can grab the .dmg at MAMP’s SourceForge page and if you wanna learn more before you install follow this link to MAMP’s homepage.

As you may or may not know, Foursquare is a very popular iPhone app that gives you and your friends new ways of exploring your city. Earn points & unlock badges for discovering new things. ( Click here to learn more about Foursquare )

FoursquareX is an OS X version of the mobile foursquare app. Developed by Eric Butler and utilizing Snow Leopard’s Core Location service, FoursquareX is a perfect example of a great port. Slightly enhanced features and beautiful OS integration make using this app nothing less than fun and intuitive.

It’s functional and free so why not give it a try today! -

FoursquareX ( Requires OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard )

Adobe’s new iPhone/iPod Touch app allows you to edit and share your photos on the go. A free photoshop.com account is required. However, signing up allows you to store 2GBs of images online to be edited and/or shared.

Editing Features Include:

• Basic: Crop, Rotate, and Flip
• Color: Exposure, Saturation, Tint, Black and White
• Filters: Sketch and Soft Focus
• Effects: Vibrant, Pop, Border, Vignette Blur, Warm Vintage, Rainbow, White Glow, Soft Black and White

Find out more by going to mobile.photoshop.com/iphone/

Via Smoking Apples Blog.

“For night owls like myself, having a super bright display is one curse. We can never use a bright white wallpaper, and turning down the brightness only helps so much. Opening up a web page usually involves some amount of eye tear. Okay maybe I’m exaggerating, but this is a common experience, especially with the larger displays of the iMacs or perhaps even a dual 30” monitor setup.

So far the only app I’ve known to reduce brightness below the point allowed by system hardware, is ScreenShade. But the problem—which wasn’t evident at the time—was that it dims the entire screen, which isn’t the ideal way to go about things. I’ve just stumbled upon this brilliant app Blackout from BravoBug Software, and it brings a unique twist to the tale of night lighting.”

Arranging your apps shouldn’t take all day, at least not if Jeff Stieler has anything to say about it.

Jeff recently released a great new app called Movement.

It’s primary function is to greatly simplify the process of organizing and rearranging your mobile applications. It does this by using a unique OS X app that simulates your iPhone/iPod Touch layout. Once your iPhone/iPod Touch is synced with your Mac the application takes in all the apps you have and allows you to rearrange the simply by dragging and dropping.

You can download the app here. movementapp.com
Requires OS X 10.5 and a Jailbroken iPhone/iPod Touch.