Apple’s WWDC 2011 keynote just wrapped up and we heard some good news. Steve Jobs said that OS X Lion will be available this July, and it will only cost $29! No extra costs for physical distribution or media means apple can let it go for much less.

4 Great New Features in OS X Lion:

1. AirDrop – With AirDrop in Mac OS X Lion, you can send files to anyone around you —  wirelessly. AirDrop doesn’t require setup or special settings. Just click the AirDrop icon in the Finder sidebar, and your Mac automatically discovers other people nearby who are using AirDrop
2. Resume – Whenever you quit and relaunch an app, Resume opens it precisely the way you left it. So you never have to start from scratch again.
3. Mission Control – Mission Control is a powerful and handy new feature that provides you with a comprehensive look at what’s running on your Mac. It gives you a bird’s-eye view of everything
4. Mail 5 – Demo’d in the recent Keynote, Apple’s Mail 5 has a beautifully updated user interface with some exiting new features like threaded messaging.

Check out all of the sweet new features here.

Drachten, Netherlands – Bohemian Coding is proud to announce Fontcase 1.1, a free update to the new Font Manager with an intuitive and uncluttered interface. While it may look simplistic, there’s is a lot features built in, and with Fontcase 1.1 you can even extend the application yourself with plug-ins if there are features you’re missing.

Fontcase focusses on metadata, and for every font and weight, you can add a wide variety of metadata. You can set tags, genres, assign designers and foundries and much more. They are not just pieces of text, but actually show up in the source list and in Fontcase 1.1 supported languages will now also show up there just like your tags and genres and you can now create smart collections based on the number of activations and when you last activated a font.

Other new features include badges in the sidebar, an updated info pane and more speed. Also, Fontcase now accepts and activates a lot more fonts than before and we fixed several bugs in version 1.1.

New features include:
* A versatile plug-in architecture to extend Fontcase in numerous ways
* Fontcase now analyzes the languages a font supports
* More metadata for when a font was activated and the number of times it was activated
* Badges show the number of fonts in a collection
* Fontcase can now analyze and activate a lot more fonts now
* A redesigned info panel
* Several bugfixes

Minimum Requirements:
* Mac OS X Version 10.5 or higher
* Universal Binary for PowerPC and Intel

You can give the App a try with the full featured demo or buy it now for $55.

GenAudio recently released AstoundStereo Expander 1.2. AstoundStereo Expander is a program that essentially enhances and expands you current stereo sound.

AstoundStereo is a 4D sound experience using only two audio channels, such as headphones or laptop speakers. It processes all digital audio on your laptop or desktop computer in real-time utilizing AstoundSound technology to enhance the audio in your existing music, movie and game collections.

I gave this little program a test drive last night while watching Quantum of Solace. (Note: I was using a 2.1 external sound system from AlTec Lansing. Your experience may differ.) I toggled it on and off while watching and re-watching certain parts of the movie. For the most part it did a pretty good job of actually making it sound better. The difference wasn’t drastic but it was a pleasant improvement from what I was used to.

This seems very similar to Dolby’s 5.1 Stereo Headphone Technology.

You can try out the demo for free our pick up a full copy for $39.95
astoundstereo.com

iBench is a synthetic benchmark program for the Mac OS X operating system. It is constituted by 21 tests (12 of integer workload and 9 of floating point) of real usage that allow to check and compare the CPU and memory performance of your Mac.

iBench is a Universal Binary and works seamlessly on 32- and 64-bit Macs and on both Intel and PowerPC Macs.

The only requirements are 512 MB of RAM or more and Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”.

Best of all it’s freeware. So, if you are looking to compare the performance of your Mac against other Macs, I suggest you give this nice little app a try.

Download and more info Here.

Back in July of ’08 I wrote about a neat little app called Snapplr. Snapplr is a replacement for OS X’s built in screen shot tool. Snapplr brings  many additional features as well as ease of use to screen shots. The highlight of Snapplr is the ability to instantly share whatever you may be capturing. With Snapplr you can:

• Publish you screen shot instantly on the web thanks to Snapplr’s instant image hosting. After the selecting the live option for your shot, Snapplr instantly adds the corresponding URL to your clipboard so you can instantly share it friends.
• Import your clips instantly into your email! Snapplr supports the ability to share screen shots through integration with OS X’s Mail app.
• Save directly to your clipboard. Snapplr also makes it easy to import screen shots into design and graphic apps via copy and paste.
• Last but not least is the ability to share your clips live. Snapplr offers a unique service that streams your selected area live on the web!

Snapplr resides in the menu bar when not in use, configurable hot keys bring up the snapplr window that allows you to set options before snapping your picture. The lightweight, unobtrusive style of snapplr makes it fun and simple to use.

Head on over to Snapplr.com to learn more and download the free trial!

Apple’s own Front Row is a pretty solid media center, as long as you are just looking to watch/listen to your media. It is simple and it does its job well. However, some people like a few more feature when it comes to a media center, especially those who are using there computer solely as a media center. Enter Plex.

On the outside, Plex may look just like any other media center, but inside you will find it is packed with useful and ingenious features.

For starters Plex has the ability to automatically fetch and apply Metadata from IMDB and TVDB to your media. This feature paired with Plex’s file manager makes organizing your media powerful and convenient. Support for RSS feeds and Shoutcast streams also make Plex stand out from other media center options.
Read the rest of this entry »

Today the Google Mac team announced the introduction of a new App called the Quick Search Box. While it is only a developer preview, it seems like it may be a promising app for those constantly on the search for web information.

From Google-”This Mac version is much more experimental than its iPhone sibling, Google Mobile App, and through it you will be able to see many of the areas we are exploring: contextual search, actions, and extensibility. It is by no means feature-complete, but is a very good indication of things to come.”

I know I’m gonna give it a try and it may actually be nice, not having to launch FF every time I wanna Google something. This will save me a good 3 seconds every time I search. That’s about 30 seconds a day or about 182 minutes a year! In all seriousness, A truly useful app to add to your dock.

You can download it here: Google code site

I have been constantly switching back and forth between Xtorrent and Transmission for the last year. Sadly, I have never being satisfied with either one. But now I have a new choice.

Introducing µTorrent for OS X.

I am very glad µTorrent has finally made its way to OS X. I have always been a big fan of minimalization. Large applications that do relatively simple things tend to bug me. µTorrent’s 1.3MBs are very appropriate for a torrent client. The developers behind the OS X version made a great choice when they decided to re-build instead of simply porting the existing version. The OS X version has all the great features of the it’s Windows counterpart yet still is a completely different app.

Whether you did or didn’t like µTorrent for windows, I suggest you give this one a look. µTorrent for OS X

Back in 2006 when BitTorrent Inc. purchased uTorrent, it promised us Mac users a version to call our own. Fortunately, that day is here. On Nov.28th uTorrent for OS X 10.5 was released in beta.

Most of uTorrent’s well-known Windows features tagged along on the journey to the Mac, though some, such as RSS downloading, torrent creation, and the webui, aren’t here yet (boo). Fortunately, uTorrent’s developers are planning to bring and keep uTorrent for Mac in feature parity with the Windows version. Read the rest of this entry »