doubleTwist Corp. was co-founded by DVD Jon. It can sync photos, videos, and playlists from a Mac or PC with a variety of mobile devices including Android,BlackBerry, PSP, Nokia and others. The public beta is a free download. I could not find anything on the website indicating whether or not it would remain free after it exits its beta testing phase.

doubleTwist

I finally got around to playing with the Arduino microcontroller the other day and started looking around for related projects. This search led me to...

Processing.org

GrandPerspective is a free Open Source app for Mac OS X that scans your hard disk and produces a graphical map of how space on the drive is being used. I decided to clean up my drive today, and decided to check if a newer release than the 0.9.9 version on my Mac was available. And, yep, it was last updated in September 2009. You can find the current release at...

GrandPerspective 1.1

The Open Source file container and whole disk encryption software for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux was updated on November 23, 2009. This update is a minor dot update release for bug-fixes (always important!).

TrueCrypt 6.3a

There's a bit over a year's gap between 0.9.3 and...

HandBrake 0.9.4

But, it arrived late in November and is available for download. Mac uses with Core 2 Duo processors should note the download page advises they use the 64-bit version.

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. It handles DVD-like sources (you can decode that language I'm sure :-)

From Softpedia...

VirtualBox 3.1.0 Final Released

Oddly, VirtualBox 3.0.12 running under Windows said it is the current release when I selected "check for updates". However, the 3.1.0 update for all platforms is available at...

VirtualBox 3.1.0 downloads page

The Softpedia article mentions several interesting enhancements available in the 3.1.0 release:

- Teleportation: Live VM migration session (wow)

Wow! I'm really impressed by Google's Picasa 3.5 release.

Google Picasa

Ran into an odd problem. I tried uploading a video from my Mac to YouTube. This is the first time I've tried to do this since upgrading the Mac to Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). The problem is that YouTube doesn't even let me see the dialog box to upload a file from the Mac. You can see what the problem looks like in the screenshot above. This happens with both Firefox and Safari on the Mac.

I was able to upload a video file from a Windows 7 computer and Firefox without any problems.

The XMind mind mapping service an free Open Source (so they claim) app for Windows and Mac OS X (Linux too) looks interesting. But, I dislike the idea of being required to sign up for a "free" XMind ID just to try the app. I've been a reasonably happy FreeMind user for a while now and have been using it more regularly recently. But, I wonder if it is worth the time and effort to take a closer look at XMind.

Any comments from someone who has use XMind?

Just a quick note that TrueCrypt 6.2a was released on June 15. TrueCrypt is an amazing Open Source encryption app that can create encrypted file containers that are mounted as drives or entire drives (including boot drives). It works with Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

OpenOffice.org 3.1

...was released. I don't see any big new features in the list of enhancements (see link above). But, the overall list of enhancements like improved screen appearance and additin of macros/scripts to its Base (database) look interesting.

I wonder if OOo will survive now that Oracle owns it by way of its Sun purchase?

Just noticed that VirtualBox got a minor point update (from 2.2.0 to 2.2.2) last week...

VirtualBox 2.2.2 (released 2009-04-27) Changelog

There's a lot of items in the changelog for 2.2.2. So, be sure to take a look at them to see what was fixed in this release.

While looking at the slideshow associated with this item by Andrew Odewahn (you can find his presentation embedded at the bottom of this blog item), I wondered what software he used to generate the social graphs...

Fortunately, he mentions using the Open Source...

Graphviz

...as the tool he is using for the task.

I have Microsoft Project. However, it is not available for Mac OS X or Linux. So, a multi-platform Open Source alternative is good to learn about. I just read about...

OpenProj 1.4

It runs on Microsoft Windows as well as Mac OS X and Linux. So, I might be taking a closer look at it in the near future. However, I think it is odd that this so-called Open Source package is only available as a binary download from SourceForge. I also wonder why it does not look like it has had any development activity since September 2008. Dead project?

I interviewed the CEO and co-founder of AnchorFree on Friday. AnchorFree has an interesting free ad-supported VPN (Virtual Private Network) service named...

Hotspot Shield

VirtualBox 2.2.0 looks like a disaster so far. I installed/upgraded it on both my Mac and Windows Vista PC. Couple of items I've noted so far...

- Bridged Ethernet support works in VirtualBox 2.2.0 under Mac OS X 10.5 but not Windows Vista. NAT works in Vista, so network connectivity is available.
- Both Fedora 9 (on a PC) and Ubuntu 8.10 (on a Mac) became unstable after going through VirtualBox's container migration process.

VirtualBox 2.2.0 was just released. It is a major update according to its release notes. The biggest change looks like the support for up to 16GB memory for guest OSes running on 64-bit hosts. But, there are also a bunch of other changes related to networking a hypervisor optimization.

I find VirtualBox interesting. But, it had too many quirks to use for even personal "production" work as of the 2.2.1 release. Perhaps it is time to take another look at it.

Looks like the Open Source VLC media player for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux is inching its way to 1.0.

VLC media player 0.9.9

I recall using it quite a bit on my old Apple iBook running Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). It was able to display video formats (like Microsoft's WMV) that were difficult to view on the Mac back then.

U3 moved the location of the U3 removal tool. You can now find the download link on this support page:

http://www.u3.com/support/default.aspx#CQ3

The good news is that there is also a U3 removal utility for the Mac now.