it’s like they read my azureus post. we now have utorrent for mac. those of us who gave an email address received their email already about the beta version.

beta works flawlessly as far as i can tell. they did two things right for a this particular release. one, it looks/works like a mac program, not just a port of a windows version. two, you will recognize the utorrent features even though it has a mac gui. not all the features are there yet, of course, but the most important stuff is.

if an update is never released i’d be happy with this version.

microsoft’s onenote is a great piece of software. you have use windows of course, and good luck moving it from the computer you installed it on, but it’s good software.

to use it successfully on a mac will cost you about about $500. onenote itself is only $120 give or take. ‘course you you have to run it on a legal copy of windows, say $300 off the shelf, and to run windows on the mac you’d use VMWare Fusion which is about $80. No you wouldn’t use Parallels. I’ll explain that in another post.

OR….

you can just run circus ponies’ notebook v3.0. for $50.

you can use evernote, evernote is great for making searchable notes, web syncing, but notebook works they way you would if you had a ringed notebook in front of you.

i liked notebook 2.x but v3 just blew me away.

just the simple addition of sticky notes stuck to a spot on the page, like you might do with a physical notebook, and the sticky flags (just like the one’s 3m makes) is pure genius.

and…wait for it…it all “just works”. it has other features also, but i can explore them as i need to.

it’s currently my favorite piece of mac software. if you want to make notes like you would in real life, notebook 3.0 is for you.

when i first fire up some type of racing game i usually spend a few minutes steering all over the place and hitting the rock/tree/you-name-it that just jumped out in front of me.

i’ve done it with stunt driver on the ps2, evo 2 4X4 on the xbox, and motorstorm on the ps3. i’ve been trying out a few demos just to get a feel for the other games out there. motorstorm: pacific rim has a great playable demo (yup, still ran into trees and rocks, but had a blast doing it), and nascar 09.

unexpectedly i was able to race around the track in nascar 09 for what seemed like hours. didn’t really crash. didn’t really do much of anything except get sleepy on the wheel.

at this point i’d like to seque to michael palin’s account character who wants to be a lion tamer, when asked why he didn’t want to be an accountant anymore he said it was dull, unbelievably dull…

so dull in fact that i turned the car around going the wrong way on the track and started hitting the other drivers head on.

don’t know about you guys but i wouldn’t pay $60 for that.

every now and then i send gpg/pgp encrypted email. once again this is where software on the mac is sadly lacking. yes, you can install macports (and fiddle with getting that working properly), and then, yes you can install gpg and import all your keys. when you are done you will be writing up your email in textedit (or textmate if you were smart) and cutting and pasting after using the gpg gui.

that was getting to bit a bit of a pita, so i used the firefox extension firegpg. it works really well with gmail can’t complain there. the problem is firefox, it’s getting a lot of updates recently (don’t know if that’s good or bad) but seems to be leaving exension authors behind. firegpg is one of the few extension i use that’s still being actively updated. extensions are what give firefox it’s power (and coincidentlly make it slow, bloated and unstable but we all live with it and say how great firefox is…except i don’t, i use camino or fluid mostly.) so firegpg works but not really ideal for non-webmail

then i thought about using the the offical pgp client. sure it’s expensive but at least they let you work with the trialware, which like both avg and zonelabs, they conveniently bury it in an obscure part of their website so the average web user will never find it. flash update for you feepers (yes i’m talking to the pinheads at avg, pgp, and zonelabs) i found them all.

mac software is supposed to be easy to install and use. probably why it gets rave reviews on usability. when referring to macs you often see the phrase “it just works”. pgp doesn’t. i gave it a good two hours before i findally requested my money back.

on the upside i found gpgmail. works great with applemail

as much as i like the mac and will never go back to windows there were some transition pains. the lack of ms onenote was one of them (until notebook, which i’ll post about after this). another was utorrent. the first time i needed a bit torrent client (i spend a lot of time on publicdomaintorrents.com) i immediately went to the utorrent page and was immediately disappointed. at the time they said they had no intention of writing a mac version. that has since changed and i signed up for notification, but who knows when that will happen.

i tried “bits on wheels” when that crashed in the middle of a download i removed it (appzapper is a great uninstaller for the mac). don’t need that happening in the middle of the night or when i’m not around to restart it.

i haven’t tried out transmission yet, but i will, in the mean time i used azureus. since i’ve been using it it’s changed it’s name once and it’s interface twice. it’s now called “vuze” (and the “content” sucks dead bunnies same as “joost” does. the latest version of the interface was a big step backwards. seems like they got rid of the multiple tabs. blink, blink. why not remove the ability to download torrents?

anyway, soon as i found another torrent client that works reliable i’ll switch to it.