FileMaker Inc., a subsidiary of Apple, has just upgraded their flagship database suite to version 10. Incorporating a whole new user interface and features. 

With a fresh new interface, FileMaker Pro 10 delivers the most dramatic design changes in over a decade. The redesigned and customizable Status Toolbar — similar to browser toolbars — puts commonly used FileMaker Pro features, previously only accessible from the main menu, right at users’ fingertips for streamlined navigation, better workflow and time-saving shortcuts.

Other major new features, such as the ability to save the results of a search, and Script Triggers, which launch scripts triggered by user actions or based on time limits, make using databases easier than ever before. - FileMaker Press Release

FileMaker is a professional database application and comes in many flavours. Available immediately, FileMaker Pro 10 is offered at a suggested retail price of $299 /$179 upgrade. Your other options are:

• FileMaker Pro 10 Advanced for $499/$299 upgrade.
• FileMaker Server 10 is $999/$599 upgrade.
• FileMaker Server 10 Advanced is $2,999/$1,799 upgrade

For home and small business users considering using a database app on the Mac, do check out Bento 2 ($49), made by the same people who make FileMaker. Dipped in Cocoa, Bento 2 features the integration that a Mac application should boast of.

Ed note: If time permits, we’ll be doing a full review of both FileMaker and Bento 2, so stay tuned for more updates. 

Cultured Code has kept their star app Things in a public beta state for a while now. The getting things done application has stolen many a heart, doing the thing it does best. The team has been slowly culturing their code, and we’re finally approaching the final release date, 6th Jan, Macworld 09. 

With just 7 days to go, Cultured Code has also pushed out the Release Candidate for Things 1.0. This is a feature complete version that includes a whole lot of changes including some slick new icons, increased flexibility with moving around items, rearrangement and change of functionality in Areas and Projects, and a whole lot of bug fixes. 

We’ll be doing a full review of Things, including the let’s-not-forget iPhone version, so stay tuned for more updates on that. Things costs $50 for a single user license, but using the coupon code “THINGSPRESALE20” will get you a 20% discount through January 15. In the meantime you can go ahead and download the release candidate to check it out for yourself.

Along with the MobileMe fixes that 10.5.6 brought along with it, Apple has updated it on the server side as well. Minor changes have been brought about for the Contacts, Calendars, Gallery, iDisk as well as the login screen.

Before you get excited, there still is no “Share File” button in iDisk that we have all longed for. The feature is still has a ‘coming soon’ status on the MobileMe iDisk feature page. Oh how I long to send those huge attachments, and just imagine the look on the face of the one who finds out how awesome my way of sending email attachments is. 

Nevertheless, I’m happy that Apple is constantly working on MobileMe. The detailed support document mentions features like “adds shortcut for creating new contact”, and “Long event titles now appear properly in Month view” when it comes to the Calendars. They have also included a “Tell a friend” link for MobileMe web galleries, although we’re still lacking photo comments to make this a Flickr alternative. Check out the full document for whole list. 

Unfortunately though, I could not test any of this, as MobileMe refused to log in (for the first time in months) and repeatedly told my Safari and Firefox browsers that Internet Explorer 7 is not fully supported. The desktop features work just fine though.

[Thanks Dan for the link up!]

You must have all heard about EventBox, the awesome new social network manager for the Mac. We’ve been working closely with The Cosmic Machine, and the new beta has just upped the twitter client to make it undoubtedly the best twitter client for the Mac. Here’s a few things you can expect to see in the latest beta, which will probably land on Monday morning.  

The new version brings with it Favorites, so you can quicky add and remove favorites, or see all of them in a list. EventBox now features searches, very helpful for professional twittering (like for instance, I like to see when someone mentions “Smoking Apples or @smokingapples” in a tweet). They’ve also added shortcuts to looking up a particular user, or pull down all tweets of any user. These are all stacked in your sidebar, which you can delete, rename or just let them be.  

The update also features a bunch of other UI enhancements like shorturl expansion, avatars in growl notifications, and a bunch of other fixes and enhancements I personally can’t remember. Most of this has come from the community in the form of feature requests and twitter polls, which I think is an awesome way to develop applications. If you haven’t checked out EventBox, I’d highly suggest you do. A free trial avaits, after which EventBox costs $15, and will be $20 when it gets out of beta. Any EventBox fans out there? Let us know!

Initially developed by Amit Singh, MacFUSE is a plugin which allows you to extend Mac OS X’s file handling capabilities. Freshly out of Google Code, MacFUSE 2.0 brings in a whole lot of features. The update brings with it a dedicated preference pane, full 64-bit support, and several other developer-specific changes that appear to be important enough to be mentioned in their changelog. They’ve even got experimental support for Snow Leopard. 

And if you want to know what goodies await the developers hoping to exploit MacFUSE, Ars has the lowdown on that:

Many of the improvements are for developers creating file system plug-ins. In addition to support for file systems using 64-bit inodes, there are new Xcode project templates to make creating a file system even easier, and added DTrace support to make debugging easier as well. Several new callbacks for the ability to set and read file attributes, backward compatibility, and a couple small bug fixes round out the release. Detailed release notes are also available. - Ars Technica.

Now what exactly is MacFUSE? It is a plugin or architechture upon which you can build other plugins that can allow you to introduce non-native file systems to behave like part of the system. Yes, this allows to you get read/write support for NTFS and EXT3 file systems inside of OS X. Here’s another excellent implementation of MacFUSE which allows you to access iTunes from your Finder sidebar. 

There’s a guide at Download Squad that will help you set up and use MacFUSE to the fullest. Use that while we prepare our own little tutorial on using and exploiting MacFUSE. You can download and install MacFUSE from the Google Code project.

Cooliris, the flashy browser plugin we’ve talked about earlier has just received a point update, which brings in a bunch of features that make it a lot more useful. Cooliris, in short, is a plugin which puts a whole new perspective to browsing the web using visuals rather than text. Sift through news events, watch youtube videos, or search through google using the 3D wall of images. 

The new version brings in Favorites. You can now sign up for a free Cooliris account and keep a database of your favourite news items or youtube clips. And since they are linked to your online account rather than local storage, you get to access them on any machine that has Cooliris installed. 

With this functionality, you could create a playlist of your favorite music videos from across the web, or assemble an entire season of Hulu television shows or movies - and it’s always faster and easier than bookmarking individual web pages.

The 3D wall can now be customised to your liking. You can change the wall angle, zoom levels or the speed of scrolling using the preferences panel. Of course, I find the default wall good enough so I wouldn’t want to mess that up.

Cooliris is compatible with Safari 3 and Firefox 3, as well as that other platform we talk about so much. If you have an iPhone, Cooliris is available for free on the App Store [Review]. Download the free plugin from Cooliris website.

We posted a review when the pre-alpha was leaked, and just over two months later, the official beta is released! The Leopard-only Intel-only beta is out for everyone to download and use. 

Remember it’s beta software, so there may be bugs and annoyances.  Please help us make it better by contributing to the conversation in the forums (forum.utorrent.com).

Of course we’ll keep that in mind! So what features do we have in stock? Well so far the client lacks a lot of features that a mature app like Transmission offers, but we need to remember what the big boss said, this is still an early beta. However, unlike the leaked alpha, the app isn’t buggy to the core. Most of the functions work and the app doesn’t come crashing down every so often. 

The UI is slick and has a few core-animation effects. The icons look slick and are very mac-like. Some of the UI elements however (like bright blue text indicating the number of files) are just plain ugly and need to be worked on. 

µTorrent has most of the standard features that a torrent client requires to be functional. The app can monitor any folder for incoming torrents and trash them once added to the queue. Controls for bandwidth throttling as well as scheduling are also present. You can set the connection limit, number of concurrent downloads as well as set port forwarding and some other networking features. 

Features missing are dock badges for downloads speeds, and drag and drop support for torrent links, and support for labels. Thankfully, selective file downloading is good to go. 

Download your copy from the uTorrent Mac page. And don’t use µTorrent for piracy.

Pixelmator, one of the best Photoshop alternatives for the Mac, has been updated to 1.3.1, and adds two new tools to its feature lineup. Version 1.3 “Tempo” has been just released, but team hasn’t taken a breather and has been constantly improving and squashing bugs. 

The Refine Selection tool allows you to perform dynamic adjustments to your selections after you have drawn them. Using sliders you can adjust the feathering, smoothness and the size of the selection. Changes are reflected live, and the red mask gives you an accurate rendering of what the output will look like. Very intuitive and very useful.

Color Management sheet allows you to fine tune color profiles for your images. You can use the presets for the web or print, or use any one of the color profiles you have set in your system preferences. This is certainly a step towards professionalism. 

Apart from this we’ve been told that this update squashes a few bugs that were causing issues in the 1.3 release. A recommended update to all pixelmator users and another reason to check out this awesome image editor. Check out our Pixelmator 1.3 review to see what Pixelmator is all about.

You’ve seen the news posts, the screenshots of the Street View and probably by now installed and taken the 2.2 OS for a spin. We took a little time off to go through the iPhone 2.2 OS and look out for little changes, that make the overall experience much better. 

Screenshots of the Locked Screen. 
It is now possible to use the two button press to generate a screenshot of your locked screen. Same shortcut of pressing the Home and Sleep buttons together flashes the screen and saves the shot in your Camera Roll. 

Multiple App Screenshots
The App Store now features multiple screenshots, so you can get a much better overview of the app or game in question. Tapping any of them invokes the photo viewer so you can quickly swipe through them. Continue Reading »

Recently updated to 2.0 status, Hog Bay Software’s TaskPaper 2 has caught our attention. The basic premise of TaskPaper is simplicity. Amidst all the feature rich GTD apps stands a simple looking project manager, which from the look of it seems more like a notepad than a functional GTD. Now let’s not judge the book by its cover and take a quick look at what exactly this app offers. Note that I have used the application for only a day, so consider this as a preview instead of a complete review. 

The Four Main Functions
There are only four functions in TaskPaper: projects, notes, tasks, and tags. Each of these is formatted automatically and presented to you in a clear easy-to-read window. Unlike other GTD readers, this actually feels like notepad that someone might have used in the past. Each window is a separate document, that you can carry around wherever you go.  Continue Reading »