Like many of the others at TUAW who really wanted to see this remote, I got my new Apple Remote a few days ago, and here are some of my impressions.

When we first heard about the Kanex HDMI + digital audio converter a few weeks ago, I was eager to give it a trial run and see if it managed to deliver on the promise of integrated audio with HDMI video. I've been playing with the $70 unit for a few days now, and the answer is a qualified yes: it does the job, but depending on your home theater setup you may be able to get by with a less expensive option.

The digital-audio Kanex unit ships without a manual and is largely self-explanatory (although the company has now posted a basic user guide and FAQ) -- a female HDMI port on one side of the roughly iPod-sized unit, and three male cables coming out the other side. The cables connect to the mini DisplayPort, optical audio out, and USB port of your Mac; while Kanex does sell a $60 unit that handles audio over USB, this version only uses that connection to power the adapter and does not provide a USB audio interface. If you're running short of open powered USB ports you might opt to plug it into a USB power adapter instead.

In operation, there's not much to worry about: I plugged in all three ports to a unibody MacBook Pro and connected an HDMI display, then went to the normal Mac OS X Displays preference pane, where I found a full assortment of resolutions for my enjoyment. The top few 'television' options may vary with your connected gear; on my test set (a Vizio 42" 720p display) I was able to choose 720p and, oddly enough, 1080i and 1080p. Below that you have resolutions ranging from 640x480 up into the 1600x1000 range.

Well, I got my Magic Mouse a few days ago, and I've been using it for my everyday tasks for a few days (and I'm still using it), and here are my impressions.

Packaging:



This packaging is clear, showing the actual Magic Mouse, just like the packaging that Apple has been using recently for the iPod shuffle, iPod nano, iPod touch and accessories.

Downloading the update:

As we posted earlier, you'll want to to download the Wireless Mouse Update to enable the new features of the Magic Mouse, which is available for Snow Leopard and Leopard.

Set Up:


Once you've installed the Wireless Mouse Update, you'll want to go to the Mouse Preference Pane in System Preferences and click the new "Set Up Bluetooth Mouse..." button. You no longer have to use the Bluetooth Setup Assistant to pair, which makes it a little simpler. It will then search for your Magic Mouse, and make sure it's turned on, which is done by a switch on the bottom of the Magic Mouse. Once it's paired, you'll be all ready to use your Magic Mouse.

Read on below to see the how it was using the Magic Mouse....

I have a handful of apps that I use to show off my Mac to those still stuck on the dark side (ahem, Windows users), and ScreenFlow is among them -- heck, it's even the app I use for screen recording Windows (via Parallels). Already the gold standard in the screen recording app genre on the Mac, Telestream's ScreenFlow adds a host of goodies in its 2.0 update. While the new features provide the means for you to enhance the look and feel of your screencasts, they're more notable for better facilitating your screencasting workflow; the end result is more of a one-stop shop for all your screencasting needs.

The first new feature relates to media interaction and management within the app. ScreenFlow 2.0 now allows you to drag, drop and position content from your media list directly onto the main ScreenFlow video canvas. In addition, said media files are now saved within a package. This means that the media files (pictures, music, and movies) you used in your project will be bundled in one place, rather than scattered hither and yon on your hard drive. As a result, you no longer need to worry about the folder(s) you placed your media in.

Prior to 2.0, freeze framing or adjusting the speed of a clip required you to use another video editor, such as iMovie or Final Cut, which was an annoyance given the fact that you had to export the video. In the 2.0 update, however, ScreenFlow has added built-in support for freeze frames and speed adjustments.

And if you yourself need your own personal freeze frame -- er, break -- you can now do so without splitting up clips through the pause and resume feature of ScreenFlow 2.0. While stopping and recording results in a separate clip, pausing and resuming screen recording results in a single clip that can be moved through the editing process as a unit.

As many screencasts eventually make their way onto YouTube, ScreenFlow has incorporated YouTube publishing within the app. No longer will you need to use your browser or export to an iMovie-compatible format to upload your screencast to Youtube. YouTube publishing includes support for distribution control, giving you control over whether or not you want your screencast available for public consumption.

Other notable features in the 2.0 update include:
• New keyboard shortcuts (for resizing the timeline, zoom in and out, and nudging clips)
• Advanced audio edits and audio ducking
• Action curves
• Improved timeline performance and improved export performance
• Support for exporting only part of the timeline instead of the entire document
• Color correction
• Live audio scrubbing
• Snow Leopard optimization

Mac OS X Snow Leopard provides built-in support for screen recording via QuickTime X, and this may serve as a "good enough" solution for basic screen recording needs. But, just as Little Snapper serves as a powerful and elegant screen capturing tool suite over the built-in capabilities in OS X (via command-shift-3 or via the "Grab" app) for more advanced uses, ScreenFlow serves as a compelling screen recording suite for those who want to add extra polish and sheen to their screencasts. And with the 2.0 update to ScreenFlow, Telestream has made adding that extra polish and sheen that much easier.

A 30 day free trial of ScreenFlow 2.0 is available at the Telestream website. ScreenFlow 2.0 is available for USD $99, or as a USD $29 upgrade for owners of previous versions of ScreenFlow. Download and purchase links available here.

I discovered Gruml a while back, but didn't write about it right away because there were too many glitches in the first beta to make it really interesting. Thankfully, recent releases have smoothed out the vast majority of the kinks, and I can now present -- with gusto -- a great RSS reader that interfaces with Google Reader.

NetNewsWire switched to syncing with Google Reader back in July, and I was pretty excited. Google Reader has been an amazing tool for me in the RSS world, and the more apps I have that all sync with it, the happier I am. However, despite seemingly endless trials and searches, I haven't really found the app that can top a Fluid SSB with a good userstyle. Gruml comes the closest so far, and it's free (at least right now, I'm not sure what the future holds after beta).

One of the things I like about desktop clients (when it comes to RSS readers) is scriptability. Gruml currently lacks the AppleScript dictionary that, say, NetNewsReader has, and I'd love to see it implemented. The keyboard navigation is decent, but not yet up-to-par with Google Reader's web interface, which can be navigated entirely with the keyboard. It might not make a difference to a lot of folks, but when I'm cruising through headlines I like to be all-keyboard when possible. The "Send Article to ... " menu is fantastic, covering 12 services ranging from Delicious to Twitter, and including Facebook, Ping.fm and Posterous. Note-taking, starring and sharing are all very well done, and sync perfectly with Google.

It's likely you've heard of GelaSkins before. They make stickers to cover a variety of gear. They are of a nice thickness with a slight texture, and removal won't hurt either your equipment or the GelaSkin itself (if you're careful).

Here's the latest project from the GelaSkin folks: They have partnered with Dark Horse Comics to release skins featuring art from Dark Horse titles. You may remember the announcement earlier this year at San Diego Comic-Con that these were coming; and now they are available for pre-order (the first wave is available next Friday). They're starting off properly, too: Buffy, Hellboy, Mr Toast, and Umbrella Academy to name a few. (NOTE: While GelaSkin makes skins for a variety of devices, the Dark Horse line is limited to 13"/15" laptops and iPhones.)

One of the things I have always loved about GelaSkins is the quality of the printing on them, and these skins are no different. I have laid my eyes and hands upon the iPhone varieties of the Buffy Season 8 #1 skin and the Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite skin, and they are beautiful in person. Add to that the coordinating wallpaper created to go with each skin, and now you have covered the front AND the back of your iPhone with something pretty cool.

Today's Friday Favorite is a new one to me, but it's been around for a while. I just picked up the latest version of HistoryHound from St. Clair Software -- more famous, probably, for Default Folder X -- and have been using it constantly for days. Its hotkey already has its own spot in my muscle memory. Here's what it does:

HistoryHound indexes bookmarks, history and cache from all of your browsers, with presets for Camino, Firefox 2 & 3, Flock, iCab, OmniWeb, Opera, Safari, Shiira and URL Manager Pro. It means being able to bookmark willy-nilly in any browser and know that you'll be able to quickly locate noteworthy sites again, in any application.

Not just the bookmarks, though; in the background -- with a very low footprint -- HistoryHound starts indexing the full text of each page. Then you can search for exact or fuzzy matches, or with Spotlight-style boolean keywords for any text on the landing page. Search comes in two flavors: a tiny popup panel which can be assigned to a hotkey and provides a list of matches as you type, and a full, Webkit-enabled search window with page previews and a multi-column result list.

I recently bought a new Mac, and I decided not to migrate years of cruft over to a pristine Snow Leopard install. I also decided to shed years of stale workflow and adopt a new way of doing things. Enter the power tools: software that augments the power and performance of OS X to do things faster and smarter. I'll examine some general system enhancements and look at a couple of powerful Mac/iPhone app combos that really work well together.

Step one was finding a replacement for my beloved QuickSilver. I had abandoned QS well over a year ago due to performance issues on most of my Macs, but after a nagging pain in my wrist surfaced, I realized I had to find more keyboard shortcuts. Enter LaunchBar, which fills in for 90% of what QuickSilver used to do for me. LaunchBar is one Ctrl-Space (configurable, of course) away from Spotlight searching, Google searching, application launching, math calculations and much, much more. LaunchBar is $25 around $35 per seat, and worth taking 15 minutes to learn the basics. Go ahead, hate me for giving up QS, but try LaunchBar before you hurl the insults.

Next I needed a better way to juggle 3 Gmail accounts. But I also needed a way to track the metric ton of inbox items that flow through those email conduits. The solution was the combination of MailPlane and Things. I had really dedicated my heart to Toodledo, but there's one trick I couldn't replicate on any setup (The Hit List included): when I get an email in MailPlane, I can select some text and press Shift-Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-0 and the Things HUD pops up and autofills the notes section with a link to the email itself. It is awesome. Not perfect, mind you, but a huge thing for me.

Read on for more power tools and tips.

A few weeks ago, we ran a short post about the release of OWC's Mercury On-The-Go Solid-State Drives. The drives, which come in the same miniscule transparent drive enclosures used by OWC for the rest of the bus-powered drive line, use SSD technology to provide users with more shock resistance and higher read speeds than traditional "spinning platter" hard drives.

OWC provided a demo unit for TUAW to try out, and I had an opportunity to use the drive in both day-to-day Time Machine backup work and for backing up some large video files. While the drives, which come in 64 GB, 128 GB, and 256 GB sizes, are more expensive than their hard drive counterparts, they do offer benefits that may be critical for some users.

After the debacle earlier this year when I lost my iPhone 3G, I decided to not only protect the new phone -- my lost 3G had been "naked" -- but make sure that whatever I used to protect it had a bit of heft.

My choice of case was the locally-grown (Fort Collins, CO) OtterBox Defender, which fit the bill perfectly. It has what OtterBox refers to as a 3-layer design, including a thick screen protector, a hard shell that encloses the iPhone, and a rubberized exterior jacket that cushions shocks and keeps ports covered. While it has been an awesome case in terms of protection, it's pretty chunky and I've often wished I had something a bit skinnier.

OtterBox came to the rescue last week with a new line of protective cases called the Commuter. There are two models -- the Commuter (US$34.95) and Commuter TL (US$29.95). Like the Defender, these cases work with both the iPhone 3G and 3GS. Read on to hear more about the OtterBox Commuter cases, and a chance to win either a Commuter or Commuter TL case from TUAW and OtterBox.

Part of my work requires me to mock up iPhone apps, often to show developers how I would redesign a user interface to work better than something they've come up with. Over the past few months, a number of paper sketchbooks have appeared on the market, all designed expressly for this purpose. I decided to try out all of the sketchbooks that I could find in a cursory Google search, just to see which one would work best for me. Of course, that meant that I had to write a review!

The three products I discovered and tested were App Sketchbook (US$16.99), iPhone Application Sketch Book (US$14.99), and The Developer Sketchbook for iPhone Apps (US$19.99). All of them are designed for the same reason, to let iPhone devs or business analysts describe how they want an application's user interface to look. Follow along as I take a look at these three sketchbooks, as well as a metal stencil template for drawing UI elements.

If there's one Mac application that has seemingly been around forever, it's StuffIt. This compression and archiving utility was the tool to use for compressing files years ago, and I'll still occasionally run into a .sit file extension when pulling up old files. The original application was the source of a bit of Mac folklore, as it was developed and supported for quite a while by a young student by the name of Raymond Lau.

Mac OS X did its best to kill off StuffIt by adding built-in support for Zip compression, but the utility has continued to flourish over the years. During the last week, Smith Micro released the newest version of the application, StuffIt Deluxe 2010 (US$79.95, with an introductory price of US$29.95 through October 15, 2009).

Since compression has been part of Mac OS X for quite a while, you might think that this application would have limited usefulness. Smith Micro is spinning StuffIt Deluxe 2010 as a better way to share large files over the Internet. How does it work? Read on, my friends...

Any musician worth his/her credit knows that accurate tuning is a given. It's a crucial starting point to playing any instrument at home, on the job, in the studio, or on the road, and an embarrassment when it isn't.

Some time ago I was doing an unplugged acoustic gig when my regular stomp box tuner broke down mid-rehearsal. I was in desperate need of a reliable tuner, without a music store in sight. Roll on Agile Partners Guitar Toolkit [iTunes link] for the iPhone/iPod Touch at £5.99

I had heard about various tuner apps on the App Store, but I was reluctant to try any of them. I could not believe that a tuner on my phone would provide the same accurate and reliable tuning that my current (expensive) tuners could. However, I was desperate, so I took the plunge.

Utilizing the iPhone's built in microphone (or the iPod Touch with a microphone headset), Guitar Toolkit's chromatic tuner performed just like using any other quality tuner. It was simple, effective and to my delight, it got the job done.

After the gig, upon further inspection, I soon realized that there was much more than just a common guitar tuner in this app.

Guitar Toolkit comprises a chromatic tuner, a metronome, a chord section, and a scale section too (practice your scales!!).

The chromatic tuner can be used to tune a variety of stringed instruments. By changing the 'mode' selector on the tuner, from standard 6-string EADGBE guitar tuning to 'all notes' tuning, you'll be able to tune almost any musical instrument. Or, you can preselect a particular stringed instrument, from a custom list, for that instruments specific tuning arrangement (guitar, bass, banjo, mandolin, etcetera).

If you're feeling creative, why not come up with your own custom tuning arrangement and input it into the tuner for later reference, or choose one from the alternate guitar tuning selection. DADGAD anyone?

For advanced tuning, you can alter the standard reference pitch from 440.0 Hz to whatever you'd like (some orchestras play at varying reference pitches). I've used it to tune a violin perfectly, and for all you bass players Guitar Toolkit, using the iPhone's microphone, picks up those low notes as well.

There are a few noticeable nice touches here and there. On the tuner, there is the option to alter the display to a 'high contrast mode' for tuning in low ambient light conditions. Also, when the app is open, the power saving/auto-lock features of the iPhone are disabled so the tuner remains usable until you're finished.

Short of being able to plug an instrument line directly in, I can't find a fault with the the Guitar Toolkit tuner.

"I switched to the Mac to use this!" might be the highest praise a Mac developer could ever hope to hear. Switching platforms means not just buying a new computer, but also buying a bunch of new software. There are probably only a handful of applications that merit changing platforms all on their own, but Accordance Bible Software is one of them. Accordance isn't just widely respected within the Mac world, it's widely respected within the entire scriptural research software universe. Bible Software Review wrote: "Anyone who knows a little bit about Bible software has heard of Accordance."

The current version is compatible with Snow Leopard, and yet still runs on System 7.5! This is the first time I've seen a Mac application vendor talk about running Mac software in emulation rather than the other way around. Accordance is proudly Mac-only, suggesting to users that once they have switched to Mac they shouldn't put up with "Windows software" on their Macs, and offering crossgrades for those who have made the switch.

Being first is nice, but once other companies have come into the market, it doesn't take long to forget who was first and start to compare based on which features each product provides. Fortunately, Accordance has a lot to offer. There are a wide variety of packages available, ranging from $49 to several thousand dollars, depending on the library options. Like other Bible software programs, you are buying two parts: first, the app itself; second, items for your library, such as commentaries, different translations of the Bible, maps, and so forth. Most users should expect to make an initial investment of at least $100, perhaps $200-$300, but those purchases will almost certainly reflect savings over buying the printed versions.

Our planned look at the camera feature on the iPod nano got delayed by a household medical emergency, as described in one of our nano example videos above. It did give me a bit more time to go a little more hands on with the nano video camera, and the end result is satisfactory. You're not going to buy this nano for the camera; it's just a bonus feature. Will it be the deal breaker over buying a nano versus another iPod, an iPhone or even a Flip? It all depends what you want out of it.

The video above was shot indoors using the nano. It was actually my fourth attempt at taking an indoor video because if you want any luck with the nano's camera, you've got to have decent lighting. This shot was my first attempt with the camera, and you can see the difference the lighting made.

As mentioned during the keynote, Apple is looking to take on Flip mino with the new nano. As such, we decided to see not only how the nano compares to the Flip, but also to an iPhone 3GS. Continue on reading to see how these shots turned out.