If you're a fan of the ever so popular BitTorrent client, Transmission, then you might like to hear that a new version was just released. According to the release notes some of the fixes included:

• You can now reset global statistics
• Support of multitracker torrents has been improved
• UPnP port mapping now faster on startup
• Ability to IP block using the Bluetack Level1 blocklist
• Dock badge images have been updated

The new dock badges provide greater readability of the transfer in progress. Transmission is freeware and can be downloaded from their website.

Mac | Life wasn't content to just read about Madden 08 on the Mac-- they tried to actually run it. And for all of us Mac gamers out there, I'm sorry to say the experience didn't go well.

Now, we already knew that neither Madden nor Tiger Woods would run on any Mac with the GMA950 graphics processors in it, so the Mac mini and the MacBook were already out of the question. The screenshot above came from an iMac, though. Clearly the text is bungled up beyond readability. The same problem appeared in the menus for the game, and even during play-- the scoreboard had overlapping graphics problems as well. Unbelievable. Did they (or Transgaming, whose Cider technology was supposed to be how EA ported these games) have their QA team play this thing even once on a Mac? This is what Apple was showing off at WWDC?

For their part, EA blames Apple's drivers, and says a driver update is coming "later this month" (M|L wisely suggests that means Leopard). Poor form, EA. Not that we expected much (EA games are often plagued with release problems, on any platform), but this is not how you bring gaming back to the Mac.

Scott's favorite blogging software has gotten another update, hot on the heels of the big 2.0 release. MarsEdit 2.0.2 patches up the big release with a few "slightly urgent" fixes involving using external editors and Evaluation mode (including a bug that caused you to be nagged a little more often than expected). There are also a few other typo and bug fixes (including a small fix to 2.0.1, which was only up for a little bit, so you didn't miss anything).

The update is available over on Red Sweater's site, and if you haven't started editing on Mars yet, the full program is available for $29.95.

Despite Keynote's maturity, a significant bug remains. Several users are reporting that pressing the "Play" button after composing a project causes the machine to immediately reboot.

From what's been reported so far, it seems to be limited to laptops, specifically iBooks and MacBooks, with and without an external monitor attached. At this point, no fix has been found.

Have any of you experienced this problem? Can you lend a hand in the troubleshooting?

Thanks, tipster!

A short while back, Digg hosted a link to this crashed iPhone showing single user mode. In that case, the error message stated that the iPhone couldn't "exec /bin/sh for single user: No such file or directory." Now that the iPhone has been thoroughly hacked, this error has evolved somewhat.

Last night, TUAW friend DrunkDwarf crashed his iPhone but since he'd actually installed a copy of /bin/sh his error was somewhat different. Instead of complaining that it couldn't find /bin/sh, his iPhone simply... ran it. Not that this was much better news. Without a keyboard and no way to attach one, DrunkDwarf was a bit out of luck. He ended up having to do a restore.

AppleHound has posted a list of all the (supposedly) reproducible bugs they could find in iPhone 1.0. There's 68 in total, and they range from various system hangs (the Phone app will hang if you start a sync while editing a contact photo) to many different UI/Usability bugs. Some of the usability bugs are a little iffy if you ask me-- many of them, like the "bug" where photo albums with less than 20 images don't display an actual number of images, seem to be "working as intended" (because why would you need an image count when you can easily see how many images are there?), and others have already been shot down according to the Apple HIG.

But on the other hand, I can't really fault AppleHound for being such sticklers. First of all, this is a cell phone that costs $600, and you should get what you pay for-- quibbling about interface quirks now means there's a much better chance of getting them fixed in a future firmware update. And second, this is Apple we're talking about. While other cell phone companies get complaints about call reception and service outages, these are complaints about tiny, half-a-second visual inconsistencies. Heck, I love my Razr, and the screen goes nuts without reason almost daily. There's nothing wrong with holding Apple to a higher standard, and maybe if Apple is kept on their toes with the iPhone, hopefully other cell phone companies will find themselves with their feet held to the fire as well.

Thanks, Leonard Nimrod!

TUAW reader Jamie Phelps has possibly stumbled upon a nasty iPhone synching bug when keeping one's iTunes library on an external hard drive. While tips like our how-tos for setting up iTunes with external drives or even an AirPort Disk work pretty well even when synching iPods with them, Jamie found that his iPhone gets the brainwash treatment when he's away from the drive containing his external iTunes library. As the story goes, Jamie synched his iPhone with a few songs and playlists, made a couple new playlists and then synched again. Hitting the road, however, and getting away from his external iTunes library drive is when the bug rears its nasty head: plugging the iPhone in while on the go caused iTunes to wipe out the new playlists and songs from the second sync operation, basically reverting them to their state before the second sync. To verify, Jamie even got adventurous and tried this whole thing a second time, once again watching iTunes blow away changes from the previous iPhone sync when the external media library isn't mounted.

This is the first time I've heard of iTunes handling this kind of setup in a poor way; for as long as I can remember, iTunes has been clever enough to realize what's happening and and would either not sync anything to an iPod when away from the library drive, or it would actually sync any media downloaded or imported while away (as we've mentioned before, you can use the Advanced > Consolidate Library command to move all this new media once reconnected with the library drive). Since we don't really have any evidence of Apple deliberately changing this behavior for their iPods or iPhones, it makes sense for this quirk to be classified as a bug that will hopefully be squashed with an inevitable iPhone software update. But what say you, TUAW readers? Anyone else get bit? Sound off.

There are bound to be bugs in any first generation product, and unfortunately this has been especially true for new Apple devices. It's only been a day since the iPhone went on sale, but already we're hearing of some nagging issues. But fear not, for you the user have the power to change the iPhone world for the better. If you already have an ADC account, you're all ready to start submitting bugs to the iPhone team. Head on over to bugreport.apple.com and go crazy– just make sure you submit responsibly and stick to the official description format, because someone has to read through each bug you submit.

Safari has been available on Windows for less than 24 hours, and already the hacker community is apparently tearing it to shreds. The Errata Security blog has been keeping track of a few announcements across the web, including a fully disclosed 0-day exploit that Thor Larholm apparently found yesterday within two hours of the software's release (and says more are "popping up like hotcakes"). And just to be clear on the use of 0-day exploit: it means Larholm found a way to execute any piece of code on a Windows box when Safari visits a properly crafted site to successfully exploit a vulnerability on the day the vulnerability was found.

What will this mean for Safari's reputation and traction in the Windows market? I'm not really sure yet. There are any number of reasons behind Apple's decision to develop Safari for Windows, and even though a healthy pool of tech-savvy users are already tinkering with it (for better and for worse), the real results will be seen once it reaches much more of the mainstream market. One of the primary reasons (besides making it easy for Windows-based web developers to write web apps for the iPhone, of course) for SafariWin, as some are calling it, is because that tiny little search box in the upper right of a browser has become quite a revenue generator if the browser does decently in the market. When users search through that box, the browser manufacturer makes some money off the resulting ads that are displayed along with that search. Firefox reportedly made around $50-75 million last year for Mozilla because of that little search box (not bad for an open source product, eh?). You don't have to be Internet Explorer to bring home at least some bacon for your company; heck, I would bet that Opera is still in business largely due to their search box as well.

But none of these reasons will mean anything, and Safari won't generate nearly as much revenue for Apple, if it doesn't gain at least a respectable share of Windows users who are actually firing up Safari to search, browse the web, view and click on ads. But If Safari keeps getting torn apart like this within 24 hours of a release, it could gain a terrible reputation before it ever hits the radar of a crucial portion of the general public. In this new web browsing and computing world where security is everything when you talk about a browser, Safari needs to plug these exploit holes ASAP if it plans to get any farther than the fleeting front page of digg.

Jason O'Grady of ZDNet posts that thousands of Windows users are having problems with iTunes 7.1.1, which they believe will not allow them to properly search the iTunes store. Their search goes into an endless wait, and then they get a message that their iTunes request could not be completed.

It seems to me that Apple's response, namely that the "network connection timed-out" error is an Internet problem not a software problem, sounds reasonable. When iTunes connects to the store, it's sending out a request for what is essentially a webpage and this request can hang for any number of network reasons--including those on the Apple end.

O'Grady suggests that users may have to uninstall iTunes 7.1.1 and re-install iTunes 7.0, but I'm not sure that is necessary. The original Apple discussion list thread is here.

TUAW reader Rae tipped us off that the new iTunes 7.1 sorting features are causing problems with the iPod's scroll-by-letter functionality. Items that start with the word "The" (like "The Breakers" or "The Danse") are sorted by their main phrase ("Breakers", "Danse") and not by "The", but when you scroll through your music, the iPod gets mixed up and the letter 'T' keeps flashing almost randomly.

I sorted out my music, synced my iPod and saw exactly what Rae was talking about. When scrolling by All Artists -> Albums, the following items "In Your Eyes", "The Innocent and the E Street", "Innocent Man", "The Instigator", "Invincible Summer" caused my iPod to flash "I", "T", "I", "T", "I". Very annoying!

Rae pointed us to a couple of discussion threads over at Apple's boards about this subject.

While it isn't a major release that adds big features like tagging or AppleScript support, Yojimbo 1.4.1 does fix a lot of miscellaneous bugs that users have been battling. A full changelog is here, listing fixes for things like crashes when viewing web archives and some scripting operations, as well as an auto-save fix to make sure your most recent un-saved changes don't get tossed out with the bath water when you quit.

Yojimbo 1.4.1 can be had from from Bare Bones's Updates page.

Users of the fantastic TextExpander who are also fond of the cmd+opt+d shortcut for hiding/showing the Dock might have noticed a weird behavior with this shortcut as of late. To be specific: the shortcut doesn't quite work anymore, even in 10.4.8; pressing it will cause the Dock to hide (or un-hide), but the Dock quickly reverses the behavior as soon as you let go of the shortcut. I know I thought it was a mere illusion brought on by sleep deprivation when I first stumbled across this, but occasional attempts at troubleshooting revealed not only that I was seeing just fine, but that a solution or even the culprit were seemingly nowhere to be found.

Fortunately, watching the latest MacBreak #63 in which Leo Laporte and Merlin Mann cover TextExpander taught me not one but two useful things about this typing tool (three, if you count that I now know that Merlin has a mind-boggling 700+ text snippets). First is a handy way to control where your cursor is positioned once a snippet is expanded. All you need to do is include a specific string - %| - in your snippet to dictate where you cursor is inserted after your snippet unfolds itself. This is great for creating snippets in which you still need to include something specific on the fly that can't be snipped, such as creating [a href] links.

Once Merlin covered this hint, however, I was inspired to open TextExpander's Help file to see if there were any other hidden gems. While perusing their FAQs, I discovered an explanation to this aforementioned bizarre Dock hiding behavior (it's towards the bottom of the FAQ page if you're curious). As it turns out, the specific way TextExpander is designed to hook into Mac OS X has uncovered an alleged bug in the OS that causes this unfortunate drawback. SmileOnMyMac is pretty sure this is a bug in Mac OS X rather than TextExpander, and I hope they have alerted Apple, in which case we could hope to see a fix possibly in 10.4.9. For now, the easiest way to get around this quirk and hide/show the Dock is probably to right-click the Dock divider (the line between Applications and the Trash/docs/files sections) and use that contextual menu.

It was a busy weekend for Landon Fuller and his crew of white-hat hackers working to plug the holes in Mac OS X and associated applications revealed by Month of Apple Bugs. His most recent two posts detail patches for Transmit and iChat, a mount warning for disk image downloads in Safari, and a patch for a zero-day vulnerability that's not even on the MOAB hit list: a heap overflow in the Java GIF image handling code, which has been fixed in Sun's releases of the Java virtual machine but not yet in Apple's release.

Landon also points to the BOM Shelter python script, written by his buddy William Carrel; the script modifies permissions on several items to avoid the vulnerabilities of MOABs 5, 8 and 15.

The thanks and appreciation of the entire Mac-using community are due to these guys, who are volunteering their time and considerable expertise to keep us all a little bit safer.

Customers of the MacHeist bundle should be receiving an email offering a download link for the new iClip 4 beta that was promised. This is a new version that John Casasanta is apparently just about ready to release next week at the Macworld expo, and users are encouraged to help track down bugs and submit them to a bug reporting link provided in the MacHeist email.

I can't help but wonder if Kevin Finisterre and "LMH" are getting their hands on a copy so they can sensationalize any bugs they find.