Downloadsquad Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Grow a Chi Pet in your Dashboard

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (May 19th, 2006)

Ah, the little plant/potter geegaw known as the Chia Pet. I don't know what meteor the plant came from, but aren't those planters cute? Relive the cuteness with Chi Pet (not affiliated with the Chia Pets of Joseph Enterprises) in your Dashboard. This little widget provides a couple of days of fun as ...

The love/hate relationship with Apple

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (May 12th, 2006)

You probably wouldn't be reading this if you did't enjoy working on your Apple computer. Now ask yourself, "why?" The answers are as varied as the users. Now ask yourself what really irks you about working on your Mac, or Apple as a company... Again, we've all got something that grinds our ...

QuickTime Components 101

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Apr 24th, 2006)

Ever wondered what happens when you can't view a QuickTime movie, and Apple's QT player prompts you to "download the missing component?" Essentially a QuickTime component is QT's version of a plug-in. Similar to how Flash plug-in allows you to view Flash content, or Windows Media Player ...

Turn that Mac mini into a media center - finally

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Apr 14th, 2006)

When the mini was announced, about the only person NOT thinking "media center Mac" was Bill Gates. I immediately bought one, and I bought the then-new El Gato EyeTV with that ATI logo on it (the full name escapes me). That El Gato box is ugly, gets hot, and didn't really do what ...

Microsoft to Apple: Happy Birthday!

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Apr 8th, 2006)

What a grand gesture. Five more years of Office wasn't enough, so Microsoft went the extra mile and released a fully-functional, virtualization app called VirtualPC XP for Intel Macs... Nah! I'm just kidding. They popped a JPEG up on their site saying how happy they have been to ride on the ...

Now that you've turned your Mac into a PC, turn it into a Mac again

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Apr 6th, 2006)

So you've done the formerly impossible and unnecessary: installed Winders on a Mac. Cool, best of both worlds. But there you are, staring at that awful primary color, jumbo crayon, sickly plasticky XP theme. Yeah, you could use one of the many mods featured on Download Squad (please, feel free). Or ...

iSync 2.2

by Victor Agreda, Jr. (Apr 6th, 2006)

Reader Johnny W. sent this in yesterday, but it took me a while to verify: iSync 2.2 is rolled into the 10.4.6 update, and it's quite nice. A while back I had my Motorola V60 working with iSync. See, last year when I got my "new" phone, I bought a $60 cable on ebay for $20 (along with a ...

MenuCalendarClock goes Universal

by David Chartier (Apr 3rd, 2006)

MenuCalendarClock is a clever little customizable pulldown calendar for the menubar that can also display events from iCal or Entourage to help keep you on top of things. As an unregistered version, MenuCalendarClock can display a small 'pocket calendar' (pictured), and clicking on a day of the week ...

Batch process your images with SmallImage

by Dave Caolo (Apr 3rd, 2006)

SmallImage is a nice piece of freeware for anyone who works with a lot of photos all day long. Just drop a folder full of images into SmallImage's main window, and you can remove your photos' embedded profiles, resize them, create thumbnails and then re-compress them with one click. As you can see ...

Maintenance 3.4

by David Chartier (Apr 3rd, 2006)

Maintenance, the beloved Automator action that can run a whole slew of maintenance tasks that command line geeks can only dream of (just kidding guys), has been updated to version 3.4. This time around, it has a shiny new icon, an expanded readme file (that explains every action it can perform) and ...

Dragthing updated to version 5.6.4

by Dave Caolo (Apr 3rd, 2006)

Dragthing, the popular utility by TLA systems, has been updated to version 5.6.4. Dragthing can be used as an alternative to Mac OS X's dock, with more features. In fact, it allows you create several docks that you can organize and arrange as you wish, and access via the tabbed interface ...

macZOT! giving away AppZapper

by Scott McNulty (Apr 3rd, 2006)

What will those kooky kids at macZOT! do next? Well, at the moment they seem determined to give away 2000 copies of AppZapper, kind of. As they say, there is no such thing as a free lunch in this life. macZOT! will lower the price of AppZapper by 5 cents for every blog that links to them, until the ...

iWeb Enhancer 1.0

by David Chartier (Apr 3rd, 2006)

Awesome: Chad Brantly has created a small add-on app for iWeb that can insert all sorts of blogging goodness into your sites such as Flickr pics, AdSense, YouTube videos, blogrolls and more. I haven't tried this out yet, but one word of caution: due to what I would assume could be iWeb's unfriendly ...

Universal OS X, NetBoot OS X, courtesy of MacOSXHints

by David Chartier (Mar 31st, 2006)

Of all the people who could create a Universal OS X boot disk (*cough* Apple *cough*), is anyone surprised that MacOSXHints (as far as I know) got there first? Top it off with the fact that they also created a NetBoot image and, well... now they're just making everyone else look bad (*cough!*). This ...

Script to bookmark all of Safari's tabs

by David Chartier (Mar 31st, 2006)

I know there are various plugins, addons, widgets and thingamabobs that will allow Safari to bookmark a group of tabs you have open. If you haven't installed any of these extras or you're just an applescript fan at heart, I found a one-trick script over at ScriptBuilders that should pull this trick ...