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The Mac Zone - October 2006

My Dream App Finals

Note: I am sorry for the lack of new posts around here lately, but I've spent a lot of time the last two weeks getting over some illness and writing, designing and editing for the Season Preview package at my website ProjectSpurs.com. I should be back to posting on a pretty regular basis starting today and with an audioblog coming tomorrow.

Phill Ryu's My Dream App is in the final round of voting with 6 finalists and their submissions/ideas for a Mac app. If you haven't heard of My Dream App, here's a snippet from their about page:


My Dream App is a grand experiment to see what happens when you combine the expertise of some of the best talents in the software and tech world with great ideas and feedback from everyone else.

It works like this. For the first two weeks of the event, we'll be collecting ideas for killer apps from hundreds, hopefully thousands of contestants. Then, the My Dream App team will be narrowing these down to 24 great (and developmentally feasible) entries.

From this point on, we'll be bringing in the best talents in the industry...to give their opinions and feedback on these ideas as they move on round by round. But ultimately, it'll be up to the site's users to determine which ideas make it to the end, with weekly elimination votes.

We think we'll have 3 innovative, killer apps by the end of this event, and it'll be up to you to help decide which ideas make the cut, and how they evolve throughout the event.

Portal
Portal is one of the 6 finalists for My Dream App



The six remaining apps are Cookbook, Atmosphere, Whistler, Hijack, Portal and Blossom.

So far I'm liking Portal and Atmosphere best, allthough I wouldn't call Atmosphere a killer app, it's more like a nice Dashboard widget. If Hijack were feasible and worked with several different types of messageboard systems (phpbb, ezboard, vBulletin, Invision, etc...) I would vote for it and buy it the day it came out.

I think the one that will get my vote is Portal. Many of the judges say there is already .mac for syncing, but .mac is hardly the end all, and not everyone is willing to pay $99 bucks a year when they can get a low-priced app they can keep forever that will do the job and that is more focused on doing it right.

In the end, My Dream App is a win-win as the three finalists each receive a MacBook and a contract with My Dream App to get it developed. They ideas also get critiqued by some industry celbrities including Steve Wozniak, Kevin Rose, Leo Laporte, David Pogue, Amber MacArthur and more.

Go vote for your favorite and get some free software in exchange.
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Mac love from Google

It seems lately that Google is really trying to please Mac users. For loyal users of an OS with a small market share, we're used to getting passed over and seeing the Windows only show up for applications and on websites. A few months ago I was flustered because I purchased a media package from fiba.org so I could watch the FIBA Basketball World Chammpionships. I saw that they were using Windows Media Player, and I could view streaming video on their site from past games so I figured it would be no problem especially since I had Flip4Mac installed as well as the WMV plugin for Firefox. Come game day, I go on fiba.org and navigate to the stream for the game I wanted to watch live and in big letters I get "Macintosh Not Suported." Great, I pay for video that I can' t see.

Gogle Mac Blog
To get off that rant, Google Video was doing the same thing for video that could be purchased from their site, until recently. Google added Mac support for the video site and Safari support for Google Calendars among a few other things. On Monday they launched the official Google Mac Blog and now that they have a Mac team in place, they will be using the blog to inform Mac users "about everything Google is doing to support Mac users."

They also now have a site dedicated to Google software downloads for the Mac, which is currently populated with dashboard widgets, Google Earth, Toolbar, Sketchup, Notifier and Picasa Web Albums Uploader. Notifier and Google Earth are currently my favorites on the alerting me when I have new Gmail and getting directions and seeing satellite images for just about every address you enter.

Docs & Spreadsheets
Who needs office with web apps like Docs & Spreadsheets around?

Since I am on the subject of Google, they recently merged their Writely and Spreadsheet services together to form Google Docs & Spreasheets. They seem to really be going after Microsoft and Zoho to dominate the web office space. All it takes is a google account to use Docs & Spreadsheets, which you will already have if you use Gmail or any of their other web apps like the recently improved Google Reader. I've already been using Spreadsheets for some time and love the ease of use and that my spreadsheets stay online and I don't have to email myself files, lug around a CD or thumb drives or worry about another computer having Excel. I was also a Writely user before Google purchased they were acquired by Google and have really liked the service for the reasons stated above about Spreadsheets. If you haven't had a chance to check either of them out, go over to docs.google.com and sign in with your Google account or register a new one.
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Tech Deals

I'll admit it, I'm addicted to finding great deals online whether through Craigslist, Ebay or pretty much any other online vendor. Once a week, I'll try to pick out the best of my findings for my Tech Deals posts. Since today is the first post, theres no shortage of great deals.

Seagate 250GB hard Drive
If you're looking to add a second hard drive to your box for backup purpouses are if you need a new one alltogether, Tiger Direct has a great deal on a Seagate 250gb ATA hard drive.

The Seagate Barracuda 7200 ATA-100 hard drive is the latest in the Seagate 3.5-inch family of high-capacity desktop drives targeted at mainstream and high-performance PCs and advanced storage applications. The product enables OEMs and system builders to qualify one family of drives from a premier provider for a wide range of storage applications.

It's available for $64.99 with a $20 rebate that expires at the end of the month.

While I'm on the subject of hard drives, MacMall has a Fantom Drives 120gb external usb hard drive for $39.99 after two $15 mail-in rebates. A few months ago, I bought a Fantom 250gb firewire external drive from MacMall and I've been extremely happy with it and have used it for weekly local backups and I even keep my iTunes library on it so it doesn't take up space on my primary drive.

New Egg has quite a few products available for just 99 cents after rebates. The most you'll have to pay before rebates for any of the products on their 99 cent page is $35.99 for an external enclosure, but there's a lot more including ethernet switches, wireless cards and thumb drives.

Want online storage, but don't want to pay a monthly price? Streamload is offering 25gb of storage free for any kind of media storing and can also be used for off-site backups.

If you want to get out and shop for great deals, CompUSA will be having a Moonlight Madness sale for four hours only this Friday, October 6 from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. The link above leads you to a flyer for the sale with some sweet deals including a Desktop PC for $299.98 and a 25 pack of DVD=R or DVR-R media for $9.99. Check out the flyer for even more.

Best Buy has a 10-12% off coupon online for the month of October. You must be a rewards zone member or Best Buy Credit Card holder to be able to take advantage of th savings.

One last deal, Dreamhost, who hosts a few of my websites aside from The Mac Zone recently completing their ninth year of service, and to celebrate they've increased their disc storage by ten times, seriously. Not only that, they doubled bandwidth on all new and current accounts.

You can get their Crazy Domain Insane plan which now includes 20gb of storage and 2 terabytes of bandidth for only $7.95 a month when you purchase for two years, $9.95 a month when you purchase for the entire year and $9.95 per month plus a $49.95 setup fee when you purchase month to month. Also included with Crazy Domain Insane is a free domain name for a year, 24 hour email tech support by email and several other features.

If that wasn't enough, they increase your storage space and bandwidth for every week you are with them, and to make this even sweeter, I have two promo codes you can enter to get a discount on either the 1-yr prepayment or the month-to-month Crazy Domain Insane plan. Use promo code "themaczone" for $50 off when you pay a year in advance, bringing your total to $69.88. You can use the same promo code to waive the $49.95 setup fee on the month-to-month payment plan. If you would like a promo code for any of Dreamhost's other hosting plans, leave a comment and I'll post the code either in the comments or in an update to this post.
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Free Files: Week of 10/02/06

Free Files
Why pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars when you can find something just as good as Microsoft Office or pretty much any other commercial software available online for free. Introducing Free Files on themazone.net. Every week I'll try to highlight not only free alternates to the high dollar software, but also some good freeware finds that have found their way to my applications folder.

Xtorrent
[ Click here to read more ]
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