Source: CNET Download Blog

Lengthy recognized as the fastest torrent client for Windows, the Mac edition of uTorrent finally discarded its beta status these days. After almost 3 years of development, two of them in the public eye, the stable version of uTorrent for Mac contains the same protocol enhancements that make the Windows edition so flexible.

Built natively in Cocoa, these include the new uTransport protocol, protocol encryption, distributed hash table, and peer exchange support. uTP is really a fairly new protocol that slows down all connection traffic when a congestion may be detected until the issue has been cleared. It basically prevents one person's connection from crowding out others, and this really is the first time it's been available to Mac users.

Within the blog post announcing the new Mac edition, the vice president of product management for uTorrent's parent company BitTorrent, Simon Morris, noted, "Feature parity is the goal for all of our consumer clients." Though there still are some minor functions not in the Mac version, for example autoshutdown after completion, what's missing doesn't seem to affect the program's overall behavior.

PC Pro School

Seagate Technologies these days announced the very first 3TB external desktop difficult drive, which is capable of using USB 2.0, 3.0 or FireWire 800 connectivity.

The 3.5-inch 3TB FreeAgent GoFlex Desk external difficult drive is compatable with each Windows and Mac OS X systems because it includes a New Technology File System (NTFS) driver for Mac. NTFS allows the generate to store and access files from both Windows and Mac OS X computers without having reformatting.

The generate comes with a regular USB 2.0 interface offering a 480Mbit/sec information transfer speed, but with a separate GoFlex desktop adapter it can be upgraded to USB 3.0 or FireWire 800 to improve file exchange performance by up to 10 times. USB 3.0 has information transfer rates of as much as 4.8Gbit/sec and FireWire 800 supports exchange rates of up to 800Mbit/sec.

"As the definition high quality of digital cameras increases, playback devices such as digital photo frames and MP3 players proliferate and also the use from the Internet for downloading music and video continues to grow, more files accumulate in the home," Kurt Scherf, principle analyst for market research firm Parks Associates, said in a statement. "Consumers who are active in digital media creation and consumption will witness their digital media storage needs develop nine-fold by 2014, driving the demand for higher capacity, easy-to-use storage solutions."

The 3TB GoFlex Desk exterior drive with USB 2.0 adapter lists for $249.99.

Source: Computer World

My iPhone 4 arrived less than 24 hours before the deadline for this column, so rather than an in-depth analysis, you'll need to settle for my very first impressions.

And my very first impression is: Wow! iPhone 4 is noticeably smaller than the iPhone 3GS, and photos do not do its beauty justice. The front and back are slabs of aluminosilicate glass. Only time will tell how durable and scratch-resistant it is, but I've been carrying it in my pocket with keys and coins and do not see any scratches yet.

The "retina display" provides an amazing 326 pixels per inch — four times as many as the iPhone 3GS. Following a side-by-side comparison of photos, text and high-resolution movie, I'm convinced it is the finest smart telephone screen to date by far.

Starting a movie chat with FaceTime, the video calling function, couldn't be easier. A friend calls Face-Time the "grandma function," and I predict Apple will sell millions of iPhone 4s to grandparents, mostly because FaceTime is so simple to use.

iPhone 4 has two cameras - 1 on the front for face-to-face video chatting and a second about the back for showing your surroundings or grandkids - and it's easy to switch between them.

Speaking of the camera, it captures 5 megapixels and includes a built-in LED flash for nevertheless photos, which can remain lit when you shoot video in low-light situations. I discovered that nevertheless pictures and HD movie (at 720p HD) looked much better than anything I've ever seen shot with a camera phone.

Also new in iPhone 4 are its pair of microphones, one for calls, voice commands and voice memos, and one more for FaceTime calls and noise suppression. I made calls whilst driving my convertible with its top down and, unlike with my iPhone 3 GS, individuals said hearing me wasn't a problem.

Another new feature is the stainless steel band that surrounds the iPhone 4. In addition to providing rigidity, it functions as the iPhone 4's antenna. It is difficult to tell if reception is much better than my iPhone 3GS but, regrettably, I've seen no reduction in dropped calls. On the other hand, because it nevertheless uses the same old AT&T cellular network, I'm not surprised.

Finally, the new version of the iPhone operating system totally rocks; I'll tell you more about that next week.

Source: Chron Business

The release of Nova Media's Traffic2Net brings relief to those Mac users who have to monitor just how much bandwidth they use while on a 3G connection. Traffic2Net watches the data flowing via your USB or ExpressCard cell modem, and shows you a running tally in the menu bar. Pop-up alarms could be set to warn you when you are hitting the ceiling of your current connection--or just blowing too a lot of your cell information mindlessly surfing Facebook. Nearly each and every legitimate indicates of getting your MacBook online has a monthly cap on the amount of information you may download, and your Mac will happily blow past that limit by blithely downloading podcasts downloads, while you're sleeping. It's enough to remind some of us--the demographic that fondly remembers the original A-Team--of what it was like to go on the internet in the Reagan administration. Back then, we paid by the hour of on the internet time, an experience we had been glad to forget.

iPhone users who were simultaneously granted kosher tethering from AT&T and a monthly cap on their information usage are temporarily out of luck; Nova Media is still testing iPhone tethering over USB and Bluetooth for accuracy, and expects to have an update out within a few weeks. In the meantime, check out either iStatMenus or MenuMeters, either of which will provide live and cumulative bandwidth statistics, but don't provide Traffic2Net's feature of maintaining those counts over a billing period.

Traffic2Net requires Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6 and runs $15 for U.S. and Canadian residents, €15 for Europeans. A 30-day full trial version is available for download.

Source: PC World

With Mac user ranks swelling with switchers from Windows, often misunderstandings crop up about every system’s implementation of the user interface. One from the sorest points surrounds a basic feature that everyone may believe was settled years ago: cut-and-paste. But the two systems see this function very differently. Now, a developer offers switchers a method to maintain using their old, poor cut-and-paste Windows habits.

Here’s the fundamental issue: the Mac is a graphical interface and promotes the idea of drag-and-drop to move files around the interface. Users drag items from one “container” to another with either a copy or move operation. The Finder changes the cursor icon to reflect the status of the copy/more, it even offers users spring-loaded folders which will automatically open when the user drags an item over it. Drag-and-drop doesn’t use the Clipboard, which is the fundamental concept with the cut-and-paste operation utilized in documents.

Instead, Windows is all about cut and paste. It works for text in a document and with files and folders within the desktop.

For example, on the X vs. XP contest page, the writer dings the Mac simply because it does not support selecting a piece of text and then pasting it onto the desktop. This really is true, of course, but it ignores the Mac way of performing this task, which is to drag text out of a document onto the desktop. This action creates a Clipping file, a stored state from the Clipboard.

Notice that the Windows individual can’t imagine the idea of dragging something more than to Desktop. Windows users don’t interact the exact same way using the graphical interface and can’t grok the basic distinction between Mac and Windows implementations. To a Windows individual, cut and paste are the “natural” functions, not drag and drop.

Enter Kapeli’s moveAddict, a Snow Leopard-only application that offers Windows cut-and-paste file/folder capability to Mac OS X. The $4.99 app uses the Mac-standard Cmd-x/Cmd-v keyboard shortcuts. Developer Bogdan Popescu says that the original data remains untouched until the move is registered by the Finder.

Source: ZD Net