Company of Heroes Complete: Campaign Edition For Mac

Sid Meier’s Civilization V For Mac


| Platform: | Mac OS X 10.5+ |
| Last update: | 15 January 2010 |
| Developer: | Rosanne Cashriel |
| File type: | .zip |
| File size: | 141.5 Kb |
| License: | Free |
| Download: | CLICK HERE |
Chrome for the Mac moves nearer to beta
Programmers have mostly overcome a crucial hurdle to releasing a beta version of Chrome for the Mac — printing support — but several Windows 7 features will not make the cut for the present 4.x version of the browser.GV Connect Widget 1.7 - Call/send SMS messages to contacts using your Google Voice number
GV Connect Widget 1.7 Are you looking for an easy way to call or send SMS messages to your contacts using your Google Voice number right from your fingertips? GV Connect is your answer:




Escape the Museum game released
Macgamestore.com and Gogii Games have released Escape the Museum, a new casual puzzler for the Mac. It costs $19.95 and a playable demo is available for download.
Escape the Museum is a hidden object-style puzzle game that takes place in the National Museum of History. You join Susan Anderson, who experiences an earthquake while touring the museum with her daughter Caitlin. She must make her way from room to room, navigating through a maze of puzzles to find her daughter.
The game features 25 puzzles, mini-games, 60 hidden object levels and other challenges.
The world we live in is increasingly wireless. We surf the Web over wireless networks, make calls on our mobile phones, and have a dozen remote controls for all the devices in our house. The iSkin Cerulean F1+TX combo brings the wireless world to your iPod by cutting the cord between your headphones and your music player; it also functions as a wireless headset for your mobile phone’s handsfree-calling features. But, as with every new technology, there are tradeoffs to be made.
As the name suggests, there are two parts to the F1+TX combo: the F1 part is the actual headphones; the TX is a small dongle, about the width and thickness of a second-generation iPod nano, that attaches to your iPod’s dock-connector port. In addition, the package contains a USB cable for charging the F1; one end hosts a standard USB A connector, the other a connector iSkin calls “Mini-A 4 pin” (though I believe it's actually a USB Micro-A). Also in the box are an alternate pair of plastic ear hooks, some foam earphone covers, and an extra pair of rubber rings for the earphones to allow for a variety of different fits. Finally, iSkin’s thrown in a USB adapter for the TX so that you can stream sound from your computer to the F1 earphones, as well.
The F1 headset resembles two Bluetooth earpieces strung together with a thin cable. All of the controls are on the right earpiece: a large multi-function button with a status LED on the outside; next- and previous-track controls on the top; volume-up and -down buttons and a charging port on the bottom; and the on/off power switch on the back. A small microphone is hidden in the front part of the right earpiece. Even though these two earpieces aren't any larger than your average Bluetooth headset, the fact that you’re wearing one on each ear does make you look, for better or worse, like Lobot from The Empire Strikes Back.
Using the F1 and TX together is pretty straightforward. You’ll want to charge the F1 first, which you do by plugging it into a computer's USB port (unless you want to spend an extra $25 for iSkin's AC adapter). iSkin says the initial charge should take about six hours, whereas subsequent charges will take only 2 to 3 hours. I let it charge overnight and everything was ready to go by the morning. Although I didn’t subject the F1 to in-depth battery testing, I found that the batteries lasted several days of moderate listening—as long as you remember to turn the earphones off when you’re not using them, something that’s easy to forget to do. The few times I forgot, I dug the headphones out later only to find them dead. It would be nice if iSkin built in an auto-shutoff or sleep function, though I can see that being problematic for those who also use the system's phone functions.
Once the F1 is charged, you need to pair it with the TX, which you do by turning the headphones on while holding down the multi-function button. Then you plug the TX into the dock-connector port of your iPod; it ought to work with any unit with Apple's standard 30-pin connector, though iSkin promises compatibility only as far back as the first-generation iPod mini. I tested the system with a number of units and it worked fine with pretty much all of them, including an iPhone. The iPhone offered to switch into airplane mode to reduce interference; I did find that I got slightly less static in the audio when I did so.
One difference between iPhone and iPod use: When using the Cerulean system to listen to music with the iPhone, I had to adjust the volume using the controls on the earphones; changing it on the iPhone had no effect. With an iPod, I could adjust both volume levels. And the volume of the music streaming from the iPhone was a little quieter than I'd have liked, even if I turned up the F1's volume all the way.
The TX draws power from the iPod’s battery, so expect your player's juice to drain at a slightly faster rate than usual. You can plug in the included USB cable to power the TX, which has the same 4-pin connector as the F1, but, again, you’ll need to plug it into a USB port on your computer unless you shell out for the extra adapter.
In addition to listening to music, you can also use the F1 as a Bluetooth headset for your mobile phone. Once you’ve paired it with your phone, you can use the controls on the F1 to answer calls, redial, adjust the volume, or put calls on hold or mute, all of which worked well in my tests.

You can even use the F1 with both a phone and an iPod simultaneously, though this feature didn’t always behave as expected. The procedure for pairing with both is somewhat finicky, requiring that you follow the steps in the manual in the precise order given, pairing first with the phone, then with the TX, then reminding it to re-pair with the phone. Even then, I found my iPhone wouldn’t always recognize the F1 when I tried to make calls unless I unplugged the TX from my iPod. And if you have the F1 paired with both your phone and the TX, the controls on the F1 default to their iPod functions until you receive a call.
On the other hand, such a situation is one where the system's integration shines: If a call comes in when listening to music, the F1 fades out the audio volume and then pauses playback, replacing your audio with a phone ringer and letting you answer the call if you like. Once you hang up, or if you ignore the call, music playback resumes and the audio fades in again. When you get everything set up correctly, this feature is a great example of convergence.
The included dock-connector-to-USB adapter lets you use the TX to listen to your computer's audio. Just pop the TX into the 30-pin receptor on the adapter and plug it into a USB port, and the TX will appear in the Output tab of the Sound preference pane. You’ll be able to stream stereo audio directly from your Mac to your headphones, without any need for additional drivers.
(Since Leopard supports the A2DP Bluetooth protocol, those using Mac OS X 10.5 can instead pair the F1 directly to their Mac without using the adapter. However, the A2DP support in Leopard is a bit shaky; I found that I frequently experienced interference and static. Using the TX and USB adapter proved a far better experience. Tiger users can also pair the F1 with their Mac, but it will function only as a mono headset.)
Besides using the F1 with your computer as Bluetooth headphones, you can also opt to use it as a headset for programs such as Skype or iChat. I’ve run into trouble pairing Bluetooth headsets with my Mac in the past, especially under Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4), but the process was reasonably smooth with the F1 and Leopard. After running the Bluetooth Setup Assistant, both headset and headphone profiles appeared in Sound preferences' Output screen, and an entry for the headset appeared in the Input screen.
The F1’s sound quality for music listening is frankly disappointing. Music—whether transmitted by the TX attached to an iPod or my computer, or with the F1 paired directly with my MacBook—sounded tinny and there was a definite lack of bass. I don’t consider myself much of an audiophile, but I much preferred the sound from a sub-$20 pair of Sony MDR-G42s to that of the F1 headphones. There’s also the matter of wireless interference, which in my testing caused occasional static and choppy sound. In terms of using the F1 for phone conversations, the sound quality ranked as average.
Controls on the F1 are easy to use once you remember which set of rocker switches is responsible for volume adjustments and which controls audio playback. In addition, some buttons do different things depending on the device to which the system is connected. For example, when connected to a mobile phone as a headset, the big, multi-function button on the side of the F1 is used to answer a call (press once) or ignore a call (hold until you hear a beep). However, when connected to an iPod, the same button plays or pauses audio playback. (When paired with an iPhone for both headset and music-listening functions, the button acts as Play/Pause until a call comes in, at which point it lets you answer or ignore the call.) The system's instruction manual offers a table of functions, but you probably won’t want to have to dig it out every time you need to refer to it.
At the end of the day, the F1+TX is not quite the many-devices, one-headphone gadget of the future, but some of that is the fault of the Bluetooth protocol. The multi-device functionality is very cool when it works, but it may take more fiddling than you want to do, especially when you’re concerned with the practicalities of making and taking phone calls while on the go. The F1+TX is also an expensive proposition, even given its versatility. But if your primary concern is freedom from the tyranny of wired headphones, then the F1+TX combo may be acceptable, as long as you can excuse the disappointing audio quality.
Themes FX 3.0 for Keynote released
Jumsoft on Wednesday announced the release of Keynote Themes FX 3.0, a package of seven new themes to be used with Apple’s Keynote presentation software. Keynote Themes FX 3.0 costs $59; upgrades for previous versions cost $29.
Keynote Themes FX 3.0 comprises seven new themes that incorporate moving background graphics. Users familiar with previous editions will recognize the first five themes: Water, Redsmoke, Brushstroke, Cells and Wood - Fibre. New to this edition are Ocean Vivacity and Autumn Tune.
Jumsoft claims that each design incorporates a separate style with background animation that won’t distract the audience. Ocean Vivacity features swimming fish in a peaceful ocean scene suitable for summery, cheerful presentations. Autumn Tune has falling leaves that evoke “a dreamy and calm mood.”
System requirements call for Keynote 3.0.2 or later.
Some of the changes in Leopard are obvious—Time Machine, Quick Look, Spaces, and so on. Others are more subtle. Here are some of our favorite tips and tricks for working with some of the lesser known new features in System Preferences and Terminal.
Reveal Login Items in the Finder - Ever wondered where some of those items in your Login Items list (in the Accounts preference pane) came from? In Tiger, you could hold your mouse cursor over an item to see its path. In Leopard, it’s even easier: just control-click on any login item and then choose Reveal In Finder from the contextual menu.—Dan Frakes
Easily Remove Third-Party Screen Savers - In Tiger, if you installed third-party screen savers and later wanted to remove one, you had to navigate to your user folder/Library/Screen Savers and then find and delete the unwanted plug-in. In Leopard, you can just go to the Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane, control-click on the offending screen saver, and choose Move To Trash from the contextual menu.—Dan Frakes

Get Rid of Screen Savers: In the past, getting rid of third-party screen savers was a pain. In Leopard, you can simply right-click and throw them In the Trash.
Uncover Advanced Printer Options - In OS X 10.4, if you wanted to connect your Mac to a nonstandard printer, or to a standard printer using a nonstandard protocol (such as some PCL-only Windows-shared printers), you used the Advanced setup screen by clicking on the Add button in the Printer Setup Utility’s toolbar, and then option-clicking on the More Printers button and selecting Advanced from the pop-up menu. From there you could choose connections such as a FireWire printer, a Bluetooth modem printer, or a Fax Printer, among many others. In Leopard, that Advanced screen has moved to a more accessible spot, but it’s hidden by default. To reach it in OS X 10.5, first click on the plus sign (+) in the Print & Fax preference pane. When the next window appears, control-click on its toolbar and choose Customize Toolbar. When the customization sheet appears, drag the Advanced button into the toolbar, and click on Done. When you click on this new button, you’ll be presented with an advanced configuration pane.—Rob Griffiths
Access Print & Fax Preferences Directly from Some Programs - You probably already know that command-P is the generic shortcut for displaying the Print dialog box. But did you know that, in some programs, you can press command-P again, while the Print dialog box is on screen? What happens next—and whether this is a useful tip or not—depends on the program you’re using. In Apple’s Automator, Font Book, iChat, Mail, Safari, Script Editor, and TextEdit, for example, the second command-P will open the Print & Fax preference pane—a useful shortcut if you need to access that pane just before printing. In Preview, pressing command-P twice will actually print the current document.—Rob Griffiths

Copy Parental Controls: If you’re setting up multiple user accounts with parental controls, you can copy the settings from one account to another.
Copy and Paste Parental Control Settings - If you’re setting up multiple user accounts with parental controls, and the accounts will have similar settings, first set up one account. Then, in the Parental Controls list, select that account, click on the Action button at the bottom of the window, and choose Copy Settings For Account. Then, to apply those settings to another account, select that account, click on the Action button, and choose Paste Settings To Account. Even if you don’t plan on configuring each account exactly the same way, you can use this technique to copy a general set of settings and then edit them as necessary, rather than starting from scratch multiple times.—Dan Frakes
Reset the Printing System - Tiger’s Printer Setup Utility provided a Reset Printing System command that could often solve printing problems when all other troubleshooting techniques failed. But Printer Setup Utility is nowhere to be found in Leopard. Fortunately, Reset Printing System is still around; it’s just well hidden. To find it, open the Print & Fax preference pane, and then control-click on any printer in the Printers list; you’ll find the command in the contextual menu.—Dan Frakes

Reset the Printing System: In Tiger, resetting a printer meant a trip to Printer Setup Utility; now this feature is hidden in the Print & Fax preference pane.
Find Out What’s On - Sometimes when you have Universal Access turned on, your Mac will start doing strange things—using its display to impersonate an X-ray machine, reciting the name of the currently selected item, and so on. This is usually the result of a slip of the fingers combined with a Universal Access feature being mistakenly switched on. Leopard can help you quickly identify the problem. Open the Universal Access preference pane and enable the Show Universal Access Status In The Menu Bar option. That done, you should see a Universal Access icon in the Mac’s menu bar. Click on that, and you’ll see a list of Universal Access options and the current state of each—Mouse Keys On, for example. Note that this truly is a status menu: it shows only what’s on and off. To fix the problem, you’ll have to go back to the Universal Access preference pane.—Chris Breen
Navigate Terminal Tabs - One of the most welcome new features in Terminal is the addition of tabs. Now, instead of having five separate Terminal windows open, you can have just one window containing five tabs. Creating a new tab is as simple as pressing command-T, and you can switch between tabs by pressing command-shift-[ (left bracket) and command-shift-] (right bracket). If you find those last two combinations awkward to remember and to execute, you can reassign them in the Keyboard Shortcuts section of the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane. But that’s time-consuming, and you’ll have to repeat it on each machine you use. Instead, try pressing command-shift and the left- or right-arrow key. These undocumented shortcuts are, for me at least, easier to use and remember than using the brackets. If you leave out the shift key, these shortcuts will cycle between open windows.—Rob Griffiths
Manage Terminal Tabs - Terminal tabs can perform many of the same tricks as Safari tabs. You can turn any tab into a new window simply by dragging it off the tab bar. You can rearrange tabs by clicking and holding on a tab, sliding it along the tab bar, and then releasing the mouse button; as you move one tab, the others will jump out of the way. You can also merge multiple windows into one tabbed window. If you have many open windows and want to combine them all, just use the Window: Merge All Windows menu command. If you’d rather be more selective about which windows get merged, you can drag and drop a stand-alone window into the tab area of another window. (For this trick to work, the tab bar must be visible in both windows.) To set the tab bar to be always visible, use the View: Show Tab Bar menu item.—Rob Griffiths
Customize the Command Line - In previous versions of OS X, you’d see a “Welcome to Darwin!” message whenever you opened a new Terminal window. In OS X 10.5, though, all you’ll see is the date and time of your last new Terminal window. If you’d like the old welcome message back—or any other welcome message, for that matter—open Terminal and enter cd /etc, press return, and then type sudo pico motd. That second command launches a text editor and loads a new file called motd (Message Of The Day). Type whatever you like for a message (for instance, "Welcome to the land where text is king"), press control-X (for Exit), press Y (for Yes, to save changes), and then press return (to accept the file name, which will be shown as motd). From now on, new Terminal windows will display your new greeting, right below the date and time of the last login.—Rob Griffiths
Busy Twitter a poster child for new communications
Microblogging site Twitter had its busiest day ever Tuesday and needs more than 30 servers to help its thousands of users keep each other posted about their lives, founder Blaine Cook said Wednesday.
Cook's brief presentation was a highlight of opening day at the first Emerging Communications Conference (EComm) in Mountain View, Calif. The fast-paced, three-day meeting is focused on new communications applications for both the wired and mobile Internet. Along with nascent ideas, participants talked about looming challenges.
One of Twitter's hardest jobs is scaling up, according to Cook. The site, launched in 2006, lets users post 140-character statements about what they're doing or thinking in real time. In response to a question from the audience, Cook wouldn't say exactly how many people use Twitter or how many servers it takes to host it. But he did say that until recently the company had 30 servers, and that wasn't enough. Scaling features is another challenge: It would be hard to add groups and maintain Twitter's simple interface, he said.
The peak day of Twitter activity on Tuesday coincided with the popular South By Southwest media conference, where some participants reportedly complained about the service's performance sagging under heavy message-posting by participants. Cook said he was closely monitoring site performance that day and believes it was the Wi-Fi network at the conference that ran out of breath.
Several presenters at EComm focused on bringing together data networking and voice. One was Irv Shapiro, CEO and chief technology officer of startup IfByPhone, which showcased a platform for making applications available to any phone. For example, users could call a toll-free number, say phone numbers for a starting point and a destination, and then get directions over the phone. The system could make a Web site accessible by phone without the Web developer having to do any voice-recognition programming, because that function would be hidden in IfByPhone's infrastructure, he said. Also on the program was OpenMoko, a spin-off of First International Computer that is developing a mobile phone with both open-source hardware and software. This will let developers create both applications and specialized devices for niche markets, said Michael Shiloh, an evangelist for OpenMoko.
Independent telecommunications analyst David Isenberg cut into all the excitement by warning developers that politics could put an end to such conferences. The one-time AT&T Bell Labs researcher said carriers want to effectively dictate what applications can go on the network. Their lobbying already stifled competitive local exchange carriers that wanted to sell services over existing lines, he said. Today, carriers such as Verizon and AT&T are rolling out services such as TV to their broadband subscribers.
"If you guys care about your jobs, you should care about the politics in Washington, D.C., because the telephone companies will shut you down or buy you out," Isenberg said.
IDC analyst Will Stofega shares that concern.
"Telcos need to figure out what they want to be," Stofega said. "There has to be some sort of agreement on how this will work," or carriers will form a bottleneck to getting innovative services out to consumers and businesses, he said. Developers of mobile applications already voice this complaint about U.S. cellular operators.
However, Stofega believes that where there's a hot application, there's a way. Motivated developers will always find a way to get some applications out to the network and consumers will pick up on them, he said.


UnifyCamino 1.7b6 - Changes color of Camino bookmarks toolbar and more. (Free)
Mac OSX TigerV v 5.1 for Windows



Mac OSx86: 10.4.8 Tiger VMware Installation Guide
WaterField offers MacBook Air case
You Control updated for Leopard
MacProVideo offers new Logic Pro tutorials
Video tutorial company MacProVideo has released several new videos for users of Apple’s Logic Pro digital audio workstation software.
The first release of the new series is “Logic 404: Mixing Electronica.” The video is hosted by electronic producer Olav Basoski and offers tips and tricks on how to get the best mix in Logic.
The second video features J.F. Brissette, the musical director of Cirque Du Soliel’s “O” teaching users how to use WaveBurner, Apple’s CD mastering software. “Logic 305: WaveBurner” will show users how to properly compile and output audio CDs, covering issues like CDDA frames, index points, track names and CD text.
The final video, “Logic 206: ES2 Exposed” features long time contributor Steve Horelick. In this video Horelick shows you the ins & outs of sound design using Logic’s ES2 synthesizer. more detail...