Over the last week I've been editing various audio files from a voice-over session for a couple casual games. The developers require the final mixes to be in .ogg format for the game, but that is not a native format in Snow Leopard.

I've been searching around for the best solution to get ogg files to play natively in QuickTime and iTunes and I came across the following component which allows me to do so. Not only will it playback ogg files but if you open an audio file in QuickTime 7 (not X) you have the ability to export the files as ogg's as well.

http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/download.html#

The next step will be building an Automator action which will automatically convert audio files to the ogg format. Give me a couple more days for that one.

Well based on some obvious visual features its safe to say that Safari 4 beta is the closest thing Mac users have to Chrome.  The rounded tabs at the top seem to mirror that of the Chrome browser as well as the “Show Top Sites” screen.  I’ve been testing it on a Mac so far and it appears to be running smoothly.  One initial point to note is that if you are running Leopard you need to be running the lastest version OS X 10.5.6.  And similarly on Tiger you must be running 10.4.11. For a full listing of all 150 features which I have yet to identify, check out Apple’s website.

Early Thoughts

Tabs - I love the fact that the tabs now occupy the area where the titlebar used to be.  Although it only adds 22 pixels more of browsable space, every bit counts.  What I don’t like about the tabs is the decreased clickable area when trying to move them around or create new windows.  Because the titlebar is no longer there the user now has to click on the tab bar to move the windows around.  What we are left with is a tab bar that also acts as the titlebar, so now to rearrange the tabs you are forced to click on the right corner as opposed to anywhere on the tab itself. Coverflow - I like the coverflow option for the history and bookmarks pages, the only problem is that they don’t load the previews by themselves.  So far the only way I can get the coverflow preview to be visible is by having to navigate to the page, have it load and then return to coverflow mode to get the preview.  Perhaps it’s still trying to load all my previews four hours later? Page zoom - I appreciate the page zoom addition I just think it would have gone hand in hand a full-screen feature as well.  Prior to page zoom I would do the ‘control + (mouse scroll)’ to enlarge an entire page and not just the text.  Now with page zoom you can do that within the Safari window.  I was hoping for a full-screen browsing mode just as the added to iWork ’09 but oh well.  I guess I’m the only one looking for that feature. Note: If you are looking for a browser for the Mac that does do full-screen browsing check out Shiira. In terms of MobileMe bookmark syncing I haven’t had any issues thus far and my bookmarks seem to sync properly between Safari 3 & 4 both ways. Other than some feature nitpicking I’ve been happy with Safari 4 beta so far.  The Jury is still out on the search bar vs the Inquisitor add-on, but I think Inquisitor might still have a stronger case.

Probably the most popular options for running virtual machines on the Mac are one of two options: Parallel Desktop or VMware Fusion. Both are good working options but neither of them, aside from the trial, are free.   For those of you looking for a free way to experiment with foreign operating systems give Virtualbox a try.  It's an Open Source virtualizer that can handle a large range of OS's including the recently released Windows 7 Beta. Earlier this week Virtualbox was updated and now supports the guest Additions for Windows 7 which make it that much more functional.

With the release of iTunes 8 various features have been updated, introduced and unfortunately removed.  The ability to toggle the genre column on and off in list view with the browser open is indeed one of them.  I came across this solution on Macosxhints.com. It will give you the ability to remove the genre column and regain your artist/album space. In the terminal type: If you so choose to reverse this action you can do so by typing the same text into the terminal but change the ending from FALSE to TRUE.

Here is a neat program to add iTunes functionality to your menubar, because hey! It's a waste of space anyways unless you load it with icons like I do. This app is available from the You Software and is completely free. Like the above image You Control can be used as media buttons as well song ratings and song selection. What I liked most about it was the scrolling now playing option (which you can set to infinite) to continually show the track info you want to see. Check it out.

Since upgrading to Wordpress 2.6 I noticed the Add Media buttons appear to be missing and in fullscreen mode are greyed out. The lack of 'Add an Image' and 'Add Video' buttons make it much harder for adding pictures and youtube videos to your blog posts and pages. A quick fix for this is to install the following Wordpress plugin TinyMCE Advanced by Andrew Ozz. This plugin will give you easy image adding and many other customizable features. "This plugin adds 15 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras."

Many thanks to Daniel Parnell for the continued support of his HTTPMail plugin. An update has been released for Leopard 10.5.3 fixing the Hotmail support for use in the Mail.app. You can download the update HERE. Thanks Daniel.

Today is the release date of Firefox 3. Join the community and help break the download day record by downloading Firefox 3 TODAY. And, while your there check out a launch party.

Myself and many others had a bit of an issue when updating QuickTime to the latest 7.5 release. The updated version played back many of my avi files with video but no audio. The simple solution is to install this QuickTime component, Perian, which is a free open source solution which adds support for various file formats.

Perian enables QuickTime application support for additional Media Types:

• AVI, FLV, and MKV file formats
• MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivX, H.264, FLV1, FSV1, VP6, H263I, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Windows Media Audio v1 & v2, Flash ADPCM, Xiph Vorbis (in Matroska), MPEG Layer II Audio
• AVI support for: AAC, AC3 Audio, H.264, MPEG4, and VBR MP3
• Subtitle support for SSA and SRT