As I wrote a while ago, I had been having hosting troubles for this blog. Those days are now past, as last night, My Dream App web programmer Scott Meinzer helped me move the site over to a blazingly fast dedicated server, hosted by 1&1. (Major kudos to Scott. His internet was acting up so he actually drove over to his workplace to use their wifi in the car. I can't thank him enough.) I know, I know, some of you warned me about 1&1's service in the previous blog post, but no worries... I've had nothing but good service running a dedicated box with them for MDA.

What does that mean? Well, my site should now be completely Digg proof, and should run significantly faster. It's like a fresh install of OS X! I'm loving the snappiness.

And, probably of more interest to you guys, is I have not one, but three previews coming up for cool new apps (and a cool new update). The first should be up today or tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Ah, and a final note... I've been resisting posting about my ongoing project on this blog, with the misguided motivation of separating personal stuff from work, or something. But then I realized two things. First, it's cool stuff, so why not? Second, we've been giving away free apps, and I should've let you guys know! So. For a limited time, while Round 2 of voting just ended, along with the chance for voters to walk away with a free copy of the excellent Mori.

That's it for now... lots of stuff coming soon.

Just a week after my preview, Dave Watanabe's Xtorrent is now available publicly in public beta form. The build will expire when the beta testing period is over, and you can read some release notes on Dave's blog. If you didn't read the preview, Xtorrent is a new BitTorrent application that, among other things, features a truly beautiful UI and unique total search integration, so torrents can easily be searched for and started within the app with just a few clicks. Enjoy everyone, this is a pretty awesome app!

With the RIAA suing grandparents and children every week and P2P apps gaining a reputation for carrying spyware and viruses, many people have been switching to BitTorrent over the past few years. Today, it's estimated that BitTorrent downloads are using over 30% of the internet's entire bandwidth and some people are even claiming that it is threatening net neutrality. I know they've been blaming my blog as well for tying up the internet, but I'll admit it, torrents are a little bit more popular than PhillRyu.com.

The thing is, despite BitTorrent's popularity, torrent apps have always remained a bit hard to use unlike apps like Limewire, forcing users to wade through torrent trackers, find their file, make sure it has enough seeders, and then open the downloaded torrent file in their torrent app of choice to begin the download. Not the most user friendly process for us, uh, media enthusiasts.

That's why I was pretty excited to hear from my friend David Watanabe that his next app is fixing these problems once and for all. And, you guys, my readers, are the first to see what this solution is. It's called Xtorrent, and it's BitTorrent done right. Continue reading...

It's been non-stop for me over the past week as we've judged the thousands of entries that came in for My Dream App and picked 24 finalists. Here are my thoughts on them as a whole.

A good 80% were uninspired, infeasible (probably the most common reason for eliminating entries), or already done. 15% were decent but not well fleshed out. We were judging looking at the potential of an idea as well as its current form, but a lot of them just didn't have much beyond the one good idea. Continue reading...

It's been in the works for forever, and thanks to some amazing work by David Lanham and Renn of Atacama Design, the new look for MacThemes is finally ready to be shown off. Of note, the nav bar itself probably took us a good three weeks to figure out as we had to come up with something functional and fitting in with the whole "designer's desk" theme we have going. Some of you designers out there can probably sympathize with the headaches the site's visual metaphor caused. But it's all good now.

To check out the designs, visit the just-started thread over at MacThemesForums here. MacThemes should be back up and running better than ever before by October. The cool part? This is only the first of some pretty cool GUI customization related news to come. I should have some pretty big news for you guys in the next week or two.