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...

Nearly three years ago, with the release of iTunes 4, Apple accidentally made piracy easy for users. With a few clicks, anyone could start streaming their iTunes library over the internet. People immediately started trading links and even developing applications to suck those downloads down. Today, this feature remains in iTunes, though it was quickly neutered into a "stream your library within your local area network without downloads allowed" form; a natural reaction when remembering Apple's new relationship with several major music companies, thanks to the just-opened iTunes Music Store.

Developers Andrew Kazmierski and Mark Davis began showing me builds of a new app nearly a year ago that would remove these restrictions and allow easy internet music library sharing once again. I think my response to the idea went something like this: "Musicast sounds pretty cool, but wouldn't it be RIAA bait? Sure, there are some legitimate uses for it, but it seems like an app that mainly promotes using iTunes for piracy." Continue reading...

Just over a month ago (and shortly after being featured in my Top Ten list of Most Beautiful OS X Apps), the awesome Cocoa Tetris client, Quinn, was pulled from Simon Haertel's site due to legal threats from The Tetris Company. (You can view the actual threat here. As readers pointed out, the whole thing seemed rather fishy (and The Tetris Company's past actions extremely sketchy). However, Simon had to make sure everything was A-OK before feeling comfortable distributing Quinn again.

Today brings good news, in the form of an email in my inbox from Simon.

"After investigating the legal situation thoroughly with the help of several people, including the EFF, I am now sure that Quinn doesn't violate any copyrights or trademarks. All this stuff has dragged on _far_ longer than I expected, but now I really hope I can concentrate on programming again "

Awesome to hear Simon! Go grab the latest version of Quinn, slap on the awesome replacement icon (as pictured) by Susumu, and start hosting some games. I hereby declare today to be Quinn day... or something. Actually, disregard that comment, and just go play some Tetris. Woohoo!

I don't have time these days to enjoy much procrastination, but when I do, I've been spending increasingly more of my time at YouTube. If you haven't checked it out at this point, YouTube is basically the Flickr for home movies and has rapidly become one of the most popular websites on the internet. (#10 now, according to Alexa. Talk about a stratospheric climb in popularity.)

So how'd they do it? Well, as any YouTuber will tell you, there's a lot of crap out there, and you have to wade through it. But with hundreds of thousands of videos out there, there's also a lot of quality stuff. Some really funny home videos, clips from TV shows like the Colbert Report, animated shorts, etc. And a lot of the fun in the YouTube experience is actually wading through all the crap to find the gems.

The not-so-fun part is the YouTube interface, which admittedly does the job, but in a very spartan way. I wish I could browse YouTube with the same ease and visual luxury that I browse music on iTunes Music Store, ya know? Continue reading...

While yesterday's preview of Leopard didn't show too much (I'm talking about the "top secret" features that Steve left out this time around), it did show enough to, well, make quite a few shareware and freeware applications somewhat obsolete. We all know that Apple doesn't have a problem scalping the Mac shareware market for good ideas (think Watson), and ultimately I don't have a huge problem with it as long as Apple's solutions are better. But whether it's justifiable or not what they do, they have done it, and are continuing to do it with OS X Leopard. Here's a list of existing 3rd party applications that are going to find themselves losing a lot of sales or a lot of downloads in the upcoming months with 10.5's upcoming release. Or, alternatively and rather optimistically, you can take it as a list of applications to hold you over and in many cases provide satisfying near-Leopard functionality until you can get your hands on the upgrade. Continue reading...

I thought I caught a glimpse of one of our widgets at Widget Machine in the keynote yesterday, but as it turns out, there were two of them! Both VoiceNotes and Statosphere showed up in the brief display of the Dashboard. It's always cool seeing our products get some Apple loving! (And hopefully even more tonight, crossing my fingers about the Apple Design Awards.) Also a note, kudos to our friends at Monkey Business Labs get their Package Tracker widget shown there as well. Thanks to Engadget for the photo.

Screensavers have become, in a way, a relic. Today, their original use of "saving screens" from burn-in and ghosting is no longer needed with modern monitors, and screensavers have become used solely for entertainment or security purposes (lock out strangers). That having been said, they're still enormously popular, even built-in to Mac OS X, and since there are literally hundreds of them out there I decided to share my personal list of my ten favorite ones. All Intel compatible, all top notch in coolness, quirkiness, or the relaxation factor, and ultimately gathered through what probably amounts to many hours of screensaver crawling. Enjoy! Continue reading...

I've been itching to get my hands on Shiira 2 since I read the preview posted on Delusions of Grandeur a few days ago, and I'm sure you guys have too. Which is why I was psyched when a MacThemesForums member found a link to a build uploaded the 19th. Admittedly it's still pretty buggy, and the preferences are all in Japanese, but hey, whatever, I'm digging the overall slickness and cool features like the tab bar and page info inspector panel.

Enjoy this one while it lasts! (Oh, and before anyone asks, to enable these tabs, you need to turn on the status bar first, then press the little icon on the bottom right (second from the right) to show the tab bar. It was a bit buggy here, so you might have to manually expand it once you toggle it on. (Mouseover to just above the status bar until you get the drag cursor, and pull up.)

Update: New build, uploaded August 1st, can be found here!