Yesterday this was posted at “The Unofficial Apple Weblog”:

If you’re feeling overwhelmed from the onslaught of YouTube forwards, newsreader headlines, Miniclip games and software demos we tirelessly blog for you, Procrastinatr just might be your solution. Even though it’s only a 0.8b version, this handy little app can help you make molehills out of mountains and start managing your time again.

Turns out, the app in question was a piece of malware!! A few hours later the post was amended:

TUAW readers: I sincerely apologize for the damage that Procrastinatr did to iCal. I didn’t notice any discrepancies in my calendar after trying this out (as almost all of my calendars are synced from Google Calendar), but please know that I have learned my lesson, and I will take much better care in the future before posting anything like this again.

I’d love to totally hack on the guy since TUAW is part of the Weblogs, Inc. Network family of blogs and I dislike that group. But working for a news publication, I see how hard everyone pushes to be first to announce any little bit of news, or in this case a new product. Best coverage doesn’t seem to be as important as First coverage. I don’t understand this attitude… most web surfers have their favorite sites to visit…they’re not constantly rotating through sites to see which one gets the story up five minutes ahead of the others. *shrug* But I’m just a reader…how should I know what readers want?

Anyway, this frantic scramble to publish first leads to problems like this one. How much trust has this person lost now? I know I won’t be first to try any software TUAW links to in the future!

DLO Flexible Dock Cable for iPod shuffle

I don’t have an iPod Shuffle, but if I did, this would be a pretty neat gizmo to have since the USB ports on my iMac are on the back of the system.

Since I bought my new iMac I’ve been spending almost all my time in OS X “Tiger”. I even shelled out $100 for a .Mac account so I could sync bookmarks and mail accounts and stuff between my 3 active Macs.

Then I found out that .Mac only syncs Safari bookmarks. Doh! But I’m kind of liking Safari 2.0, especially the quick and easy RSS reading.

But I really hated losing Firefox’s cool “Find at you type” feature. So I went back to the ‘fox (not a bad thing, mind you…its an excellent browser).

Then today, I stumbled upon AcidSearch. This is a little ‘plug in’ for Safari that gives you mega-super-duper search options from the search bar, AND the ‘find-as-you-type’ feature I’d been missing out on.

So far it seems to work great. And better yet, its freeware. Check it out, Mac users!

Apple’s Jobs says company will support Podcasts
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Computer Inc. (AAPL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) will support and organize podcasts in the next version of its iTunes and iPod software, the company said on Monday.
read the rest…

Sweet, even though I’ve already shelled out $20 for iPodderX. But its a little flakey. In fact, every client I’ve used has been a little flakey. This news kind of lends legitamacy to Podcasting, and hopefully Apple will do it right.

Check this out! I want one!
radioShark is essentially Tivo for your radio. Hook it up to your Mac and set it to record Car Talk (or whatever) every week, then dump it to your iPod for listening to at your leisure!

Because I’m nothing if not fickle, I’ve stopped using AmphetaDesk as my newsreader. Yes, I know I raved about it, and I still think its pretty sweet software, and works across operating systems to boot.

But now I’ve become a NewNewsWire Lite fan. Its Mac OS X only though. But its still free, and it offers both a traditional 3-pane view of your feeds as well as a ‘pop-up’ listing from the dock, a la Slashdock (which is also a great free OS X newsreader, but isn’t really conducive to casual browsing of feeds).

Actually this isn’t as strange a reversal as it might seem, as I liked NetNewsWire a lot when I first tried it, but it costs a fair amount of coin ($40). I never noticed the free “lite” version before (scroll all the way down the page). Thanks to Elaine for pointing it out…

(Click for full-sized image)

JapanConsuming.com: Apple the fashion brand

Interesting article about how wildly the Japanese are embracing the iPod Mini, and why.

I’ve been trying a bunch of different RSS Feed readers, but I think I’ve found the perfect (for me — these things are highly personal) solution. It comes in two parts.

First, get yourself a copy of AmphetaDesk. This is a cross-platform (written in Perl, so it’ll run on Windows, Mac OS 9 or X, Linux…basically anything that’ll run Perl I guess) utility to pull down RSS feeds. It uses your web browser to display the results. It works great! Problem is…it doesn’t look all that hot.

So second, get the bolt-on product, AmphetaFrames. You install it by renaming a directory in your AmphetaDisk install and replacing it with the AmphetaFrames directory. Its painless.

Last note for those of us who use quality browsers (something Mozilla based: Mozilla, FireFox, Camino), you have to make a small hack to a file. (Note that there’s a small typo on that page. In two places you’ll see # print out the http headers. $connection->send_basic_header(); there should be a line break so that $connection starts a new line. This typo is in both the ‘before’ and ‘after’ code segments.)

And voila, a flexible, good looking, free RSS reader that you can use on all your machines. You could even run it on a server and log into it from various places.

Click to see a full-size image.

PodWorks

OH MY GOD! You folks who have an iPod and more than one Mac, you NEED this software. It allows you to copy songs from your iPod onto your Mac, making syncing two copies of iTunes so much easier.

But get ready to spend the big bucks…the developer wants a whopping $8!!

AirPort Express: A bit of ‘geek heaven’, by, well, me!

A bit of shameless self-promotion on my part; CW asked me to do a quick hands-on of the Airport Express, so I did!