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Elsewhere for Mac OS X takes you elsewhere
Elsewhere: Ambient Nature Sounds is a nice little free app that lives on your menu bar and plays ambient sounds in the background while you work or relax. There are three environments; City, Forest and Beach. Each soundscape has a switch for nighttime or daytime ambience, or the app can change automatically based on your time zone. Elsewhere's sounds seem of high quality, but I think they would best be appreciated on external speakers. You can add the sounds of rain to any of the environments for US$0.99, but I got along fine with the free sounds. I found that in general I liked the night variant, even during the day, except in the forest where some owls or other arboreal denizens were a bit distracting. The sounds are random, so it's not just a short loop endlessly repeating. On headphones the sound was quite good. The audio is stereo, and I thought the best directional effects were on the Beach preset. I don't know if my concentration was any better as a result of using Elsewhere, but I liked having the sound on, which works best for me if it is just above the level of audibility. Elsewhere is a 42 MB download that requires OS X 10.7 or better.
Snow Leopard review
Snow Leopard. Even the name seems to underpromise -- it's the first "big cat" OS X codename to reference the previous version of the OS, and the list of big-ticket new features is seemingly pretty short for a version-number jump. Maybe that's why Apple's priced the 10.6 upgrade disc at just $29 -- appearances and expectations matter, and there's simply not enough glitz on this kitty to warrant the usual $129. But underneath the customary OS X fit and finish there's a lot of new plumbing at work here. The entire OS is now 64-bit, meaning apps can address massive amounts of RAM and other tasks go much faster. The Finder has been entirely re-written in Cocoa, which Mac fans have been clamoring for since 10.0. There's a new version of QuickTime, which affects media playback on almost every level of the system. And on top of all that, there's now Exchange support in Mail, iCal, and Address Book, making OS X finally play nice with corporate networks out of the box. So you won't notice much new when you first restart into 10.6 -- apart from some minor visual tweaks here and there there's just not that much that stands out. But in a way that means the pressure's on even more: Apple took the unusual and somewhat daring step of slowing feature creep in a major OS to focus on speed, reliability, and stability, and if Snow Leopard doesn't deliver on those fronts, it's not worth $30... it's not worth anything. So did Apple pull it off? Read on to find out!
