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Why wait for Leopard? Share and edit your calendars now with SyncBridge
By now you're probably picking up on a new theme of 'Why Wait for Leopard?' If so, good eye. If not: you really need to read more TUAW. In either case, we've tracked down another Leopard-busting app in the form of SyncBridge, which brings all the features of syncing, sharing and editing iCal calendars to the table, without the wait for Leopard or price of .Mac (sidenote: I'm a .Mac member and fan, so don't be hatin').The SyncBridge software uses Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger's built-in SyncServices to share calendars over the SyncBridge servers, allowing others to subscribe to and edit calendars, sending changes up to the servers and syncing back to your own calendars. Users can even log into the site to see their calendars displayed, though it isn't possible to edit the calendars on the web; that has to be done through an iCal client. A tour is offered at the site, explaining each step of the process.SyncBridge is charged as a yearly subscription service at £25 / $46, which probably places it outside the range of the casual calendar editing/sharing enthusiast. Nevertheless, this is a viable alternative to waiting for Mac OS X Leopard to land next spring.
Why wait for Leopard? Get a virtual desktop manager now
Mac publications are all taking a new eye to the apps and features that Leopard is 'killing,' and Dan's post about the 7 apps that Leopard kills inspired me to check out the current market of virtual desktop managers for Mac OS X. Since I'm on a MacBook Pro however, the only one I could really put through the ringer was VirtueDesktops, which is fine since it seems like a feature-packed and very capable virtual desktop manager. Hence, another post in an ongoing theme here at TUAW: Why wait for Leopard?While we didn't get a full shakedown of Spaces at WWDC 2006, VirtueDesktops seems to offer the same functionality, with quite a few tricks up its sleeve. Barb blogged VirtueDesktops in February 2005, but it has certainly come a ways since then. It still offers a basic set of four desktops with the ability to add more, and it's very keyboard shortcut-friendly. Here's a quick rundown of the rest of this highly customizable desktop manger: Eye candy - a wide variety of the standard Aqua transitions are available for switching between desktops. This alone is worth showing off to friends, even if you aren't into the multiple desktop thing AppleScript-able Extensible with plugins Works with Growl to let you know which desktop you've switched to (you can name them for better organization and recognition) Sticky windows and apps - you can bind apps to one desktop or another, or specify them to show on all desktops. This is handy, for example, if Mail.app is 'stuck' to a 'Communication' desktop. Clicking on Mail.app in the dock will automatically switch to the required desktop There's even more to this virtual desktop utility, and since Leopard is taking a while to cook, why not check it out? VirtueDesktops is donationware and a Universal Binary.
Why wait for Leopard? Get Dash Clipping now
Let's face it: Apple on Monday previewed some really slick new features in the next version of Mac OS X, but they aren't going to let us get our hands on them until some time next spring. Even though that's technically 6 months or so away, that's really like a few years when translated into computer industry years. So why wait for Leopard?Some of the features in the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 either already exist in present applications (as Dan pointed out), or developers have been inspired from Monday's keynote and are producing their own versions, with Web Clippings as our first example. The developer of Shrook looked at this new tool, realized that it's utilizing a fairly simple trick and whipped together his own Dash Clippings tool.After playing with this for a bit, I can say it more or less works very similarly to the Web Clippings tool demoed in the keynote. You enter a URL into the widget, and it loads up the page. You then drag the widget to the proper size and over the specific area of the page you want to clip, and presto - you've just made yourself a live, dynamic web clipping tool that will check the page for updates as often as you tell it to.Hey, who says Apple is the only company that can use the "good artists copy, great artists" steal philosophy? Once you're done answering that (or not), go snag yourself a copy of Dash Clippings and check one drool-inducing feature off your Leopard shopping list.
