Tweetwally lets you display only the tweets you’re interested in tracked by #hashtags, @usernames, and keywords. You can save and share your tweetwall and then customize the look and feel. It’s like building a custom twitter feed. I don’t know if it’s worth the hassel of dealing with another site, but it’s a good idea. They also offer optimized twitter walls in large, tv, and mobile platforms.

Argonaut puts you at the controls of space craft in the year 2149. With detailed graphics and great game play this asteroids clone is a must for any Mac gamers.

Pac the Man X offers Mac gamers a throw back to the original Pac Man game. With four difficulty levels, 140 levels, online high scores, and multi-player support this Pac Man redo is worth a look.

Frets on Fire is a take on Guitar Hero, but for free and a limitless number of downloadable tracks. The game features support for playing with a keyboard or a guitar controller. It’s free and available for all platforms.

Frozen Bubble is a Mac clone of the classic Tiato game Puzzle Bobble. This is a great game that was the basis for newer games like Snood. It has excellent game play and is open source and free.

Just moved from Windows to Mac? Solitaire Greatest Hits, is the Solitaire replacement you’ve been looking for. This is a free collection of popular Solitaire games. It includes: Klondike Solitaire, Free Cell, Spider Solitaire, Pyramid, Canfield, Aces Up, Golf, Scorpian, Yukon, Baker’s Game and Forty Thieves.

Please leave you suggestions below in the comments for other free great Mac games.

AppFresh is a handy application that keeps all your applications, widgets, plugins and preferance panes up to date. Overall, the application is very easy to use and provides version comparison to all your installed applications. Be careful though, if you have paid for software such as 1Password version 2.x, and it offers you to upgrade to version 3.x you might be set back to a beta since there is a upgrade fee for these two versions. This is no a problem if you are only using open source or free software, but be careful when upgrading paid software for main version changes.

One of the main benefits of using AppFresh is their integration with iUseThis [link]. If you format you computer often or you have multiple computers you can simply add the software to you free iUseThis account and then one click download and install all of your software. This is a really great feature that will save you a lot of time getting you system set up.

Notes: AppFresh is still under heavy development and their current version is very stable. However, there are some installs that it doesn’t work very well with. It has issues when there is an actual installer instead of just the normal drag and drop. It will download these applications and notify you that the installer needs to be run.

If you’re looking for a more professional way to keep your applications up to date, then you should try MacUpdate Desktop. MacUpdate Desktop offers a lot of the same functionality as AppFresh, but adds watch list and a much better installer process. At $20/year it’s not going to break the bank, but it’s a hard stretch to purchase this over the Free AppFresh. There is however a free trail available on the macupdate website [link].

If you’re not looking for a full application there is also a widget that checks for updated versions of your software. The App Update widget is very easy to use, but will not download and install these applications for you. If you’re a fan of widgets you can get it here for free.

Cyberduck is a free open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and Amazon S3 client for Mac OS X. It has a very estensive list of features that make it the top choice for free file transfer. They include a host of protocols, document browser, quick look, bookmarking, SSH, remote archiving, Growl integration, and Apple Keychain support.

Fugu, winner of the Apple Design Award in 2003 for best open souce software, offers a host of features that rvial commercial clients. These include: drag and drop, image previews, alter premissions, and Keychain support. The main bonus that FUGU offers over Cyberduck is the side-by-side interface for file transfers. It’s a great free SFTP Mac client.

FileZilla, which use to be a Windows only FTP/SFTP client is now available on all platforms. It offers multiple language support as well as transfers larger than 4GB, bookmarks, drag and drop, and remote file editing. Overall this is a great FTP client that has had years of support and contributions.

OneButton FTP provides a very simple FTP client for OS X. There is something to be said for an application that does one thing and does it very well. It’s very simple interface and dedication to just doing FTP right makes this a great choice.

Macfusion is quite different than the others in this list. Macfusion provides a way to mount FTP/SFTP remote computers as if they were a local drive. This is extremely handy if you are working with file editors such as NetBeans or some of the other ones listed here. This is s a great application that any developer should have handy.

When it comes to FTP or SFTP programs don’t think you need to spend $50 to get something decent. This list shows that you can get some great clients at zero of the cost. If you have any other suggestions for applications please comment below.

NetBeans is quite possibly the best free php editor on Mac OS X. NetBeans provides a host of features including syntax highlighting, project support, code navigation, unit testing, and code completion. My favorite part of the code completion is support for all classes in your project. Thus, it makes using a PHP framework a lot easier. It also has project templates for a lot of popluar frameworks. [link]

TextWrangler is another great free PHP editor for OS X. With support for FTP and SFTP along with syntax highlight and and very nice find and replace feature, TextWrangler provides enough power for everyday use on your sites.

Aptana provides a great all around PHP IDE that is built on the Eclipse framwork. This is a great IDE, and provides FTP/SFTP support was well as syntax highlighting, debugging tools and a host of other features. However this is moved down on the list because of their recent news: “Aptana PHP is no longer included in Aptana Studio 2.0, and only PDT will be supported going forward. Developers who wish to continue using Aptana PHP should continue using Studio 1.5.x.”

Smultron is a very simple PHP editor. It isn’t made for large projects or where you need to run PHP unit test or debugging. Smultron, is something you would use for everyday quick edits of code. It does support multiple files, syntax highlighting, and I really like their simplicity but still providing some decent power as a editor. Snow Leopard is also supported in their beta release.

jEdit is another simple PHP editor. It does provide syntax highlighting as well as FTP support (via plugin) and it offers unlimited undos/redos, auto indent, and some really nice plugins. It is looking a bit oudated compared to some of the other editors in this list, but it is very stable and runs on Java.

If you are not looking to spend any money these are some great IDEs to get help with your workflow. If you are looking to spend some money for a editor, try looking at Espresso or Coda. If you have any suggestions please post them below.

It isn’t surprising that there are just so many apps on the AppStore. Most paid applications have a free counterpart and if you look through the latest submissions it’s clear that some developers feel the need to barrage the store with 100 versions of the same application, when really they could have just added that functionality into the single app. If you are glued to the Top-Paid or Top-Free sections, I feel that you miss out on some true gems in the AppStore, such as Sentinel, a free tower defense game with nice graphics and challenging game play. Never-the-less, we are stuck with sorting through all this junk to find the decent apps on the iPhone.

Even before this was truly a problem, PandoraBox was developed and released for the iPhone. This free application was a new front-end to the App Store. Basically, it adds functionality to view recent app submissions (accepted apps), view recent price drops from paid-to-free app, and view recent price drops on all paid apps. It also let’s you bookmark apps and will show you when that app is on sale. Free on the AppStore. [iTunes Link]

Another app for viewing the AppStore is AppSniper. AppSniper is similar to PandoraBox, but with it you can ban sellers, filter categories, and “Snipe” (Bookmark) apps. The one thing that seems better about AppSniper is the ‘On Sale’ screen shows the discount percent, provides a nice price over time graph, and the ability to email a app recommendation to a friend. On some apps I found the screen shots button didn’t seem to show anything. $0.99 on the AppStore. [iTunes Link]

appsfire enables you to share your favorite applications to your friends. It’s nothing really great here. The apps above are better suited to find new apps. However, it’s free on the AppStore. [iTunes Link]

Another clever app for finding deals on the AppStore is Bargin Bin with Push. Let’s you see the sale price and add applications to your watch list. When the price drops you will get push notifications. Interesting app, and the feature for browsing only apps that are popular and on sale is a good one. I’ll be adding Command & Conquer Red Alert to my watch list. Bargin Bin is free and available in the AppStore. [iTunes Link]

Warlex is another iPhone application adviser. The benefit of Warlex is that it only shows you the essential and highly rated applications. Instead of getting bombarded with 1000’s of apps that you wouldn’t want even if they were free, it only shows you the somewhat decent apps. Warlex is free and available in the AppStore. [iTunes Link]

With the huge success of the AppStore, Apple really needs to find a better way to navigate the over 100,000 applications. Until they do, use these applications to get the best deals.

Let’s being with downloading the trial version of CSSEdit. Which you can get for free and save files upto 2500 characters.

To ensure that we are all on the same page for this tutorial, I suggest downloading the same sample file and sample css. I am going to be using the sample files from csszengarden. If you have never seen the Zen Garden it’s a fun site that can be completely redesigned in css. They have many different versions of their same page. So it’s a fun site to redesign. So let’s download file (1) and file (2). Next put these two files in the same place and rename the css file to “sample.css”.

Now, let’s start up css edit and select what file we would like to work with. Once it launches, click File->New Style Sheet. Then click preview. Now, just drag your html file you downloaded in the previous step into the preview window. You should see the file in the window.

Next we want to override the style that is attached. The black Style Sheets hover window should show the style sheets attached. If not, place the sample file in your Sites/ folder and enable web sharing. Then you should be able to browse to localhost/~username/sample.html. Now you should see Extract and Override.

Now in our cssedit window we should see our extracted-sample.css file is loaded. The top of this file should say to override our previous sample.css. Now the fun part begins.

So now we are going to apply our new styles using this editor window. I’m going to begin by clearing out everything in the main window. This will give us a fresh start on the file. You will see that this updates in the preview window as well.

Now we are going to add a new theme to this window. If we want to see what elements to select we can just click the x-ray in the preview window. For example the css Zend is located at the css selection path of html body #css-zen-garden div#container div#intro div#pageHeader h1. This is great but we probably want all h1 elements to be rendered the same.

So, lets get some of the basic styles out of the way for our design. I am going to make this page look like it’s on a e-book reader. Just for a simple example. So after apply a few styles, we have what looks to be like a electronic paper style. Here are the styles applied so far.

html,body,div,span,applet,object,iframe,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,p,blockquote,pre,a,abbr,acronym,address,big,cite,code,del,dfn,em,font,img,ins,kbd,q,s,samp,small,strike,strong,sub,sup,tt,var,b,u,i,center,dl,dt,dd,ol,ul,li,fieldset,form,label,legend,table,caption,tbody,tfoot,thead,tr,th,td{margin:0;padding:0;border:0;outline:0;font-size:100%;vertical-align:baseline;background:transparent}body{line-height:1}ol,ul{list-style:none}blockquote,q{quotes:none}blockquote:before,blockquote:after,q:before,q:after{content:'';content:none}:focus{outline:0}ins{text-decoration:none}del{text-decoration:line-through}table{border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:0}
body{font:13px/1.5 Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif}a:focus{outline:1px dotted}hr{border:0 #ccc solid;border-top-width:1px;clear:both;height:0}h1{font-size:25px}h2{font-size:23px}h3{font-size:21px}h4{font-size:19px}h5{font-size:17px}h6{font-size:15px}ol{list-style:decimal}ul{list-style:disc}li{margin-left:30px}p,dl,hr,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,ol,ul,pre,table,address,fieldset{margin-bottom:20px}
body {
background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);
color: rgb(51, 51, 51);
display: block;
font-size: 26px;
}
div#container{
margin: 0 auto;
font-size: 26px;
line-height: 36px;
max-width: 800px;
text-align: left;
width: 600px;
}

So the beauty of using cssedit is that we now have a visual update of all our changes to the style. If you are new to css it even provides for applying styles usuing their visual editor.

Let’s edit the title of this using the visual editor. The first thing we need to do is to defin what element we want to edit. Using the xray in the preview click css Zen Garden. Now we see the path, mentioned above. So we are just going to change all h1 elements. Start by typing in the editor ” h1 { ” (without quotes of course) now on the right apply your changes. All changes are updated automatically. Here i have added in the visual editor the following:

h1{
color: #5e5e5e;
font-size: 2em;
font-style: italic;
font-variant: small-caps;
text-align: center;
line-height: 1.5em;
}

The result is shown above. Since I’m going for the electronic paper look, I’m almost donw. There are a few more styles that I’m going to apply using the wysiwyg editor.

So this is my new look, it’s nothing great, but it does illustrate just how easy it is to apply css quickly to a document. Let’s look a few other features of CSSEdit.

CSSEdit provide W3 validation for css 2.0 and css 3.0. Clicking validate on the toolbar will validate the css in the main document body. It shows us tat we have a error on the reset/text css that we added earlier. We can either ignore this error or remove/fix this part of the css. It seems hat content: is not a valid. So if we remove this we have and click validate again, we have a valid css file. This is very useful.

CSSEdit also adds the ability to automatically format the css to look “pretty”. This is useful if you can’t stand poorly formatted css or you download css from somewhere that has been compressed and is very hard to read.

That’s pretty much it for using CSSEdit. The next thing to do is either copy & past our css or export it to another document. When you export you can select all the documents that you want to attached to and remove existing styles from those documents first. So after a few more minot tweeks we can see the final design. It’s nothing fancy, but just shows how easy to use CSSEdit is. This blog & myself are not sponsored by CSSEdit, MacRabbit, or CSSZenGarden.

If you are really into css stay tuned for the next post about using jquery ui as a basis for you next project. Please comment about CSSEdit, or any other CSS tools that you find useful below. Here is the final css.

/* @override http://localhost/zen-garden/sample.css */

/* reset txt */

html,body,div,span,applet,object,iframe,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,p,blockquote,pre,a,abbr,acronym,address,big,cite,code,del,dfn,em,font,img,ins,kbd,q,s,samp,small,strike,strong,sub,sup,tt,var,b,u,i,center,dl,dt,dd,ol,ul,li,fieldset,form,label,legend,table,caption,tbody,tfoot,thead,tr,th,td {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	border: 0;
	outline: 0;
	font-size: 100%;
	vertical-align: baseline;
	background: transparent
}

body {
	line-height: 1
}

ol,ul {
	list-style: none
}

blockquote,q {
	quotes: none
}

body {
	font: 13px/1.5 Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
}

a:focus {
	outline: 1px dotted
}

hr {
	border: 0 #ccc solid;
	border-top-width: 1px;
	clear: both;
	height: 0
}

h1 {
	font-size: 25px
}

h2 {
	font-size: 23px
}

h3 {
	font-size: 21px
}

h4 {
	font-size: 19px
}

h5 {
	font-size: 17px
}

h6 {
	font-size: 15px
}

ol {
	list-style: decimal
}

ul {
	list-style: disc
}

li {
	margin-left: 30px
}

p,dl,hr,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,ol,ul,pre,table,address,fieldset {
	margin-bottom: 20px
}

body {
	background-color: rgb(238, 238, 238);
	color: rgb(51, 51, 51);
	display: block;
	font-size: 26px;
}

div#container {
	margin: 0 auto;
	font-size: 26px;
	line-height: 36px;
	max-width: 800px;
	text-align: left;
	width: 500px;
	padding-right: 150px;
}

h1 {
	color: #5e5e5e;
	font-size: 2em;
	font-style: italic;
	font-variant: small-caps;
	text-align: center;
	line-height: 1.5em;
	border-bottom: thick solid #919191;
}

a {
	color: #919191;
}

div#quickSummary p.p1:first-letter {
	padding-right: 5px;
	font-size: 150%;
	float: left;
	font-style: italic;
}

span acronym {
	color: #009191;
}

h2 {
	border-bottom: thin solid #919191;
}

h3 {
	border-bottom: dotted thin #919191;
}
div#pageHeader h1 span
{
	padding-bottom: 20px;
}
div#linkList {
	position: absolute;
	margin-left: 500px;
	right:0;
	top: 200px;
	padding-right: 20px;
}
div#linkList h3{
	color: #5e5e5e;
}
ul li{
	list-style-image: url(images/bullet.png);
	list-style-position: outside;
	font-size: 20px;
	text-decoration: none;
}
ul li a {
	font-size: 20px;
	text-decoration: none;
	color: #ff1e91;
}
ul li a:hover{
	border-bottom: 2px solid #2d2bfa;
}

p.p5 span a{
	color: #ff9123;
	font-style: italic;
	text-decoration: none;
}

While Google trends may still be in the google labs, it has been around for quite some time. I even wrote an article sometime back using it to predict who the next president would be. My prediction ended up being true. You can read that article on my old blog here. I started to think that maybe I could use google trends to make money on the stock market. My reasoning is that people tend to search for companies as they hear something about them or something in the news that sparks their interest.

The news can be either good or bad. Such as how Garmin could possibly compete with Google when Googles product is free? So we need to be careful when using google trends to predict the market price of the company. The resulting increase in trend could be because of a failing product or company error that will want us to sell short instead of investing even more. The trick is to find the company that is currently being talked about, and do it quickly enough that we don’t pick up the stock after the “trend” is over. Let’s analyize the historical data for a few companies.

One of the best checks for this idea is a historical analysis.

Shown above is the search volume for keyword AAPL, the NASDAQ ticker symbol. As you see there are key events that cause the search volume to increase and decrease sharply over time. This is how most trends occur. Trends are usually quick spikes in interest and as a story saturates it reaches a peak and then interest for this story declines. Such as the release of the next generation iPhone. We see the same shaped figure when search for Apple.

Looking deeper into these trends we can see that company knowledge is important. If you have knowledge of what the company is about to release then this can help in determining the stock price. Doing a search for AAPL, Apple, iPhone, iPod, and Apple Computers. We see the same types of trends in teh graph. And get a better estimation of how things are looking right now.

Now looking at the stock price for Apple. We see that the stock interest is more long term than trends. This is because most people aren’t day traders and invest for the long run. The interesting thin is when we mesh these graphs into one graph and notice the actual trend.

There are a few things this image shows. We see that the trends map to peeks or falls in the stock price. On a side note it does appear that the iPod doesn’t really have a effect on the stock price any more since 2004 (1). So what does this all mean. Besides that people search for iPods around Christmas time, this graph shows there is some correlation between stock price and search trends around that company.

It’s hard to estimate the future stock price of a company with just looking at historical data. So let’s look at more recent and zoomed in results to see what we can determine. The image above is the stock price for AAPL in the last 30 days. Now let’s see how the trend for AAPL stacks up with this market data.

This graph shows that the searches for AAPL increased with the stock price.

So which occurred first, did the stock rise making people search for it on google or did the trend happen first on the internet making people buy the stock. Well a closer look at the the stock price shows that the spike in stock price actually happened on the 20th of October while the increase in trends happened on the 18th of October. So what happened, well it’s clear that there was some Apple buzz over the weekend and Monday whent the stock market opened the demand for Apples stock increased.

So will the Motorola Droid increase the stock price of Motorola? Well lets’ take a look at what’s been happened in the for MOT (NYSE ticker symbol).

Here is the trend line for searches on Motorola & Droid. As we can see, the trend line spikes on the 17th for news stories about Motorola and then promptly after, the stock price rises. The we notice the same dip in news stories as the stock price falls. We now also seem to be at on the same spike of news stories this weekend. If this graph keeps rising and the news on the Driod is good, then it would seem the stock would rise.

Please leave your comments below on how you feel about the correlation between Google trends and the stock price of the company. It seems that there is some correlation and more data analysis is necessary to ensure this is correct. With any luck and some further studies it would seem there is a few day lag between stock price and trend. As always, be careful when buying stocks and do your research.  Note that I do not currently own stock in either APPL or MOT.

Missed last nights episode of Glee? Well you don’t need a Tivo to see it. Hulu brings your television to your computer. It’s clean interface, HD tv shows, movies and clips make it worth checking out. Alternatives are numerous, and incude: Joost, wedigtv, fancast, woho.tv, and castTV.

digg is a social news site where only the “best” articles and links make it to the average user. It’s a great system where users post and monitor each other. For example you can visit digg and digg up this story if you like it.

Dropbox: Still love having the ability to sync all my data between machines and have a online backup. All this and the ability to forward a file from my iPhone really makes dropbox a complete solution for syncing. They are working on being able to sync other folders outside your dropbox as well. Sing up for a free account with this link and receive a extra 250MB. It’s all free. It’s really a great synergy of desktop-to-cloud software.

Need to do a quick tutorial for pretty much anything? Need to record your screen but don’t want to purchase or mess with installing software. Well that’s not a problem thanks to screen toaster. This app lets you record your screen directly from their website. It’s free so try it out here.

Wufoo provides online forms for pretty much anything. Great way to send out a invite or just to have a wysiwyg form editor. The interface and design makes creating forms fun instead of tedious.

Facebook for professionals.

Missed out on my article about getting music for free online. Well I failed to mention yahoos attempt at social music, foxytunes. They provide some streaming of music and can find related bands and songs you might be interested in. Foxytunes really seems more for followers of bands than your typical music streaming site.

If you interested in a free Miscrosoft Word replacement that is in the cloud, then Zoho documents just might be for you. I find that ZOHO is more structured than Google Docs and still provides a clean interface for writing, spreadsheets and pretty much every type of document.

Mint is a great single place to manage your money. It tracks spending habbits and gives you visual breakdowns of where your cash is going. Useful application, free, but you do need to enter a lot of your personal information for the account to work well.

Gliffy brings Microsoft Visio to the web. It’s nice packaging and easy to use tool makes this a great substitute for the desktop counterpart. It offers flowcharts, network diagrams, floor plans and much more. There is a limited mode that is free to try and see for yourself.

Snap-Shots is a great application for bloggers and other writers who want to put a little eye candy on their links.

Hopefully this list introduced something new to you. I didn’t mention applications like facebook, yelp, youtube, skype, gmail, meebo, flickr, stumbleupon, pandora, feedbuner, and iGoogle because most people have herd of these sites.