5. Boxee – This desktop application is a great source for watching TV shows.  This application has a wide variety of sources which it gets videos from, and you can always add your own.  Boxee doesn’t just do TV well, they also have integration with NetFlix, Pandora, and several other online services.

Boxee

4. Fancast – Operated by Comcast, Fancast provides a great online video service.  They offer some shows that aren’t available on Hulu or other sites.  Also, if you are a comcast subscriber, then you get access to even more on-demand media.

Fancast

3. Blinkx – If you are in the mood for some older shows then the mainstream popular sites might not be the best way to go.  Want to flashback to the 90s and watch “The Wonder Years”, well you’re not going to find that on Hulu.  The best site to search and watch these shows is Blinkx.  They are basically a front-end for megavideo, youtube, and other video sources.

Blinkx

2. Hulu – Possibly the most known video streaming site.  Hulu offers a wide variety of TV shows and movies in HD.  They have a great buffer, quality, and overall experience.  Hulu is quite possibly the reason most people crave for Flash on the iPhone/iPad.

Hulu

1. TVGorge – Want the latest and greatest TV shows without waiting for Hulu or Fancast to release them?  Want to watch TV without the ads interrupting you?  Then TVGorge is what you’re looking for.   TV Gorge offers great video quality, and offers a great selection of TV Shows.

TV Gorge

Update: 17 Invitations Remaining

Update: 5 invites remaining

Regardless, it’s a great browser.  You can download it here: Windows: [link], Mac (beta): [link].

1. Aviary Screen Capture – Very power snap and share feature for screenshots.  Aviary is a online photoshop alternative software, and this extension lets you capture images and process them directly in Aviary.  Very convenient plugin.
2. Gmail Checker – Need a constant eye on your gmail accounts?  gMail Checker for Chrome does just that.
3. AntiADS – Don’t like to view those online advertisements, this plugin is what ad-block is for Firefox.
4. Facebook Notifications – Get your Facebook notifications in your status bar.
5. AniWeather – Weather in your status bar simple and pretty.

1. Installing PHP & MySQL – There are several ways to install these packages on a Mac.  You can build the source code, download installers for each or download a development bundle that already has everything setup.  If you are just using your local machine to develop on then you probably don’t need to update the PHP version on your Mac or install MySQL to the Mac’s bin directory.  There are much easier options.  They aren’t secure enough for production machines, but for your local development they will do just fine.  The easiest one is BitNami stacks.  BitNami provides a wide range of application stacks such as Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal to name a few.  It also provides Infrastructure Stacks.  These are stacks like MAMP, WAMP, LAMP, etc.  Basically, this is a base install for M(ac) A(pache) M(ySQL)P(HP), or Windows Apache MySQL & PHP, etc.
2. Download MAMP ~63MB.  If you are developing plugins or themes for Wordpress or one of their other application stacks then you might just skip this install and download that application stack.
3. Next we need to run the bitnami-mampstack-1.2…installer.app.
4. You will just be prompted for the install location and the root password.  The only requirement is that the password is more than 6 characters.
5. When the installer is done you should now see that your install was a success.  Your web-browser will open to page http://127.0.0.1:8080/  This is your localhost address.

1. Next step is to locate where these files are coming from.  I used the default install which places all files in /Applications/mampstack-1.2-0/ .  The page you see on your success page is coming from /Applications/mampstack-1.2-0/apache2/htdocs/.  You can remove all the files from this folder and place your PHP scripts here instead.  If you haven’t used a PHP framework yet, I suggest you try out CodeIgniter.  It’s simple to use and there is a lot of documentation and support online.
2. Install CodeIgniter – Simply download Codeigniter from here. Extract the contents of CodeIgniter_xx to the folder /Applications/mampstack-1.2-0/apache2/htdocs/.  Also, it’s best practice to move the application folder from out within the system folder and to the base or the htdocs/ folder.  (Command double-click the system folder to open in a new finder window.)
3. 
4. Next it’s time to install a free PHP IDE.  Take a pick from my recent article on the top 5 free PHP IDEs on MAC. I chose to use NetBeans due to the great features, free, syntax highlighting, and code completion for libraries such as CodeIgniter.
5. Just a few quick tips.  To access your phpMyAdmin you can goto the link http://127.0.0.1:8080/phpmyadmin/. Here the username is: administrator and the password is the one you used durning the install.
6. Configure CodeIgniter – With NetBeans choose New Project -> PHP Application with Existing Sources -> Sources folder: /Applications/mampstack-1.2-0/apache2/htdocs ->Project Name: Whatever you want. -> Run As: Local Web Site -> Project URL: http://127.0.0.1:8080/ -> Index File: index.php .
7. Now everything should be setup.  Just a few tweaks to configure the database and index file.  Open application/config/ and enter in your database credentials.  Next open config and change your base url to http://127.0.0.1:8080/.

That’s it you can now visit http://127.0.0.1:8080/ and you should see your wonderful new site.  I hope this helps clear up some questions about getting started with Mac Apache MySQL PHP.  If you have any further questions please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments below. TRHFUVMUP9CQ

Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

The first eight people to comment on this post will get a free Google Wave invite. While you are here please be sure to check out some of our other articles. See you in the Wave.

Update:

Please read that the disclaimer from the Wave invitation system: Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.
Happy waving! I am adding them as soon as people comment, but the invites might take a while to reach you.

Update 2:

Update 3: Thanks to everyone who posted. I will keep everyone else up to date if I receive more Google Wave invites. Here is the final list of people who commented in time.

5.  Fluid – Fluid provides a native style application for your favorite web applications.  Fluid is a free application that creates a site specific web-browers for a given url.  This doesn’t sound all that great, but the concept works pretty well.  I usually find my Safari window filled with tabs and unable to actually locate what I’m looking for.  Even with Expose, it’s still hard to find my gmail tab.  Fluid also provides dock notifications for new mail when applied to a supported webmail site, like Google’s Gmail.  Overall Fluid is a really light weight application that works really well if you are stuck to using a web based mail client.

Benefits to using Fluid over Apple Mail:

• Very small footprint.  Files are not stored locally.
• When using Gmail as your main client it’s easier to access Google’s features such as tagging messages and applying filters.
• Supports 1Password and other third party scripts.

4.  Mailplane – Think of Mailplane as a perfected Fluid application for Google’s Gmail.  It provides drag and drop file attachment, sending screenshots, supports Offline Gmail, optimizes photos, multiple gmail accounts, and Growl support.  This is a really nice application but at $25 it’s a little steep for me to see how it’s worth it with so many free alternatives.  It does offer a very good experience for using Gmail with multiple accounts.

Benefits to using Mailplane over Apple Mail:

• Image optimization
• Offline Gmail mode with Google Gears

3.  Thunderbird 2 – Thunderbird is a multi-platform desktop email client that is based on the same framework as the Mozilla web browser.  Thunderbird is a fully functional replacement to any email client.  It’s main features are message tagging, great search ability, saved searches, notifications of new mail, third party add-ons, anti-phishing tools and other privacy features.

Benefits to using Thunderbird over Apple Mail:

• Large user community
• Updated often
• Tagging emails

2.   Opera Email Client – In case you haven’t looked at Opera lately, the multi-function web browser, perhaps you should take another look.  Opera 10 is a fast browser to launch and has always adhered to web standards.  Opera now integrates your email with your web browser.  One of the benefits of using Opera mail is if you have multiple accounts they show all new messages in a single inbox called Received.  It’s a pet peeve of mine to have to click on individual accounts to check new messages, like the iPhone’s interface.

Benefits to using Opera over Apple Mail:

• Integrated experience
• Labels
• HTML WYSIWYG Email Editor
• Built-in Emoticons

1.  Postbox –  Postbox is a great email client that is really for the pack rat in you.  It keeps track of everyone you’ve sent emails to and received emails from.  There is an amazing search that lets you search attachments, files, images, and pretty much any field.  They also have a excellent export feature that you can backup to save your email.  With threaded messages and tagged topics along with To-Do items Postbox is the most complete replacement for Apple’s Mail.  The only caveat is the $39.95 price tag.  I used Postbox for 6 months durning the beta, and loved it.  However, when it came out at $40 I couldn’t compel myself to buy it.

Benefits to using Postbox over Apple Mail:

• Amazing search functionality
• Direct access to file attachments
• Smartly threaded conversations
• Summary inspector pane
• Tabbed interface

Those are my top five picks for Apple Mail replacement.  If you have any others please comment below. If you just can’t give up Apple Mail, tell us why.

In case you aren’t familiar with wireframing, it’s the process of designing a mockup that acts as a visual guide to the structure of a website or application.  There are a lot of applications, both desktop and online, that let you mockup a design quickly.  Even if you aren’t a designer you may want to play around with these tools if you have a concept for a new website or other application.  This will really help a designer realize  the basic structure  you are looking for.

New to this scene of wireframing mockups is Mockingbird.  A beta online free application that is built on the Objective-J framework, cappuccino. It’s a very nice tool including a nice set of widgets for your disposal.  Also, you can share your mockups with your designer or your client.  It’s fully web based and supports multi-page sites.  Above you can see a simple mockup that took about two minutes with Mockingbird.

Mockingbird isn’t the only free wireframe tool, another great tool is Pencil.  A free prototyping tool that is a that is a plugin for the popular Firefox browser.  With Pencil, you can create complex application mockups, with built-in stencils, multi-page documents, and it’s cross platform.

One more application that is worth noting here is iPlotz.  While it’s not free, except for the 24 hour demo, it is a feature rich application for prototyping.  I personally like the ability to switch between themes, from hand drawn to Mac Leopard theme.  It also supports annotations by your added members.  The toolbox also contains an abundance of tools.

With iPlotz demo you cannot export from their site, but you can take a screenshot when you are done to share with anyone.

Do you have some indispensable tools for wire-framing or creating mockups?  Please leave a comment below.

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Today’s good deal is actually a really good deal.  When it comes to HiFi equipment such as Blue Ray players, DVD players and other equipment to hook up to your television on of the most expensive components can be the cost of cables.  Forget going to your local Best Buy to get these things, the markup on them is insane.  You can get the same great cables on Amazon.com for pennies on the dollar, and sometimes just pennies.

I have added some cables here from the Amazon.com store. This is just a small sample of the vast collection they have. Remember just because a cable says it’s for a Canon Camera or PS3 doesn’t mean that is all its for. Most cables are just generic, like a mini-usb to usb cable works on all cameras and a HDMI cable works on all devices that have a HDMI output. Just make sure you check the device you are working with. As you can tell by just looking at the prices, these are extremely lower than anything at Best Buy. That’s even if you include shipping & handling.