Consumeroo

This is just neat.

Fluid creates what are called ’site specific browsers’ or SSBs, native to OS X. Just like Prism (the project Mozilla is working on), you point Fluid to a URL and it creates a completely native OS X application of that site or web app. A good example could be Gmail, or maybe Campfire. In my case, the first thing I did was try Helperoo. Look!

Neat!! While I can’t imagine this suiting everybody, it certainly helps if you are in the middle of writing an email, or maybe a Google Spreadsheet–should Safari crash, you’re safe from losing any unsaved edits. Plus, like the Fluid website points out, sometimes we lose ourselves in our 20+ tabs. Since it’s a completely native OS X application, you get all the benefits of our most beloved operating system. Webkit, native keyboard controls, beautiful text rendering etc… etc… There’s even a Flickr group dedicated to providing icons!

I always liked the premise behind Prism but always thought it was going to be executed rather poorly on OS X given the Mozilla Groups history (cough Firefox.) Guess I don’t have to worry anymore.

Part of setting up the new ‘Roo was to get a system that was easy for Tim and I to post. A lot of this had to do with the blogging system we chose and a lot of this had to do with the way we prepare content to post. Things like music, images and videos can be such a pain in the ass to prep, we both ended up simply not posting.

In the process of creating a bunch of scripts to easily (with one click!) take the selected song from iTunes and prepare it to go online (renames it, exports album art and uploads), I came across (what surely can’t be new) a way to get a DRM’d track exported to MP3 without much of a hassle or quality loss.

The magic happens with in an audio app I bought almost a year ago, Audio Hijack Pro. If you’re at all familiar with Audio Hijack Pro, you know exactly where I am headed with this. It’s simple. You just hijack your audio from iTunes and once you setup your format options (which for us is a 128kbps MP3) you just play the track once through iTunes. Audio Hijack Pro captures the digital stream right through OS X (I assume via Core Audio) so there is essentially no quality loss! Boom, boom and… boom.

If you’re a torrent user, you might be interested to know that my personal favorite BitTorrent client hit version 1.0 today. Transmission is a super sleek and easy to use BitTorrent client that is not only open source (therefor free) but it’s also tremendously well built and feels great on OS X. If you’re not willing to pay for David Watanabe’s rather excellent Xtorrent then I recommend checking it out.