Mac Freebies, Ideas, Updates, And More Nonsense.

Slow news day? With Apple, the Mac, iPod, and lawyers, there’s no such thing.

From free applications to ridiculous and frivolous lawsuits, we cover it all. Mostly.

Mac Freebies
Free Mac applications are usually the Friday domain of our lovely-for-two Alexis Kayhill. This one deserves mention on Monday.

RadicalBreeze intros Footlights 2.0 and Footlights Pro.

What? Another movie player for the Mac? How many do we have? About 37 by the last count.

Footlights is different. Not necessarily better, but different. First, there’s a drag-and-drop movie list window.

Drag your movies, drop them on the list, then click the one you want so it plays in the, uh, movie player. Simple. Elegant. Free.

What’s so special? Footlights (free) lets you adjust the playback speed, go full screen with the movie, and there’s a transparent slider bar.

Slide the bar and the movie screen becomes less visible. Slide more and the movie is almost invisible. Is that cool or what?

Turns out, it’s mostly “what” as I can’t figure out much use for it. The Pro version will set you back about $15 and will export the movie in various formats. Much like many free applications already do for you.

Mac Updates
I want to point out that Monday is usually an update day. Many Mac applications get updated and announced early in the week.

So it is with a couple of the nifty utilities from EcammNetwork. They’re the developers of iGlasses and Conference Recorder and DockStar and a few other Mac apps.

iGlasses lets your iSight camera grow more features so it works better in low light.

Conference Recorder lets you record multiple video conferences in iChat and save them as a QuickTime movie.

Ideas
Chip giant Intel is showing off their latest multi-core chips.

The latest is called Clovertown. Will that be the first chip in the updated PowerMacs late this year? Or something else?

Regardless, all money is on multiple core chips for the high end Macs. How many cores? Some say we could have two per chip to start, then four, then eight, perhaps 16, all within a decade.

Nonsense
It was just last week that telco AT&T warned they own the patent to some MPEG-4 compression technologies.

MPEG-4 is hot stuff and shows up big time in QuickTime. Apple and others may have to cough up more money for more lawyers.

Surprised? Don’t be. Lawsuits are a part of our national culture.

Fortunately, not all lawsuits are aimed at Apple Computer.

Take the latest suit targeted at Target. SFGate reports the following:

I know what you’re thinking. Me, too. When will the nonsense end?

With all apologies to blind web surfers everywhere, I hope this lawsuit gets thrown out.

It probably won’t.

Target will cave in and modify their web site to conform to some standard that’s not biased against the sight impaired.

What of Mac360? What of Tera’s new site?

Do all such sites on the internet require modification to help the blind read better or is this kind of suit aimed only at stores with deep pockets? Is it discrimination to target Target when smaller retailers are not targeted?

Could I sue Slate because I don’t understand much of what’s written on the site, and don’t agree with the rest?

Are the hearing impaired going to sue Podcast sites because there’s no written transcript of each Podcast available? When and where does it end?