LaCie Portable Hard Drive Review

This LaCie 100GB portable FireWire and USB 2.0 hard drive is designed by Porsche and serves as an ideal backup companion for your lonely PowerBook or MacBook Pro. (It also gets along with iBooks and MacBooks, but the metal styling doesn't match as well.)

Available sizes range from 60 to 160 GB and the drive is bus powered via the FireWire or USB port on your Mac laptop which solves the annoyance of having to plug in a separate power cable. Unlike some other tested drives, this one is able to draw enough power from even the pickiest Apple laptops which often provide no more current than the exact bus specification (which some drive manufacturers don't follow very carefully). In the unlikely case that your laptop doesn't provide enough bus power, this drive can even draw juice from both the FireWire and USB ports simultaneously via an included cable.

The drive is stylish, small, solidly built, fast, quiet, and works flawlessly with Macs. It comes with a soft drawstring case and thoughtfully short FireWire and USB cables. Note that you should use Disk Utility (in your Utilities folder) to reformat the drive as an HFS plus volume (Mac OS Extended) before using it for optimum Mac compatibility. If you need to exchange data with Windows users, leave it with the default format.

• By LaCie.
• buy
• photo

SpamSieve 2.4.4 Review

Adds bayesian spam filtering to most popular email clients including Apple Mail, Emailer, Entourage, Eudora, GyazMail, Mailsmith, Outlook Express, and PowerMail (see review). The author has used SpamSieve for several years and has achieved a 98.6% accuracy score out of 91,348 emails processed. From personal experience, it appears to work better than Apple's own spam filter in Mail. SpamSieve offers a great deal of customizability and even allows you to view the corpus of words which it uses to calculate spam scores. Integration with clients such as PowerMail is seamless via AppleScript.

• By c-command.
• download
• screenshot

AP Grapher

A new universal binary version of AP Grapher with several other enhancements is in the works and should be released in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

New Capture Me Released

A new version of Capture Me has been released. This version features a French translation by Antoine of the Mac-Vidéo forum and a Dutch translation by Alexander Henket! Thanks!

OmniDiskSweeper 1.5 Review

Find your hard drive filling up? OmniDiskSweeper can help. This handy little utility scans your drive and hierarchically sorts every file and folder by size - even the invisible ones. This is very handy for finding those huge cache files or old applications, movies, and music that you forgot about. The demo still sorts all your files but forces you to go to the Finder or use the Terminal to delete them manually. Pay the small fee for this software and you gain the ability to delete unwanted files directly within DiskSweeper.

• By The Omni Group.
• download (demo)
• screenshot

OmniWeb Sale

The OmniGroup is having a November sale on OmniWeb for only $10 instead of the usual $30. This is a great deal on a great web browser which is reviewed here.

Dvorak Layout

New page about using the Dvorak keyboard layout on Mac OS X is now live. Check it out.