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I’ve been blogging for more than two years now, while lately the tools of the trade have gotten better than ever before, it wasn’t always like this. Cyberduck is a piece of software (only for Mac OS X) that allows you to transfer files via FTP to and from a webhost, this is not the only use this software have, let’s take a look at some of the features I use the most.

Installing Cyberduck is as easy as you can imagine, just download the files from cyberduck.ch, and drag the software from the file image to your Application folder in Mac OS X and viola. When you visit the cyberduck.ch, the first thing you see in the front page is a full description of the software, alone with some other information about plugins, configuration option, etc.
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For those of you that like to be up-to-date on all you Mac OS X components, the open-source project X11 got updated to version 2.1.3 on January 18, 2008. Generally, the community submits this updates and only when Apple has tested them is when they become available on your software update application.

Before I continue, I’m including a shortcut from an entry in Wikipedia that explains what X11 is all about. Remember that Wikipedia is a user generated content place and may contain inaccurate information, what I read from the article looks pretty accurate.

This update includes fixes to six possible vulnerabilities (bugs), the update is not a complete application just fixes to the application. Therefore, if you haven’t install X11 before, you’ll need to install it from the operating system DVD, and then apply this update.

Here is a short explanation of who needs this update and why. The update includes patches to bugs discovered by the open-source community around this application. If you are the kind of user that likes to install open-source, UNIX applications (NeoOffice, Gimp, etc.) then is a good idea that you keep your system updated at all times.

This is not a review of the application, I’ll be playing around with X11 dependant software to report back whether it still have bugs or not. Feel free to add or correct me on this one, I just wanted to get the word out and the shortcut for those of you interested in this topic.

Anxiety is an application for Mac OS X Leopard that allows you to sync To-Do created between Mail.app and iCal.app, as well as create To-Do’s from the application. I downloaded Anxiety yesterday afternoon when I got back from work, immediately started playing with it but before creating To-Do’s in my Mail.app or iCal.app I went directly into Anxiety and created two entries. This was the beginning of the end, Mail.app would not respond and crashed about four times before I started reading my error logs.

The error was the same one all along, it seems that when Anxiety tried to create a new To-Do instruction in the Mail.app was not applying the instruction correctly. iCal.app got the instruction without any problems but Mail.app just kept crashing. Here is an excerpt of the error log for Mail.app

12/14/07 7:51:26 PM Mail[224] *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception ‘NSInternalInconsistencyException’, reason: ‘trying to set a non-ToDo MailboxUid for a ToDo. The MailboxUid for a ToDo must be a ToDosMailboxUid’

I’m not an expert reading these error logs but it seems like the software was trying to create a non-ToDo Mailbox folder for a ToDo. I quit Anxiety, trash it, and erase it from the Trash and the error persisted in Mail.app. I was so frustrated that my only choice was apparently to erase the com.apple.mail.plist, which means I had to get rid of everything in my Mail.app.

After erasing the .plist for Mail.app I was able to set up my email accounts again without issues. I did not install Anxiety again, even when I think to know how to prevent this issue. If you are going to use Anxiety, before installing the application create one generic ToDo in iCal and Mail.app. Make sure that both of them have different instructions or words like, one that says, “Take out the trash” and another “pay bills.”

As long as they are different I think that Anxiety will not try to create new ToDo folders and will go directly to syncing them. This is only in theory, as for me I will wait until Anxiety release an update to their software before trying again. If you find this article useful consider Digg-ing it or give me a review in Stumble-Upon.

It’s amazing the hundreds of hidden feature you can find within OS X, today I was listening to the Typical Mac User and while Victor was giving us great tips on how to use Finder more effectively. He started talking about the very top of the Finder window, right where the name of the folder is displayed whenever you open your Finder. Read and learn this is awesome.

If you click on that top section of the screen where the name of the folder winder is, while holding Control key (or Apple Key) you see the path that you took to get to you are. If you open a finder window and you have not navigated anywhere, when you click on the top of they screen where the name of the folder you are in is, it will display a list of folders or drives that are in the column on your left.

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What was running around as rumors became a reality, Microsoft has released photos and specs for their new Zune lineup that will be release sometime in November 2007. The new Zune lineup has an 80GB model called the Zune 80, and two flash models sporting 4 and 8GB of storage. The company gave no indication of discontinuing the 30GB, 1st generation model, instead the new updated UI (user interface) will be added via update software to the old Zune.

If you ask me Microsoft is up to something, the new UI and software upgrade add some interesting features that are worth discussing. This first one is the integration with Windows Media Player, now you can transfer your media content from your computer to your Zune effortlessly. What’s better the new Zune software is compatible with h.264 and MPEG4 codecs, you don’t need to convert your media files to WMV.

Some good news to Podcasters is that the new Zune software includes support for podcasts, you won’t be able to update your podcasts over WiFi, but you can share them with other Zune players. Talking about sharing, Microsoft changed the rules for sharing music a bit. Now instead of getting the three days, three plays restrictions you only get the three plays restriction, not sure if this means something to Zune owners.

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