Let me be honest with you: my goal here is to clearly push you to ditch your PC for a Mac. How am I going to manage this? I will use a series of posts, starting with this one, where I recommend a Mac application for every PC program you might use. And to top it off, I'll prove to you that each and every one of these Mac programs is better than their PC counterpart. In this first post we start off with basic apps, you know, the essential programs you use every day to do things like communicate with friends, work on documents or connect to the internet.

Outlook Express - Apple Mail - Finding Outlook Express excruciatingly slow every morning at startup? Apple Mail always starts up in a flash. Another thing I'm really surprised with Outlook Express is the lack of a truly effective search tool, where Apple Mail makes use of the lightning fast Spotlight. Add to that the great templates in Mail and the wide choice of third party plugins and you have a clear winner in Apple Mail.

Windows Live Messenger - Adium X - Why put up with the advertisement-ridden Live Messenger when you can use the open source and highly customizable Adium? The Mac messaging client lets you connect to almost any IM protocol like AIM, MSN or Jabber and can be customized with all sorts of icons, audio, styles and script. True it doesn't offer voice or video chat yet, but you'll still get encrypted Off The Record messaging.

Microsoft Office - iWork'08 - This one is a no brainer. iWork'08 is cheaper, smoother and creates better looking documents, particularly presentations under Keynote. You'll also be able to work with any Microsoft Office document, whether Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

Internet Explorer - Safari - Apple's homemade browser loads twice as fast as IE and integrates perfectly with Keychain, so your online account data is always safe and sound. The sleek metal view and clear bookmark also contrast with IE's convoluted interface.

Nero - Roxio Toast Titanium - I've always found Nero too bloated a program and draining on PC resources. Roxio Toast Titanium on the other hand is much easier to use and offers a streamlined process so that disc of yours is catalogued, burned and ready to watch in no time. It now lets you watch movies on your iPhone and mix your own sounds.

Imagine if you could locate your local town on a Google Maps style interface and then find out what kind of videos users in your local neighbourhood had uploaded. Imagine - you could find out things about your local area you had no idea about, get in touch with like minded video makers and of course, become your local area's number one uploader.

That's exactly what YouTube will soon offer according to NewTeeVee when they add their new "Geosearch" function to the world's most popular video sharing site. Users have been offered the chance to geographically tag their videos when they upload them but as yet, there was no particular advantage in doing this. Now it seems the logic is that YouTube will embrace Google's mapping technology to produce a much more personlised service.

At the current time, geotagged videos are available on Google Earth and but only a small selection. Presumably when the full YouTube Geosearch tool is rolled out, it will eventually be able to locate all clips. Of course, the plans do throw-up a few questions. Firstly, there's issues of personal privacy. Should users really have to give their precise geographical location when uploading videos? If someone has managed to catch something particularly sensitive on camera, they are unlikely to want to reveal too much about their identity. Secondly, are people going to accurately geotag their videos or not? If they just select any old location in a rush to upload the videos, the whole service will become useless.

Let's hope that YouTube offer users the choice of whether they want to geographically tag their data and if so, at least use your IP address to bring up your location quickly rather than having to select it from a map of the world.

Only a few hours to wait (9 AM Pacific Time) and Apple will unveil its new Mobile Me service, iPhone 3G and App Store. This last one may simply be the biggest news of all. Ever since Apple released its iPhone Developer Kit enthusiasm among independent developers has been incredibly strong, reflected by the sold out WorldWide Developer Conference, which was largely dedicated to the iPhone.

Although, typically, little information has leaked on the App Store, Steve Jobs has mentioned that already 500 different applications will be available, with a quarter of them being free while the rest should only cost a max of $9.99. Also, according to the New York Times, a third of the applications will be games. The rest will have its fair share of educational, communication, productivity and other sorts of programs. Forbes states that Apple will take a 30% cut on the sale of any iPhone application, and in the long term developers will be able to set their own prices.

We've already seen demos of many iPhone apps and games in the last few months, but with the imminent launch of the App Store I've noticed many video demos are now unavailable. A case of Apple cracking down just to make sure all eyes are on the App Store? In any case I'm anxious to see how all these applications will make use of the most exciting iPhone features like Multi-Touch and its different sensors.  Apple is entering a whole new territory here, but it seems they've got everything well covered. One more market conquered?

For all you .Mac members, there's only three days left until the service is shut down and Apple switches you to its brand new MobileMe service. Released at the same time as the new iPhone 3G, with which it will interact, MobileMe is surrounded by high expectations, as it will be a big step up from the aging .Mac services.

An Apple support page keeps a status posted to let .Mac members know of the switch. On Wednesday July 9 at 6 pm GMT, the .Mac service will be taken offline. The new MobileMe service will then have a six hour window to be introduced, which means .Mac members could spend a few hours without access to their account. The status window shows little colored buttons next to each .Mac service to keep you updated on their availability.

The switch seems to be highly worth it though. Although the yearly subscription fee is still a little high at $99, I feel that MobileMe offers much more incentives. Not only do you get 20 GB of individual storage, which should be plenty to hold all your emails and a significant amount of pictures, but you also get better integration with all Apple applications like iCal, Mail and the Address Book. You also still get direct access to your iDisk from your desktop.

The best improvement for me though is the easy synchronization of all your data, which should be best demonstrated with the iPhone 3G. Having all your contacts, notes and emails disseminated across all your computers and devices can really drive you crazy, and you simply don't want to waste time harmonizing personal data on each device. If synchronization with MobileMe really proves to be as seamless as they say, I might just consider signing up.

When launching the long-awaited Firefox 3, the guys over at Mozilla decided to try to achieve a Guinness World Record. The idea would work not only as a very original marketing campaign to promote the latest version of the popular browser among Internet users, but would also set Firefox 3 as the most downloaded piece of software in the world in only 24 hours.

A few weeks later, after in-depth reviews, video analysis and some opposing voices, Mozilla has made it official: Firefox 3 is now the proud holder of a Guinness World Record as the most downloaded software in 24 hours. The numbers are pretty self-explanatory:  on June 17th 2008, the day when Firefox 3 was officially launched, 8,002,530 people dowloaded it from the Mozilla servers (no wonder they were on the verge of crashing). The counter is still working on their site and currently shows more than 28 million downloads. Way to go!

Again, Mozilla wants to thank all users who helped Firefox 3 to achieve the Guinness World Record. So if you did your bit and downloaded your copy last June 17th, show off your contribution by printing your very own personalized certificate.

It was always on the cards that a software giant like Adobe would eventually launch themselves into the world of online desktop publishing, especially in view of their pioneering development of Web 2.0 in the form of Adobe Air.

Acrobat.com is a new set of office applications recently launched by Adobe to get a foothold in this rapidly expanding software field currently dominated by the likes of Google Docs and Windows Office Live (Incidentally, why do Microsoft now have to tag anything new they come up with as "Live"? Can they not be a bit more creative in the naming of their online office apps?).

When you enter the site, it's clear that Adobe have decided to base their suite on Flash which as we all know, can be very cumbersome and slow sometimes but it certainly looks slick. You are presented with a collection of online apps including Buzzword (for word processing), Adobe Share (for file sharing) and Adobe ConnectNow which allows you to share your screen with anyone. In fact, ConnectNow is a brilliant online conferencing app that assigns a room for all users to log on. On the downside, there doesn't seem to be any presentation or spreadsheet tools such as PowerPoint and Excel and so it's safe to say that Acrobat.com seems to be aiming more at helping people share and collaborate on projects rather than produce original pieces of work.

There are some definite reasons to be impressed by Acrobat.com. Buzzword gives you a generous 5GB of space for sharing documents and PDF conversions are so quick and easy that I'd never use a third party app for that again. The PDF converter can convert up to 5 files of 200MB each at the same time and it's lightning fast. If they do choose to add a presentation and spreadsheet application, Google and Microsoft may well find themselves with a major player to contend with.

So the pomp and publicity is over. Firefox 3 was downloaded a gazillion times in 24 hours and was given a big gold medal by everyone (including Softonic). But just how good is Firefox 3.0? In my opinion, it deserves most of the praise it receives but it is still far from perfect. In fact, there are at least three things I really hate about Mozilla's latest browser.

1    Firefox 3 crashes all the time

I haven't used a program this prone to critical errors since Firefox 2.0 was released. In the last seven days, Firefox has crashed on me about 10 times. And like the very best program crashes, Fx 3's problems seem impossible to predict. Sometimes, I'm editing a bookmark's properties and Bang! Or maybe I used a search box on a frequently used and perfectly stable website and Boom! This happens on my Mac and my work PC but most specifically on the Mac, I also get frequent hangs due to other applications working. None of this happened during my extensive testing of the betas for Fx 3, so why now?

2   The memory hog that grew and grew

Everyone knows that the main problem people faced with Firefox 2 was that it was prone to gobbling up all your system resources like a fat, greedy, RAM-eating pig. We were given assurances by Mozilla and various reviewers that this problem had been fixed but... I still see Firefox using up a hell of a lot of memory for just two open tabs. Of course, extensions can be the root cause of this kind of problem but as far as I'm concerned, it's mad to say "Well, as long as you don't install any extensions, you should be fine". If I can't install extensions without Firefox turning into Mr. Creosote then I don't want the option to install them.

A while back I bemoaned the fact that Pandora is now only available to listeners inside the USA. Well, the situation hasn't changed but they have released Pandora Desktop which as the name suggests, is the desktop version. After experimenting with some of the tips suggested on the Digital Alchemy site, I managed to get it working with limited success and took it for a test drive.

In reality, there's nothing particularly different from the online version of Pandora. The difference is that it's much more easily accessible. You can access it in a jiffy from Windows tray or Mac dock and they've built in some instant access links to common Pandora features such as pause, change stations, etc. As the developers admit themselves though there are no major changes and, "If nothing else it ensures that you'll never accidentally browse away from Pandora and lose your stream."

The one thing that you can't avoid on the desktop version is, yes you guessed it, advertisements. To pay for all the music licensing, Pandora need to use advertising to keep it going. The difference, and I prefer this to the online version, is that the ads are graphical rather than audio. The big downside is that because the program requires so many pixels to run the ads, Pandora Desktop is not exactly a small desktop application and can tend to hog your RAM. The other slightly annoying thing is that it requires installation of Adobe AIR to work (which it does automatically) which is worth having anyway because there are so many cool applications coming out for it. However, Mac users be warned that Pandora Desktop is apparently particularly heavy on RAM and the CPU which the developers have identified as an Adobe AIR issue which they are working to resolve.

Pandora Desktop is currently in beta stage so if you experience any other added problems or issues, e-mail them to beta-feedback@pandora.com

We all run the risk of being cheated in many aspects of our daily lives and computers are not an exception. If you don't pay enough attention you may easily end up swindled, robbed or just made to look like a complete fool.

There are several ways you can wind up in any of these unpleasant situations, so we thought it would be a good idea to create a list of the most common ones to help you avoid them now and in the future.

1. Download magic software Any relatively popular program has its own fake version, usually bloated with ads, viruses and malware. Apps like Ares or eMule are the most forged ones. You should suspect it's a fake when, after installing eMule, you're asked to enter a serial key, call a given phone number or send a text message. Obviously, the easiest way to avoid these fake copies is downloading software only from a reliable source such as Softonic.

There are a couple of alternative situations to this case: one is when you suddenly find the latest version of a well-known program that includes new, incredible features. Did you hear about that new Live MSN Messenger with support for satellite connections, air conditioning and remote assistance to manage the dishwasher? I don't think that's the original program! The other alternative is downloading software you intend to use for nefarious purposes, such as multiplayer game tricks, key generators and the like. You'd better have an updated antivirus tool in this case: a lot of the guys who develop a lot of these programs aren't exactly into truth and honesty themselves.

Just as expected, Apple revealed version 2 of the iPhone yesterday at the WWDC. The mobile device, which will be available in 22 countries worldwide on July 11th, offers a sleuth of new features: 3G network support, GPS, simultaneous voice and data connections, Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, secure access via Cisco IPSec VPN, WPA2 Enterprise and 802.1X authentication, a flush headphone jack and better battery life (300 hours standby, 10 hours talk time, 5 to 6 hours high speed browsing, 7 hours video, and 24 hours of audio).

Apple also revealed the new App Store, which will give you access to all the applications created by independent developers using the iPhone SDK.

iPhone 3G now comes in two models, black and white, yet the most significant announcement could be the price itself. In an effort to reach a number of 10 million iPhones sold worldwide, Apple will now offer the device at significantly lower prices, $199 for the 8 GB model and $299 for the 16 GB one.

This was easily one of the most exciting days of WWDC in recent years with many more announcements accompanying news of the iPhone3G, and all that just on day 1.

Apple also announced the expected transformation of their .Mac service into MobileMe. It will let you store all your email, contacts and calendars on a secure server on the me.com site and sync to any one of your devices, whether Mac or PC. MobileMe will work with native applications and current .Mac users will be automatically migrated to it.

Day 1 of WWDC 08 was also the opportunity to reveal a little bit more about the next Mac OS, Snow Leopard. Expected in about a year, Snow Leopard will offer Microsoft Exchange support and introduce Quicktime X, with optimized codecs and a better playback experience. OpenCL, 64-bit technology and a Multicore architecture will also mean much improved performances.

There's more to come at the WWDC, notably with the Design Awards expected in a few days. We'll keep you posted!

Apple's much awaited WorldWide Developer Conference (WWDC) starts today at 10:00 am Pacific Time. The event which takes place at Apple's favorite exhibition complex, the Moscone Center in San Francisco, will last from the 9th to the 13th of June, and will gather developers and IT professionals from the world around to learn about Apple's technological innovations. Just like last year, the iPhone will be the main focus of the conference, but developers will also have the chance to work with Apple engineers and attend over 150 sessions and labs on everything else Mac.

The exciting thing with the WWDC though is all about predicting what Apple will reveal. There's always a great deal of secrecy, Apple-style, during the event, and always something that Steve Jobs pulls out of his sleeve. Last year Apple surprised us with the complete feature list for Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), Safari for Windows, and the iPhone SDK. So what can we expect this time?

• iPhone 2.0 - Expectations run high for what should be the second release of Apple's star product. We could very well see the mobile device finally run on 3G networks and big changes in the software development kit. Also expect an App Store in iTunes and GPS support.
• Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - There's been talk of Apple releasing a new operating system. However, according to many sources, the so called Snow Leopard would not offer drastically new features but would show significant improvements in security, reliability and design. The big question then is how much will Apple charge for it?
• Mobile Me service - Remember how we told you the .Mac online service would change? Apple should announce a complete revamp of the service including better integration with the iPhone and more powerful syncing capabilities.
• Design Awards - Extremely valued by software developers, the Design Awards recognize the best apps built for Mac. We tried to make a guess for this year, but there really are no clues as to which software will win the prize.
• 4" and 7" Multi-Touch devices - According to a Wall Street analyst, Apple could release new highly portable devices which make use of its new trackpad technology seen in MacBook Air. These devices could run on 3G networks.

Keeping your Mac safe isn't the most difficult of things. As I previously wrote, Macs are generally well protected against any sort of threat, and if you've followed my advice on tightening up security by configuring your firewall and making sure your screen is locked, you shouldn't have any problems.

Those of you who still feel a little paranoid, and have time on their hands, should take a look at the Leopard security configurations guide released by Apple today. This guide is clearly aimed at experienced Mac users though as it really goes into details on Mac's security architecture and each and every sensitive areas. Consider it like a map of the bank and how to keep it safe from robbers. Leopard offers a number of security improvements, including better Trojan horse protection, stronger runtime security, easier network security and improved secure connectivity, that this guide takes into account.

An interesting read, the security configurations guide for Leopard conscientiously takes you through each and every security issue: global system settings, accounts, system preferences, data and encryption, system swap and hibernation storage. For the ultra geeks out there there's even a security checklist for action items at the end of the document. This can actually be very useful if you handle systems in a company, but I wouldn't really worry about it on your home computer.

The advanced security management section will teach you all you need to know about managing authorization rights, maintaining system integrity detecting intrusions or auditing system activity.

Worth a read if you're curious as to how your Mac handles security, to check out the improvements in Leopard and to keep your Mac safe at all times.

Acrobat 9 was officially announced by Adobe today, as AppleInsider managed to reveal before anybody else last week. The new version of the famous PDF reader now comes with native support for Adobe Flash, so you can include Flash videos and applications in your PDFs, live collaboration with other users on the same document via Acrobat.com and unification of all sorts of content into one file. You can already sign up at Acrobat.com to be notified once Acrobat 9 is released and to try out the ConnectNow environment.

Very similar to Photoshop Express, ConnectNow is built completely in Flash and offers a clear interface from which you can create and share new documents thanks to Adobe Buzzword, invite participants to an online meeting, and share your webcam or desktop.

You can now blend all sorts of content in Adobe's new Portfolios, called Packages in previous versions of Acrobat. Portfolios look likely to be a more central part of Acrobat 9, with Adobe encouraging users to blend content together, including video and 3D, and share their documents with other users. Acrobat comes with a number of layouts but you can also customize your own by choosing from a set of color schemes. As pointed out by AppleInsider, Adobe have finally integrated Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of scanned text, so you can make any one of your PDF files searchable. Almost all files, including paper documents and web pages, can now be converted to PDF and two PDFs can easily be compared, with varying text automatically highlighted for you.

Acrobat will come in three versions: Pro Extended, Pro and Standard, with the starting price, for the Standard version, being $299. If you're ready to pay the price and see some use in the extended collaborative tools on hand, it's probably worth making the jump. We'll have a hands on review of Acrobat 9 for you as soon as it's released.

All online social network sites claim to be useful because they allow you to stay in contact with friends you wouldn’t otherwise hear from. Having a profile online allows you to post photos, videos and write thoughts or experiences available for anybody to read or see. They can all know where you are, what you are up to and so on. It’s cool and time saving, isn’t it?

Although it is true that Facebook is mostly used to maintain contacts with people you know, the ‘temptation’ of enlarging your social network is always there. It’s surely not like LinkedIn where you just invite work colleague and you really want to maintain your profile linked just to specific people. In Facebook most users leave their profile open for others to see and it can happen that complete strangers ask you to be their 'friend’. Sometimes you may think, ‘why not’, so you accept the invitation, simply basing your willingness on the other person’s picture.

Even though people say they use social networks just to maintain contacts with family and mates, the possibility of knowing ‘new friends’, or of being ‘on the market’, really stands behind the popularity of these social websites. If this weren’t true, if the possibility ‘to flirt’ were not an option, people would just have a personal blog, a mailing list or a private forum to stay in contact with whoever they wanted.

This trend is even clearer with Badoo, a ‘new’ service which is becoming extremely popular, and taking ground on Facebook. It is actually a free dating web site, under the appearance of a social network. Of course the service is meant to create your community of friends, share photos and videos. With this site you rate other people’s pictures, which can actually be funny, and post a brief profile. Within minutes you receive dozens of messages of people asking to be your friend and so on. Not that they will write more than ‘Hi, how are you’ though. Users can even pay to have their photo in the site's home page, so they can be in contact with the entire world. The human omnipresence delirium has its chances to be fulfilled.

The big rumor today is that Apple will make significant changes to their .Mac online service, starting with the name. For those of you that don't know what it is, .Mac is an online account where you can set up your own website, photo albums, Apple Mail account and even store files. It works seamlessly with iLife and all other Apple applications, but the service those come at a price, starting from $99.95 for a unique yearly membership.

TUAW yesterday reported on two links hinting that .Mac will go through a name change, and maybe even bigger modifications. On one side there's Todd Ditchendorf, an ex-engineer at Apple who in his twitter suggests something big is coming for .Mac. Then there's a more substantial blog post from Dmitry Chetsnykh, CEO of Coding Robots, who, after installing the latest 10.5.3 update of Leopard, found hints of renaming of .Mac in the Localizable.strings of iCal, Apple Mail and Safari. In all of these .Mac was replaced by %@.

So will a new .Mac service be one of the main attractions of this year's upcoming WWDC? It's been a while since we've heard of anything new for .Mac, at least since last August, when new web galleries and 10 GB of storage for all were announced by Steve Jobs. Maybe as TUAW hint it will have to do with extended interaction with the upcoming iPhone 2.0.

Update (02/05/08): Many rumors believe that the new service will use the Me.com domain, which seems to have been recently acquired by Apple.