Via TUAW.

Hotspot Shield sends your connection though an private American VPN network. In other words, it tricks websites into thinking that you’re internet connection is based in the US. Thus, sites like Hulu.com magically work.

Hotspot Sheild isn’t the kind of service you want running at all times, as it does put a banner add at the top of webpages that you visit. However, if you want to watch some internet TV and you’re not in the States, give it a try. But I have to keep this short because I’m in the middle of an episode of The Office.

LittleSnapper

LittleSnapper is a new screen/web capture app with a built in browser that lets you take smart snaps of embedded web elements. Just hover over different areas in a loaded web page and page elements will highlight for you to capture. LittleSnapper will also manage your web snaps so they’re easy to find in the future.

Download LittleSnapper. It’s 39 USD. The demo limits you to 15 images.

Songbird

Songbird is an iTunes-like music jukebox app without Apple’s music store. In its place is a built in browser which lets you load up music blogs and play all the embedded mp3s without clicking on any links in the page. It probably won’t replace iTunes as your primary media management app, but it’s an excellent way to discover new music.

Download Songbird. It’s freeware.

Fluid

Fluid is an SSB or Site Specific Browser. Have some Web 2.0 sites that you visit everyday? Configure fluid to handle your browsing of these sites and your experience will feel much more like you are using a desktop application. Fluid also has a Cover Flow mode so you can preview all the links on sites like Digg or Reddit.

Download Fluid. It’s freeware.

CSSEdit

CSSEdit’s built in browser was a game changer for me. Open up any web page in CSSEdit and you can not only view its CSS – you can edit it. The browser supports live updating of all the changes you make in the style sheet so you’re never editing blindly.

Download CSSEdit. It’s 30 Euros (about 40 USD). There’s an unlimited trial with the ability to save removed.

TubeTV

TubeTV lets you search YouTube and download videos in an iTunes friendly format. It’s not the most beautiful app, but it’s probably the simplest way to get your favorite vids ready for watching on the go.

Download TubeTV. It’s freeware.

Know another application with a unique web browser implementation? Share it with us in the comments. And don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up the the latest and greatest on MacMembrane.

HandBrake, however, is packed with arcane preferences, which can make it difficult to master if you’re inclined to setting your own encoding standards. Fortunately, tucked away in a slide out drawer are some presets which makes doing so unnecessary. To open the drawer, click on the ‘Toggle Presets’ icon at the top right of HandBrake’s main window.

If you’re like me an use HandBrake to encode to a specific format the majority of the time, it’s worth your while to change the default format from ‘Basic’ to your chosen format. To do so, click first on your desired default and then scan the bottom of the drawer for the little gear drop-down menu. In this menu, simply select ‘Make Default’ and you may never need to open the drawer again, nor fear wasting time accidentally encoding to a format that you don’t want.

Open up a standard aspect ratio vid in QT and then jump into preferences. Under the Playback tab you’ll find the option to expand your vid for a total full screen effect. As on the iPhone, you do lose a little off the top and bottom of your video, but I’ve never found that to be too distracting. Set the second menu to ‘Fill Screen’ for standard movies and you’re set.

Once you’ve enabled true full-screen, however, you can now toggle it on and off during playback by hitting the little expand button in QT’s floating control panel, just as in the iPhone (it’s the second to last button in the panel). This is much more convenient if you momentarily want to check if you’re missing anything by making the most of your wide screen monitor.

If you want freeware (and who doesn’t?) here’s 10 Apps for a Fresh Mac. And here’s ten more.

1Password

The internet is a scary place! As the monsters become smarter, you need to take precautions against their sinister designs. 1Password is a password manager for your Mac. Safari already saves passwords for you in your keychain, sure, but 1Password enhances this inbuilt capability ten-fold. Smartly save your new passwords from web forms in its database and autofill them the next time you visit. When it comes time to create a password for a new site or service, use 1Password’s strong password generator to make sure your form is secure. All of my passwords are now 28 characters of mixed letters, numbers and symbols – strings that I could never remember, but 1Password makes it so that I don’t have to. Peace of mind.

Download 1Password from Agile Web Solutions. 34.95 USD after a free trial period.

MarsEdit

I love blogging. But I love blogging even more because of MarsEdit. Far and away the best blogging client for the Mac, MarsEdit is akin to a plain text editor that lets you apply custom markup macros to your writing and send your work up to your weblog with a single click (or keystroke, in my case). Set up is dead simple, and despite MarsEdit’s power under the hood, the application is extremely intuitive and easy to use. And if your into scripting your apps, MarsEdit’s extensive AppleScript support won’t let you down (read about my MarsEdit workflow, with scripted goodness, here). Perhaps best of all, MarsEdit’s developer consistently releases maintenance builds between major updates and adds significant features almost monthly.

Get MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software. It’s 29.55 USD after a 30 day trial.

CSSEdit

CSSEdit lets you edit CSS (cascading style sheets) and preview the results of your experimentation instantly in its integrated browser. I can’t speak for experienced CSS mavens, but if you like to experiment and want to learn one of the most important aspects of the new web, CSSEdit is an amazing teacher. Install the included bookmarklet and open up any site you’re viewing in Safari in CSSEdit. Examine the code. Modify the code. Learn. View style hierarchies in the preview window, set new classes and ids via an HUD pop up and apply styles using comprehensive drop-down menus. When you’re satisfied, send your creation up the server via your favorite FTP application without leaving CSSEdit. The app may cost 30 Euros, but to me that’s cheap tuition.

Download CSSEdit from MacRabbit. It’s 29.95 Euro after a time unlimited demo with crippled saving.

WriteRoom

WriteRoom is the application in which I am writing up this post. Beautiful and fully customizable full-screen mode! I’ve tried the excellent Scrivener, but that application has far more firepower than I need – WriteRoom is simply full-screen, distraction free goodness. But WriteRoom has replaced TextEdit for me in most cases, and not because I need full-screen for everything I write, but because even when editing documents in a discreet window the application is completely soothing on the eyes. A nice, black text editor! WriteRoom’s extensive options let you set your text color and background to whatever you like, moreover, so if black isn’t your fancy, change it up. This is something of a luxury application, but whatever increases your ability to crank out words is worth the money in my opinion.

Download WriteRoom from Hog Bay Software. It’s 24.95 after a demo period.

Airfoil

If you have an Airport Express and haven’t heard of AirFoil, your time has come. The Airport Express comes equipped with AirTunes, which can send audio from iTunes to remote speakers over your network. Amazing! But what about Safari? Songbird? Or GarageBand? Install AirFoil and send audio from any application to your Airport Express. What about video? If you’re sending sound alone to your Airport Express, your Mac will buffer the output in maintain a clear signal. This makes video impossible to watch – you’ll see someone talking and hear what they say 3 seconds later. But Airfoil 3 comes with Airfoil Video Player, a full featured video app that syncs video with its audio output. It’s brilliant. Airfoil completes Apple’s Airport Express.

Get Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba. 25 USD after a demo which overlays noise on transmissions longer than 10 minutes.

Hazel

I wrote about how I use Hazel to keep my desktop organized and since I’ve taken the pill, I can’t imagine my Mac without it. Hazel is folder actions on steroids, without all of the AppleScript effort. It can monitor any folder on your Mac for incoming files and ‘do stuff’ with them – almost anything. Move jpegs from your downloads folder into Pictures, Mp3s into Music or PDFs into Documents. Set colors to your new folders an files or after a defined time, move or delete older files. Auto empty the trash at a certain size, delete your applications as well as all their associated files, trigger Automator actions, shell scripts or AppleScripts when the contents of a folder changes… I feel that there’s so much here that a discerning user will undoubtedly find new ways to use this diamond of an application. Amazing app.

Download Hazel from Noodlesoft. 21.95 USD after a two week trial.

XScope

If you do any kind of visual designing on your Mac, XScope is something you should check out. XScope is a color picker, on screen ruler set and light browser emulator rolled into one. XScope also allows you to draw Photoshopesque grids on your screen if you need to line things up vertically or horizontally. The application’s most novel feature, however, is a kind of smart measuring tool that lets you quickly (very quickly!) find the distance between two screen elements using an expanding ruler. XScope’s keyboard shortcuts are extensive and a bit of a learning curve must be overcome, but the application is designed thoughtfully and moreover is quite pretty in itself. If you use a bunch of separate tools to pick colors, take measurements and compare screen elements, XScope will replace them all and give you new tools that you never knew you needed.

Get XScope by The Iconfactory. It’s 26.95 USD after a 40 hours of usage.

FastScripts

Readers of MacMembrane know that I am an enthusiastic if amateur AppleScripter (check out my collection of free scripts). Your Mac comes with a built in menu-bar utility to access your scripts on the fly and that’s great, but once you try FastScripts you will see the poverty of Apple’s script menu. FastScripts lets you assign scripts to context specific folders which will only show up when their parent application is active. When I’m in Safari, for example, only my Safari scripts will be fully exposed in the top menu. To access your other scripts, just scroll down to their folder. More importantly, however, is that FastScripts lets you assign shortcuts to any or all of your scripts – hence the name of the application. There are, of course, freeware methods by which you can assign shortcuts to scripts or anything else (Quicksilver is my favorite), but it’s FastScripts’ elegant management of your AppleScripts that makes the application one of my favorites. If you script your Mac, FastScripts will make you smile.

Download FastScripts. 14.95 after a 30 trial. A free FastScripts Lite version is also available (download link near bottom of page).

QuickTime Pro

QuickTime Pro is a small up-sell that Apple sneaks into OS X. If you only have QT installed, have a look through the menus – many will be disabled until you shell out the cash for QT Pro. The upgrade gives you a wealth of export options, as well as a super quick way to slice up a video, adjust it’s sound or color range, or export it for the web. QuickTime Pro, as is to be expected, integrates tightly with all of iLife, so, for instance, you get a bunch more options when you export from iMovie. For small edits and tweaks to your movie files, QuickTime Pro is a great investment.

Get QuickTime Pro from Apple. It’s 29.95 USD.

TextExpander

TextExpander is a productivity tool that lets you reuse common snippets of text without retyping them over and over again. The utility sits in your menu bar and provides you with a folder organized list of your text snippets which you can insert into any document. I’ve heard it used most for replying to stock emails, but I use it whenever I’m working on a new website. When I open a blank CSS file, I enter into TextExpander all of the values that I will use over and over again in my style sheet. This makes it easy if I need to jump over to Photoshop to create an image using like colors or dimensions. It’s a quick way to work, and you can even download a bunch of stock snippets relating to XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. from the developer’s website. Amazing time and sanity saver.

Get TextExpander from Smile on my Mac. 29.95 USD after a 30 trial.

There we have it! There are so many sweet applications for the Mac that I could write a hundred posts like this. What are your favorites? Let me know in the comments!

First off, have a YouTube video playing and open up Safari’s Activity window (to open the Activity window, look under Safari‘s Window menu or press Cmd + Opt + A). If you have multiple tabs open, find the tab with your YouTube video and expand it by clicking on the grey triangle beside its name. You’ll see a bunch of strangely named elements, but just find the largest file loading in the page by looking under the status column:

Once you’ve found the file (look to the image above for an example) double click it to begin downloading. A nondescript file will download to your downloads folder called ‘get_video.’ This is a Flash version of the video you were watching (if you want to test this, add the extension ‘.flv’ to the video’s title and open it in VLC Media Player, which plays Flash files natively). By default, iTunes (and therefore your iPod) can’t handle Flash videos, so you’ll have to convert the get_video file to an mp4.

The easiest way to convert Flash video (and many other kinds, too) is by using Techspansion’s free iSquint utility. Rename the ‘get_video’ file to something more memorable and then drag it onto iSquint. Select ‘Convert to iPod’ and check the ‘Add to iTunes’ check box. With your video in the queue, hit ‘Start’ and iSquint will convert your video and add it to your iTunes Movies folder. At this point, I like to change some of the meta information – adding song title and album name if it’s a music video – but it’s not necessary. Drag your video onto your iPod then next time you sync it and you’ll have your YouTube video ready to watch on the go.

If you want to capture a portion of the screen rather than the whole thing, press Command + Shift + 4 and a set of crosshairs will appear. Drag the crosshairs until the portion of the screen you want to capture is highlighted and release. The shutter will sound and your screenshot will appear on your desktop.

A third option: if you want to capture a particular window on the screen, press Command + Shift + 4 and then the spacebar. Your crosshairs will transform into a camera icon which, when moved around the screen, will highlight the window it is over. Click the mouse to make your capture.

You’ll notice that the third method – window mode, it might be called – adds a translucent shadow around the window that you’ve captured. In most cases this should be fine, and moreover it looks quite slick, but if you don’t want the shadow, OS X offers you another way to capture elements on the screen. Open the utility “Grab” (Applications/Utilities/Grab) and select ‘Window’ from the ‘Capture’ menu bar menu. Take your window grab and save the file (Grab also lets you name your files before saving them) and you’ll have a shadow-free png.

Screenshots of objects in motion

If you begin to take a lot of screenshots, you’ll soon notice a limitation of the above methods, namely, that it is very difficult to precisely capture a screen element that is in motion. For instance, double clicking on the title bar of any application window will minimize it to the dock, and if you have “Genie Effect” selected in the dock preference pane, the window will minimize with a unique animation. How to capture a precise frame of this animation in a screen shot?

To get your screen shot, you’ll need to install some third party software, namely an application which can record video of what’s happening on your screen. I use SnapZ Pro, which is 69$, but iShowU, a similar software, is only 20$. Open your screen recording app and take a short video of the animation that you want to capture. Open the resulting movie in QuickTime, scrub to the frame you want, and drag the frame off QuickTime onto Preview in the Finder. The frame will open and you can then save it to the format of your choice. Presto:

Elegant grays? Sure. But a tiny box in a browser window isn’t the ideal venue to watch a movie. Get around this situation by copying the movie’s URL, opening QuickTime Player, selecting ‘Open URL’ from the File menu and pasting the video in. Now you can resize the video to a watchable size and go on about your online business.

Here is an AppleScript to open the currently playing movie in Safari in QuickTime Player and save you a few clicks:

tell application "Safari"
	set nowPlay to URL of document 1
	close current tab of window 1
end tell

tell application "QuickTime Player"
	getURL nowPlay
	activate
end tell

Note the “close current tab” command in line three. I can’t see a reason to keep the movie tab open after QuickTime takes over, but if you can, just remove the line and the script will still work fine.

But this situation can be automated even further. What if, instead of actually opening the movie in a webpage before sending it to QuickTime, we could automatically search out the movie link and open it from that alone? And what if, moreover, the page contains links to multiple videos? Could we not open each linked movie in its own little player? Think of the time we’d save!

tell application "Safari"
	set link_count to (do JavaScript "document.links.length" in document 1)

	set myLinks to {}
	repeat with i from 0 to (the link_count - 1)
		set this_URL to (do JavaScript "document.links[" & (i as string) & "]" in ¬
			document 1)
		if this_URL ends with ".mpg" or this_URL ends with ¬
			".mpeg" or this_URL ends with ".mp4" or this_URL ends with ¬
			".wmv" or this_URL ends with ".mpeg4" or this_URL ends with ¬
			".avi" or this_URL ends with ".flv" or this_URL ends with ".mov" then
			set this_host to (do JavaScript ¬
				"document.links[" & (i as string) & "].host" in document 1)
			if this_host is "" then
				set this_URL to the parent_URL & this_URL

			end if
			set the end of the myLinks to this_URL
		end if
	end repeat

	repeat with i from 1 to number of items in the myLinks
		set the image_URL to item i of the myLinks
	end repeat
end tell

tell application "QuickTime Player"
	getURL myLinks
end tell

This script borrows heavily from Obi Kwiet‘s amazing Open Linked Images in Tab script (it’s the second one down on the page). Out of the box it will support mpegs, mpeg4s and wmvs. If you want to add other formats, just insert

or this_URL ends with ".VidExtension"

at the appropriate place. In QuickTime preferences, make sure you have “Open movies in new players” checked!

If you don’t want to mess with Script Editor, you can download Send Linked Movies to QuickTime precompiled and run it from your script menu. If it doesn’t work for you or you see some way to make it more efficient, please don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments.

All of the applications from the previous list have a home on my own computer, but of course they have lots of company. Here are 10 more freeware apps of a slightly more specialized nature. I think that the majority of users will find them all useful over time.

Quicksilver:

In essence, Quicksilver is a keyboard based application and document launcher, but beneath the surface Quicksilver is a powerful and versatile little creature. Compose emails or send files without opening Mail, rename, move, copy or compress files, manipulate images, supercharge your clipboard, add system wide keyboard shortcuts to common actions and scripts and much, much more. Moreover, there is a multitude of application specific plugins for Quicksilver which extend its amazing out-of-the-box functionality even further. After climbing the learning curve, Quicksilver will make any user more efficient and productive, reducing if not completely eliminating trips to the Finder. It’s the Mac application that I couldn’t live without.

Download Quicksilver.

NetNewsWire:

Subscribing to RSS feeds makes consuming a massive amount of online content convenient and easy, and NetNewsWire is the absolute cream of RSS readers for the Mac. Group feeds by folders and smart folders, display unread articles in any number of ways, open articles in an external browser or in NetNewsWire itself, save notable articles or text clippings for later use and read all of your news using only the spacebar. NetNewsWire also comes with a large selection of ‘themes’ to customize the experience to your taste and integrates with other popular Mac apps. NetNewsWire is super fast, super stable and way powerful.

Download NetNewsWire.

Cyberduck:

Cyberduck is a remote file browser that supports FTP, FTP/TLS and SFTP transfers and integrates seamlessly with all the most popular Mac text editors. Easy bookmarking, access to bookmarks from the Finder, server history, smart memory of interrupted transfers, keychain integration, Quick Look support, powerful directory synchronization and an adorable and functional dashboard widget all make Cyberduck a top condender among Mac FTP clients. It also has extensive AppleScript support if your up to adding features of your own or automating existing ones. Top it all off with a user-friendly interface, and Cyberduck packs a huge punch for a free application.

Download Cyberduck.

TextWrangler:

A free text editor from the makers of BBEdit, TextWrangler lets you compose and edit plain-text and Unicode files with ease. TextWrangler supports syntax coloring and language specific options for a wide variety of coding protocols, has comprehensive AppleScript support, configurable keyboard shortcuts for often typed code and an integrated spell-checker. TextWrangler lets you search and replace text across multiple documents and even has a ‘Gremlin Zapper’ to purge your documents of unintended invisible elements. TextWrangler integrates with Cyberduck without configuration. It’s a rock solid application.

Download TextWrangler.

Audacity:

Audacity is a multi-track cross-platform audio editor with an intuitive interface and powerful features. Record live, edit sound files in popular formats, cut, copy, splice and mix diverse sounds, adjust the speed or pitch of a track independently and export your creation to mp3. Audacity is a cross-platform application and while its interface may not be the most Mac-like, it is nevertheless easy to access all of its features. Most Macs come with GarageBand preinstalled, but Audacity’s unique and easy to use feature set makes it a must-have alternative for audiophiles.

Download Audacity.

VoodooPad Lite:

Most people have heard of Wikis – online self-linking documents that allow users to modify or extend any webpage. They are a great way to organize a body of knowledge and are steadily gaining popularity online. VoodooPad Lite brings the power of the wiki to your desktop by allowing you to create your own multi-page local documents and link between them via text and images. VoodooPad’s simple interface makes quick work of linking pages and creating new pages on your wiki is just as easy. Use it to take class or meeting notes, organize research, plot a novel or just about anything you can think of. VoodooPad is an extremely versatile and unique application.

Download VoodooPad Lite.

Songbird:

Songbird is a desktop media player with an integrated web browser for reading music blogs and listening to online audio files. Until recently, Songbird felt somewhat unMac-like, without support for even the most common keyboard shortcuts applicable in nearly all Mac applications. With the 0.5 release, this has changed. Bookmark your favorite music blogs, create online playlists and download songs directly into your Songbird library. Songbird reads all the same audio file tags as iTunes, so importing your iTunes Library is as easy as pointing Songbird to your music folder. Though still in beta, Songbird is an innovative application with lots of potential.

Download Songbird.

Cocoalicious:

Cocoalicious is a freeware client for the popular Del.icio.us online bookmarking service. Upon first launch, Cocoalicious will download all of your online bookmarks and tags for quick viewing within the application. It also has a rudimentary browser window for viewing the source of individual bookmarks without the need to open them in an external browser. Posting new bookmarks to your account is easy, too. Highlight some descriptive text from an article, hit the included bookmarklet and enter some tags for your new bookmark (Cocoalicious will autocomplete your partially typed tags for you). Cocoalicious makes managing your Del.icio.us bookmarks easy and fun.

Download Cocoalicious.

Bean:

TextWrangler is great for editing plain-text files, but most people want a rich-text editor (i.e., a word processor), too. Bean is fast and light and has an easy to use interface. It offers writers a live word count, a page layout mode, the ability the import/export a bunch of popular text formats and, as a native Cocoa app, tight integration with OS X. Moreover, Bean is solid and quite pretty overall. And though Bean doesn’t include many of the flagship features of MS Word or Open Office, for most writing tasks Bean gets the job done with style.

Download Bean.

AppFresh:

Currently there are 118 apps in my applications folder, and while most of these alert me if there is an update available when I launch them, it can be a little annoying to open an app to get some work done only to have to wait while it downloads and installs an update (I know that you can ignore these, but I never do). With AppFresh you can batch update all of your applications at once without the need to open each one individually. AppFresh integrates with the extensive IUseThis online database to grab the latest versions of each application on your machine and installs them automatically. I run AppFresh about once a week to avoid the hassles involved in maintaining a fully up-to-date cache of applications.

Download AppFresh.

These ten applications combined with the ten from the previous list are a great start if you’re new to the Mac platform. If you’re not, I hope that you’ve found one or two that you weren’t familiar with and have a chance to play around with them. Of course, let me know in the comments if I’ve neglected any of your favorites.