This post is
one part refresher tip for those of you into working with photography on your Mac, and another part "new
hotness" for those who are fresh to the Mac platform; possibly due to a Mac-related gift over the holidays
(congrats!). By now most of you have either heard of or are using iPhoto or some other OS X image-organizing
application for your pictures, but a lot of users pass over a great importing tool that’s right under our collective
noses: Image Capture, residing in your Applications folder. This unassuming yet powerful image tool acts kind of like a
command center for your image importing needs as well as OS X’s behavior with cameras and cards, allowing you to see
yours images and videos before simply importing everything into, say, iPhoto. You can import into specific folders and
also specify a default app to start up when your camera or card is connected to your Mac. A decent set of options and
preferences are accessible in Image Capture, giving you a bit more control over how OS X handles all those images
you’ve been shooting.

[via href="http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2005122409261096&lsrc=osxh">MacOSXHints]

src="http://www.tuaw.com/media/2005/12/TigerMail_ThunderbirdTheme2.jpg" />
href="http://www.timgaden.com/hawkwings/2006/01/01/tigermail-make-thunderbird-look-mail-20-like/">Hawk Wings has
tracked down another Mail theme for Thunderbird by the name of href="https://addons.mozilla.org/themes/moreinfo.php?application=thunderbird&category=Newest&numpg=10&id=1713">TigerMail.
While I know we’ve blogged one before, I can’t track it down. From what I remember though, TigerMail is a much more
accurate reproduction of the Tiger Mail look and feel. But if Panther Mail’s look and feel is more your style, href="http://www.timgaden.com/hawkwings/2005/09/17/an-apple-mail-theme-for-thunderbird/">CrossOver might just be
the Thunderbird theme for you.

src="http://www.tuaw.com/media/2005/12/movie_theater.jpg" />The Toronto Star ran an interesting href="http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Render&c=Article&cid=1135896621633&call_pageid=968867495754">article
today suggesting that 2005 may have been the beginning of the end of the traditional movie-going experience. I’ve had
the same thought recently as I downloaded interesting content for my iPod video and read multiple predictions that
Apple would soon release a Mac-based home theater.

Why go to the trouble of driving to the movie theater,
standing in line for tickets, taking the risk that a new movie will be sold out, paying robbers’ prices for popcorn and
soft drinks, sitting uncomfortably in a seat with broken springs behind a lady with very big hair, and trying to ignore
the Surround Sound from the theater next door—all when you could be sitting in the comfort of your own home
watching a movie on your own Mac theater system, or enjoying a portable show on your iPod?

The romantic
notion that people will always go out to movie theaters has been proven wrong in the past, as the Toronto Star article
points out. There was a decline in movie-going with the introduction of television, home videos, and movies on DVD.
Apple’s foray into video, with all it promises, may portend a further decline in movie-going. As sad as it may seem,
this could indeed be the beginning of the end of the venerable movie theater. What do you think?

Now
here’s a novel idea: keeping songs and playlists synchronized between Macs. While it’s possible to do it manually, or
with jury-rigging your favorite backup system, I really think Apple should offer a far better, OS X-injected way of
doing this.

Enter iPod.iTunes, an app that tries to
fill this gap by using the already established iTunes and iPod system, offering 8 different ways to synchronize
playlists and songs between your Macs. It offers a fairly robust feature set for customizing the syncing process, but
the obvious catch here is that - in my understanding - what you synchronize is limited to the size of your iPod. I
haven’t given this a real shot yet as I have a 30 GB library of music and only a 4 GB nano, but this sounds like one
of the best solutions I’ve seen for keeping multiple iTunes libraries in sync thus far.

[via href="http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/12/26/ipod.itunes.3.0.released/">MacNN]

src="http://www.tuaw.com/media/2005/12/PodJams_iDiddyNano.jpg" alt="" />The Pod Jams iDiddy fashion covers for the iPod
nano come in two styles: Clear and Bling. href="http://www.ididdy.com/WS4D_Cookie=x12.31.05_07,41,37_61/forms/shopping/*ws4d-db-query-Quickshow.ws4d?IDNCJL">Clear,
as you might imagine, allows the true beauty of the nano to shine through while still protecting it in plastic. Bling
(pictured) steps up the flashy style by encasing your nano in a diamond-like sparkling plastic case. Both of these
iDiddy’s come with an iLanyard, similar to href="http://tuaw.com/2005/10/21/first-impressions-apple-lanyard-for-ipod-nano/">Apple’s lanyard, boasting superior
earbuds that "pound out the base and highs." Fortunately these cases can be used with or without the
lanyard.

At a competitive $29.95, it’s nice to see more lanyard style cases cropping up. They’re expected to
ship the first week of January ‘06.

[via href="http://playlistmag.com/news/2005/12/30/podjams/index.php?lsrc=mwrss">Playlist]

src="http://www.tuaw.com/media/2005/12/CFM.jpg" alt="" />Client
Folder Maker (CFM) is a handy applescript applet for those of you who repeatedly have to create standard folder
structures for any kind of projects such as websites or design proofs for clients. The applet offers a simple UI for
essentially creating a folder structure template, allowing you to list all the regular folders you might need. Building
websites for clients? Create a folder structure list in CFM with folder names like I have pictured and you can simply
run this applet to generate all the folders you need for each project, named according to whatever scheme best suits
you. It’s a handy little applet if you’re doing any kind of repetitive work like this, and for the mere price of $0,
how can you go wrong?

I might be unique
in the Mac community in that I actually like Apple’s .Mac. Yes, there are alternatives. Yes, you can roll your own.
Yes, it’s a bit expensive. However, it’s on of the few tools that works the way I want it to. Synching my bookmarks,
calendars, and contacts between multiple machines is essential to the way I work. And I like that my iDisk is available
from virtually any computer I sit in front of. My single complaint with .Mac is the slow transfer/copy speeds of the
iDisk.

Apple’s also given all of us .Mac users a nice New Years Eve present. They’ve href="http://loop.worldofapple.com/archives/2005/12/31/mac-shifts-bandwidth-limit-to-1tb/">increased the bandwidth
allowance on our .Mac accounts to 1TB per month.

I’m thinking this suggests new .Mac tools about to be
released which involve storing and synchronizing video files (like those purchased from the iTunes store) between our
computers. Also, a Mac mini-based media center device could easily tie into an iDisk for storage of files.
/>Another clue that a media center device is just around the corner? Perhaps…

Now, I love
Google Maps. Since its inception, it’s been my default online maps site. I view it as the logical evolution of the
industry which started with MapQuest and melded into Yahoo! Maps which gave rise to Google Maps. At various times of my
Internet chronology, I’ve been an enthusiastic user of each.

LifeHacker has given us instructions for putting
Google Maps on
your iPod Photo and now Yahoo has answered with a web application that allows you to enter directions between two
points, then zips the results into a .zip file for download. All you do then is unzip the file and place the images in
your Photos library for it to upload to your iPod. Yahoo is calling this service href="http://ipodiway.com/">iPodiWay. It’s really not a bad idea

If
you thought those $600 speakers for your iPod were
expensive, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Hammacher Schlemmer has released the Studio-Quality Triode-Tube iPod Speakers at
a mere $3999.95. No, that’s not a typo, they want you to spend four thousand dollars on a speaker set for your iPod. />
Okay, take a minute and breathe. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. Better?

Now, at least for the $4000 you
get a nice device. From the product description:
/>"…the system consists of an aluminum-encased amplifier housing four powerful
Class-A tubes which glow gently as they generate warm, low-octave sound that is virtually distortion-free, considered by
audiophiles to be the most pleasing to the human ear. The tube amplifier smoothes over distortions found in modern
digital recordings while helping to compensate and minimize the quality loss inherent in compressed audio such as
MP3s."

So it’s not like it’s a $100 "antique" chair marked up to $5000 and being sold
in some Upper East Side furniture store. There’s some real tech involved.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned
living in NYC (and consulting for the rich and famous), it’s that some people will buy anything if it’s marked up high
enough and perceived as a "luxury" item. I have to believe that this falls clearly in that category.

I’ll never forget
the first Mac conference I attended where we all used SubEthaEdit to collaboratively take notes during presentations
and lectures. It was exciting to see software used in such a refreshingly new way.%uFFFD The social aspect of working
together to evolve a working document was fascinating to me.

And so I’m bummed that I won’t be able to
witness what Jambo Networks will be doing
at January’s Macworld Expo. They’ve created an application that you can download to your computer which will help you to
interact with other attendees.

"You can download the Jambo application to your PowerBook or iBook to
discover other attendees you want to meet that are in proximity, wherever you happen to be. Jambo can detect
like-minded attendees throughout Moscone Center, your hotel, the airport, or up to 5 or 6 blocks away from wherever you
are. Jambo can even discover other attendees on your same airplane flight too, since Jambo works online and
offline."

This is exciting. For me, Mac conferences have always been about social networking. I love
meeting people that share my same passion and hobby. Anything that can help facilitate that social aspect of a
conference is a plus i n my book. Perhaps one of our lucky TUAW bloggers attending the conference will do a review of
the software during the conference [I look in Scott and Laurie's general direction].