During this past week I’ve been talking a lot about alternatives for VLC. I’ve covered MPlayer and Movist so far, and both these apps are very stable, good looking and overall promising. But what about the actual VLC? You should have heard not so long ago that the development of VLC for Mac was going under some trouble, and that the devs were talking about ceasing it.It’s not like that, fortunately.

VLC is getting a new face. Its codename is Lunettes, it’s got a brand new user interface, it’s fully 64-bit enabled. It’s basically a new application. From what we can read on the official Lunettes’ wiki page:

“VLC for Mac must attract designers.We have decided to offer to designer the possibility to edit via a simple text file the look of VLC.

VLC for Mac needs a good interface to be the best Video Player.We want to make sure you’ll get the best experience ever when watching your favorites TV shows or Movies using VLC.For instance, if I am watching a TV show, and then quit Lunettes. At next launch Lunettes will offer you to go back to where you were.

Then the famous playlist fades out: It is not visible by default, and you don’t have to use it anymore.

Also in fullscreen you can now scroll through your playlists or TV channels.

And finally Lunettes is 64 bits.”

Lunettes VLC Mac

And I’ll tell you what, it works. It’s fast, it’s nice, it’s smart enough to remember where I was before I quit the app. The cool thing is, you can already head over the Github page of the project and download an early working build of Lunettes.The future of VLC has been that promising, I believe.

When it comes to getting things done on a Mac, Things from CulturedCode is the way to go. I wrote an in-depth review of Things (both for Mac and iPhone actually) some weeks ago, and let’s face it: Things is just great. It’ one of the finest examples of a simple app that provides a stunning feature set, enabling the user to go through both easy and more complex and structured tasks.

There’s only one major drawback about Things, sync. CulturedCode hasn’t managed yet to come up with an over the air solution for syncing Things for Mac and iPhone, so everything still happens locally - in a local network. As we’re approaching to a cloud based web, forcing the users to sync their stuff locally will soon become outdated and unacceptable. At least for data, everything should move to the cloud now. This is the future, and it’s already happening in many ways.

Back to the GTD thing, what’s the deal of pushing everything to the cloud? It’s a big deal actually. In this post I’ll talk about Nirvana, a very promising web application which already comes packed in a very Mac OS-like interface and aims at revolutionize the way you organize and complete tasks. Both on your Mac and your iPhone.

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I don’t know why, but there’s something wrong about Mac OS X and archives. As you may know Mac OS comes with an application called Archive Utility installed by default, and it’s pretty good when it comes to opening simple .zip archives. Problem is, Archive Utility totally sucks when the file isn’t encoded in zip or it’s a password protected archive. And if you consider that most of the files I download are encrypted .zip’s and .rar archives, you realize that I have a problem. So I decided to try something else. I installed the popular Unarchiver, good for .rar files, but unable to join split archives. I was about to give up.

Fast forward to this morning, my friend Dietmar from Green & Slimy sends a tweet about an app he’s been working on and that’s in beta: it’s called Rucksack. I open the link, I see a sexy website saying “the new iArchiver” and “…the new way to handle archives”. I download the .zip file. I unarchive it with Archive Utility. For the last time.

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Yesterday I wrote this post about MPlayer OS X Extended and many people in the comments and on Twitter told me I was wrong, that there was another alternative to VLC, and it wasn’t the app I talked about. It’s always a great thing when you guys suggest me new apps to try and write about.

The app is called Movist, is hosted (again) on Google Code and it’s media player for Mac OS X based on Quicktime and FFMpeg.

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Mac users are lucky. We get all kinds of toys to play with if we ever want to take screenshots, with Littlesnapper and Skitch coming to mind as the two most prominent apps available. Techsmith, the same guys who make Camtasia Studio, felt that there was room for one more. And I must admit it’s really pretty (I’m a sucker for eye-candy).

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I use VLC as my media player of choice on my Mac. Although Quicktime is a great app which provides a good dose of eye candy as well, VLC is compatible with almost every format out of the box - without the need of installing any additional plugin.

It’s simple, it’s straightforward and it becomes beautiful if you apply the Blackpearl mod. But today I’d like to talk about the new kid on the block of media players for Mac, MPlayer.

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While I first passed it off as a gimmick, My Living Desktop is one of those applications that you just have to see for yourself before passing judgement. It’s interesting to note that while it doesn’t promise to increase your productivity (or really anything for that matter), those looking to transport themselves to another world during work or play might find this application of great use.

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Do you know which Mail.app’s features I use more? Search and mailboxes. The basic functions, yet the most powerful I could ever ask for to get things done with my messages. Pretty much as if someone tells you he loves folders and Spotlight, I can’t live without these two simple things. But good things can always get better. What’s simple can be evolved, refined, made more powerful while still maintaining its original simplicity at the core. Take a look at your running machine, because its operating system is the best example of what I’m talking about.

I’ve already written about a great plugin for Mail I’ve recently discovered, it’s called MsgFiler and it lets me quickly move messages around without leaving my keyboard. And that’s for mailboxes. Now, what about the search function? While smart collections are indeed a great way to easily retrieve messages based on some user-assigned criteria, still I can’t find a better solution than the classic search bar when it comes to find messages. Either by content or original author, it usually takes between 10 and 20 seconds for me to find the information I’m looking for (an email address, a name, a macro) and use it somewhere else. I wish there was another way that combined with the simplicity of ⌘ + F and more advanced features like boolean operators and filters, as I really can’t stand clicking on those buttons in the toolbar. Turns out the in the same moment I was thinking about this stuff a rocket was launching.

It’s called Rocketbox, and brings email searching to a new level.

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I have a huge email library. I tend to keep every important message that I receive and move it to a folder or sub-folder. Indeed, despite all the people that seem to appreciate those applications that let you assign tags to mails in order to browse everything with tags, I still think the folder structure puts every other solution to shame. I just couldn’t think of any other way to store and organize messages right now, but maybe Apple will prove me wrong someday. Anyway, considering that I daily mess with dozens of messages and I’ve got to move each message to a different folder, I was looking for some app that would have made the process easier, faster and almost invisible. Many followers suggested me to try Mail Act-on, but after a brief test I have to say Act-On is aimed at people who have 40 + folders.

It’s surely a feature rich application with a lot of stuff you can play with, but I wanted something simpler, an app that could let me move messages in a few steps without leaving the keyboard.

Meet MsgFiler.

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