With the debut of a modestly updated white MacBook this week, we now have the previous MacBook at a closeout price of only $899.99. This MacBook features a speedy 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2GB of memory. It has the new, advanced NVIDIA GeForce 256MB 9400M graphics for great 3D gaming and graphics-processing performance. The closeout white MacBook features a 120GB hard drive and a DVD and CD-burning SuperDrive, and is fully equipped with AirPort Extreme 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, and built-in iSight camera.

“See it here. Specials begin at only $899.99!”:http://www.smalldog.com/product/73058

We are pleased to announce the winners of our Facebook and Twitter drawings! Steve G. from Riverside California was selected from our Facebook friends, while Ali F. from Burlington, Vermont was selected from our Twitter followers.

Both will receive a Mac/iPod gift pack of fun and useful accessories. Sorry if you weren’t selected, but we will continue to select random winners from Facebook and Twitter every month until at least the end of the year.

If you’re not already in our Facebook group, you can join here:
“Small Dog Electronics on Facebook.”:http://www.facebook.com/pages/Small-Dog-Electronics/18904017006

Not on Facebook? “Sign up here.”:http://www.facebook.com

Do you use Twitter? We post Mac tips, tricks, news, contests and more on our Twitter feed. “Click here to follow us on Twitter.”:http://twitter.com/hellosmalldog

Again, congratulations to Ali F. and Steve G.! Perhaps you’ll see your name here next month…

As promised, here is my list of favorite FREE applications for Mac. While these are my own personal favorite apps, many of them are also great for new Mac users and recent switchers.

These are all legitimate applications, and not pirated or black market titles. I use these apps weekly and even daily, and don’t hesitate to recommend them.

Note that I didn’t include any web-based applications and services in this list, though I was tempted to do so. We’ll cover our favorite web apps in a future Kibbles & Bytes.

*1* “OnyX”:http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html This is a multifunction maintenance, optimization, and personalization utility for Mac OS X. It’s available for Panther, Tiger, and Leopard. I use it about once a month or so to keep all my Macs running smoothly.

OnyX allows you to verify your Mac’s Startup Disk and the structure of its System files, run miscellaneous tasks of system maintenance, configure some hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, Dashboard, Exposé, Safari, Login window and some of Apple’s own applications, it deletes caches, removes a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome and more.

“Click here to learn more and download OnyX!”:http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

*2* “VLC”:http://www.videolan.org/ VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, more) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

In other words, VLC will play back many file formats that the QuickTime Player, Windows Media Player, etc can’t handle. Best of all, VLC doesn’t need any external codecs or programs to work.

“Click here to learn more and download VLC.”:http://www.videolan.org/

*3* “Bean”:http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor (or more precisely, a rich text editor), designed to make writing convenient and efficient. Bean is Open Source, fully Cocoa, and is available free of charge! MS Word, OpenOffice, etc. try to be all things to all people, and indeed offer many more writing tools, templates, and output options. But sometimes you simply need to write, and that is Bean’s niche.

Bean includes many writing essentials including a live word count, a Get Info panel for in-depth statistics, a zoom-slider to easily change the view scale,
an Inspector panel with lots of sliders, date-stamped backups, auto-saving, page layout mode, an alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue), selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc, a floating windows option (like Stickies has). find panel allows regular expressions (pattern matching), and all of Cocoa’s good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.).

I combine Bean with “Think”:http://www.freeverse.com/apps/app/?id=7013 for efficient, clutter-free writing.

“Click here to learn more and download Bean for Mac.”:http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html

*4* “NetNewsWire”:http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/NetNewsWire/ This is an easy-to-use RSS and Atom reader for your Mac. It allows you to browse, subscribe, read, and save hundreds of thousands of website feeds. It is a true desktop Mac application, with integration with Spotlight, Address Book, iCal, iPhoto, Growl, Twitterific and more. Best of all, it effortlessly syncs with NetNewsWire’s web-based RSS reader for free, allowing you to manage all your RSS feeds from any Internet-connected computer (Mac or PC).

“Click here to download NetNewsWire!”:http://www.newsgator.com/

*5* “HandBrake”:http://handbrake.fr/ HandBrake is an open-source, multithreaded video transcoder, available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. It will convert just about any video file you can play on your Mac into a variety of other, easier to play, more portable video formats. Most people use HandBrake to back up their DVDs, or convert a DVD into a file that can be played back on their iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, PS3, etc. Use it as you will. HandBrake has been updated substantially over the past several years since its initial release

“Click here to learn more and download HandBrake.”:http://handbrake.fr

*6* “Carbon Copy Cloner 3.”:http://www.bombich.com/software/index.html I admit, since Time Machine debuted with Leopard, I don’t use this app as much as I used to. However, for simple, successful backups, Carbon Copy Cloner can’t be beat. You can also use CCC3 for backing up across network, backup to disk images, and backup of selected files only. CCC 3 features an interface designed to make the cloning and backup procedure very intuitive. In addition to general backup, CCC can also clone one hard drive to another, copying every single block or file to create an exact replica of your source hard drive.

“Click here to learn more and download Carbon Copy Cloner!”:http://www.bombich.com/software/index.html

*7* “The Unarchiver”:http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html Forget the other commercial unarchiving apps (like the free version of StuffIt)–the Unarchiver is all you need. Uncompress RAR, 7zip, tar, and bz2 files on your Mac. The developer notes “Many new Mac users will be puzzled the first time they download a RAR file. Do them a favor and download UnRarX for them!”

“Click here to download the Unarchiver and learn more.”:http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html

*8* “Google SketchUp”:http://sketchup.google.com/ Google SketchUp is used to create, modify and share 3D models of anything you like. I know a few people who used SketchUp extensively to plan and pre-visualize house renovations. I’ve used it to create a virtual set for planning camera placement. There are dozens of video tutorials, an extensive Help Center and a worldwide user community for SketchUp, making it relatively easy to learn.

It’s amazing that SketchUp is free! “Download SketchUp by clicking here.”:http://sketchup.google.com/product/gsu.html

*9* “Tweetie for Mac.”:http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/ Tweetie is my desktop Twitter app of choice. I like that I can easily mange multiple Twitter accounts, view entire tweet “conversations” iChat-style, and compose Tweets in a seperate draft window (with built-in URL compression). The free version is ad-supported, which so far I don’t mind. I mean, it is free after all.

“Click here to learn more and download Tweetie for Mac.”:http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-mac/

*10* “AppCleaner”:http://www.freemacsoft.net/AppCleaner/ Want to remove some of the apps you’ve downloaded here, or downloaded in the past? Try AppCleaner. It’s a small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps. Installing an application distributes many files throughout your System using space of your Hard Drive unnecessarily. AppCleaner finds all these small files and safely deletes them.

“Click here to learn more and download AppCleaner for Mac.”:http://www.freemacsoft.net/AppCleaner/

Honorable Mention: Quicksilver. I know I’d get lynched if I didn’t include this app, which is #1 on many lists of essential Mac software. I simply don’t use it anymore, or ever since I upgraded to Leopard. It’s an awesome app though. “Click here to learn about and download Quicksilver”:http://www.blacktree.com/?quicksilver

Runners Up: “Audacity”:http://audacity.sourceforge.net, “Adium”:http://adium.im/, “NeoOffice”:http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php, “CyberDuck”:http://cyberduck.ch/s, “Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html, “Camino”:http://caminobrowser.org, “Carbon Copy Cloner”:http://www.bombich.com/software/index.html, “xPad”:http://www.getxpad.com, “Windows Media Components for QuickTime, by Flip4Mac”:http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx, “iStat Pro”:http://islayer.com/apps/istatpro, “Think”:http://www.freeverse.com/apps/app, “SuperDuper”:http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html, “Burn “:http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/Pages/English/home.html “Chicken Of The VNC”:http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc, “Skype”:http://www.skype.com, “Anxiety”:http://www.anxietyapp.com/

_Dear Friends,_

The garden is liking the May showers we are having this week with flood warnings to boot. I was lucky on my long weekend journey to Pine Bush, NY to miss most of the rain. We rode through a couple of showers but the Vision motorcycles keep us pretty dry. I had gone down south to have some performance work done on my engine and gained about 25 HP in the process. We had fun tooling around the Catskills and the Adirondacks.

We got home Sunday night and picked up the pups, including the mysteriously ill Fantail Shrimp. She had suddenly developed some pain in her abdomen and we were very nervous to leave on our trip, but thanks to Joyce and Fanny’s friend Maggie, she was in good hands. I took her to the vet yesterday and we discovered that she had ingested some copper wires and ultimately needed surgery. It was a good thing, too, because one of the wires had imbedded itself in her gall bladder and that was clearly what was causing her so much pain. She is recovering now and I expect she’ll be back in the office yapping her little head off soon.

My grandchildren showed up on Memorial Day with one of their friends. The three girls immediately went into the hot tub and within minutes decided to take off their swim suits. Boka, my grandson, looked at them and said “disgusting” and walked away. I went with him and told him that someday… We decided to check out my shop and Boka had to try out each of my tools. At one point, he picked up my soldering iron and asked me about it. I told him it was for melting metal and was very hot. He didn’t believe me, of course, and grabbed the end. Luckily it had just started to get hot, but he believed me about every other tool after that!

We had a minor update to the low-end MacBook this week and while the new version sports a slightly faster processor and a larger hard drive, we were able to purchase a number of the older versions that will provide some savings if you are interested in the entry-level MacBook. Apple also announced their annual college student back-to-school promotion and will again be giving away an iPod with each Mac sold. This annual promotion is not available, unfortunately, to their loyal independent resellers so we do operate at a competitive disadvantage during the summer for college students.

It is a great opportunity, however, for my team to show you why buying from Small Dog Electronics makes sense. There are many vendors of the same equipment and most sell for the same price–our job is to give you as many reasons as possible to buy from Small Dog, including our commitment to world-class customer service that is reflected in our slogan “Always By Your Side!”

View specials while on-hand supplies last. Please note that some specials may not be available in our retail stores; check for availability.

See all specials on our “Specials Page.”:http://www.smalldog.com/specials

We are introducing a new weekly feature for Kibbles & Bytes: *Recommended Site of the Week*. It’s very common for us to recommend websites to our friends, customers, and colleagues. In many cases, these previously-unknown sites become favorites to the people to we’ve recommended them to.{?}

These recommended websites will mostly be Mac and technology-oriented, with an occasional Vermont, dog, or environmental site mixed in as well. Very rarely a totally random (but useful, fun, or innovative) site will be recommended instead.

We already have a huge long list of sites we think you’ll enjoy, so we might double up on recommendations as we initiate this column.

This week, in keeping with the following article (Top 10 Free Mac Apps), I want to recommend “AlternativeTo”:http://alternativeto.net. AlternativeTo is a new approach to finding good software for Mac, Windows, and Linux. In that regard, “AlternativeTo”:http://alternativeto.net is superficially similar to other websites for finding new Mac software (“Versiontracker”:http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/ and “MacUpdate”:http://www.macupdate.com/ are great for this).

However, instead of listing thousands of apps in a list in a category, “AlternativeTo”:http://alternativeto.net makes each application into a category. They say “Think of it like forever evolving blog posts about good alternatives to the software that you’re not satisfied with. And the “blog posts” are generated by you through suggestions, comments and votes.”

Indeed, this collaboratively generated database has helped me find awesome alternatives to expensive programs. However, it has also helped me find open source programs that have extended the usefulness of commercial apps, such as Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and even Final Cut Studio.

Check out “AlternativeTo by clicking here!”:http://alternativeto.net