Those of you lucky to have one of the newer Intel Macs already know that they ship with the little remote control, allowing you to control Front Row and several other Mac applications. Here comes Remote Buddy, a new interface for using your remote control to manipulate not only a few applications, but almost any application and system-level utilities you can think think of. With the remote you’ll be able to emulate keyboard and mouse movements, eject CDs, terminate applications, control iTunes, Keynote, PowerPoint, VLC and many others, thanks to an open-source API allowing other developers to create different behaviors for other applications.

Video demonstration after the jump..

Read more of ”Remote Buddy – Control your new Mac using just a remote control“

Ruby* is considered by some to be the best programming language on Earth. Naturally that’s just one person’s opinion and the question usually ends in some sort of argument with no end in sight. So moving on to tools, the next argument usually involves TextMate being the best text editor for Ruby (on Rails) developers, which I must admit I’m close to agreeing with (I’m still trying to let go of Text Wrangler). Regardless of which editor you use, it’s imperative that you know your way around it, in order to increase productivity and lower turn-around times. Enter stage left, Mike Clark, Rails developer-extroidanaire who’s created a very handy TextMate cheat sheet, in handy, printable PDF format, containing about 50 or so shortcuts for TextMate under OS X.

* – Edited to reflect my lack of knowledge of what a true programming language is ;)

[TextMate cheat sheet | Cheat sheet direct download]

Oh time machine, where are you? An artist was recently commisioned by a magazine to produce conceptual art covering the topic, the future of the Apple iMac. Based on Apple’s current trends and the current iMac, the artist created this wonderful vision, featuring a 30″ translucent LCD screen, transparent keyboard and mouse, and a low profile curved design.

[Future iMac concept art] (Via The Cool Hunter)

While I tried resisting writing a list post, I just couldn’t resist talking about my favorite apps for Mac OS X. I have several Macs, and I couldn’t stand working on them without having the following apps (and so many more) installed immediately. Naturally this isn’t the only apps I find to be necessary to my OS X workflow, only 10 of my favorites, I’d be happy to know some of yours ;)

10. Fetch Art
I have tens of thousands of MP3s, naturally ripped from my personal CD collection, and thus it’s always a nightmare to organize and move my MP3s around while still keeping the cover art images in-place. Enter Fetch Art, a nifty little script which scans the ID3 tages of your songs in iTunes and automatically downloads the appropriate track’s cover art directly from Amazon.com with pretty good accuracy. (License: Donationware)

9. UnRarX
UnRarX is a GUI application that uses the unix command line apps ‘unrar’ and ‘par2′ to let you expand rar archives, as well as restore corrupted and/or missing archives using par2. Handy for those who download binaries often from newsgroups, you know who you are. (License: GPL)

8. MacPAR Deluxe
Following number 9 comes another newsgroups favorite, MacPAR Deluxe. MacPar is a mighty powerful utility which is primarily for ensuring error-free transport of data from ‘par’ and ‘par2′ files. It’s features include full support of the ‘par 1′ and ‘par 2′ standards, verification, recovery and automatica unrar of parity files, including visual representation of the current status of all files contained with an archive. It’s also capable of launching an external unpacker in the rare case it’s unable to unpack the archive on it’s own (see #9). (License: Donationware)

7. Quicksilver
Quicksilver has appeared on just about every list associated with Mac OS X software, so naturally it had to appear here. Quicksilver is everyone’s favorite Finder-replacement and has become so integrated into my daily workflow, that I couldn’t imagine using a Mac without it being installed. (License: GNU GPL)

6. Text Wrangler
I was a huge fan of UltraEdit on the PC, but that was then, this is now. I needed a powerful, yet affordable text editor for coding, and in walked Text Wrangler. Text Wrangler is an extremely powerful text editor, suitable for Unix and server administrator’s, HTML-pushers, and scripters alike. Best of all, it’s from the creators of BBedit, THE text editor for hardcore text editing on a Mac AND it’s free! (License: Freeware)

5. Fugu
I don’t know anyone who prefers using FTP over a much more secure system, such as SCP or SFTP. I’ve personally shut down FTP completely on any servers I’ve administered and required all users to transfer files using SCP (WinSCP on XP or Fugu on OS X). Fugu is a GUI which eases access to OS X’s built-in Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), which is similar to FTP, only the session is entirely encrypted and is much more secure than normal FTP. Fugu also allows SCP file transfers, as well as session saving and a Finder-like interface for interaction. (License: BSD-Style Freeware)

4. Firestarter FX
For those still burning their CDs you must get Firestart FX. A pure Cocoa burning application, it’s one of the few, if not the only, burning applications for the Mac which allows duplication of all kinds of CDs, as well as burning VCDs and SVCDs. Oh, Overburning! Who can forget, it’s the only burning app I’ve found which supports overburning, a staple of burning applications on the PC. (License: Donationware)

3. Little Snitch
Anyone who’s recently switched to Mac knows the problem that spyware and adware are for Windows users. I’m the type of person who likes to see how my software is using my internet connection. Whether calling home or reporting usage statistics, I want to know. Little Snitch enables the user to find this information out. Running natively within the operating system, Little Snitch informs the user when an application wants to connect to the internet and where it wants to send the information to, allowing the user to deny or approve this request. Very powerful, nice small footprint. (License: Commercial $24.95 USD)

2. Conto
Tracking bank accounts and finances isn’t a strength of mine, but Conto is a nifty little freeware application that eases that task for me. Providing a powerful finance tracking system, complete with graphing abilities, support for different currencies and strong encryption, Conto is an extremely powerful free application. (License: GPL)

1. MySync
Keeping Macs on a LAN in sync is not always a fun OR easy task. MySync makes this an easy task, allowing automatic detection of other MySync “nodes” running on your LAN (via Bonjour), automatic sync scheduling, SSL encryption, and syncing capabilities for Address Book, Safari bookmarks, and iCal. (License: Open beta – for now)

Mega Games, one of Europe’s largest online gaming communities, is keeping a live and exhaustive list of free video games. 52 pages of games, covering years of game design and covering all genres and many platforms (from Linux to to XP to OSX), there are hundreds of interesting (and some not so interesting) games free to play and enjoy.

[Free Games at Mega Games]

The Participatory Culture Foundation has announced the release of the Democracy internet-TV platform’s latest and greatest version (0.8.4.1), addressing many stability issues, adding some new codecs, and cleaning up the interface a little more, among other fixes. But man, what a version number. For those who do not know, Democracy is an internet-television browser, using a built-in RSS reader to display and download video-based content channels using bit-torrent technologies. The ability to grab podcasts, videocasts, video blogs and bit-torrent video feeds are present, and the video player can also be used as a Quicktime replacement, so you can re-watch season 2 of Lost, while downloading the latest episode of Rocketboom in the background. Best of all, it’s free (as in speech, as the slogan goes), open-source and works wonderfully under OSX.

[Get Democracy]

The current trend in green-living is reducing your consumption and usage of resources. One of the many ways that we can do that is by tweaking the power consumption of our portable devices, laptop computers especially. How you ask, enter the ever inspiring Guide to Green Living with a useful How-To on reducing the energy consumption of everyone’s favorite mobile computing device, the laptop. From lowing your screen’s brightness, to disabling the auto-saving feature on Word, there are several easy changes that you can do to lower the overall power consumption of your laptop’s battery, which in the end lowers the amount of time you’d need recharging.

[Conserving your laptop's battery power]

UK software engineer Simon Sheppard has created a thoroughly exhausting list of command line syntax for the Oracle 9i, Windows NT/XP (including Win2K and 2K3), Linux and OSX operating systems. As we constantly hear down here in the Nerds closet (AKA: office), true nerds use the command line.

[Command line reference for Oracle, Windows, Linux and OS X]