With AOL’s Xdrive going under, Drop.io is poised to pick up their lost users. Drop.io sent out a message from their twitter account about an hour ago:

Know anyone looking for an alternative to xdrive? Tell them to try Drop.io! http://drop.io/welcomeXdrive

They link to a page which tells a bit about their services, but hidden away at the bottom is the neato 1G upgrade promo (from the regular 100MB) that you should jump on while it’s hot:

To use drop.io’s “Xdrive” premium code, just follow the directions below:

1. Click on the “upgrade” icon below the “add files” box (as depicted in the image below).
2. Type in: “Xdrive” in the box that pops up.
2. Set your password.
3. Drop your files.
3. And you’re set - welcome to Drop.io!

Enjoy everybody!

In the battle for consistent design there is no more fearsome foe than Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Despite the browser quickly coming up on its eighth birthday, it is still in wide use - particularly in markets where software piracy is more wide-spread and users aren’t able to upgrade to the “Windows Genuine Advantage”-required IE7 or IE8.

As such, it’s important that you be able to test your design, theme/template, or even your blog tweaks to assure that they work alright in the archaic and anarchistic browser.

One problem - due to kernal code differences, it isn’t possible to install Internet Explorer 6 or lower on a machine running Windows Vista. So where handy bundles like the MultipleIE package worked well on XP - they’re a no go on Vista.

There are some great static checks you can do using Web apps like Browser Shots and IE NetRenderer, but sometimes you need to interact with the design to see where things are, or aren’t, functioning.

Enter IETester. Created by the same developer as the IE DebugBar, the free Web browser offers up the rendering and javascript abilities of IE5.5 to IE8.

Not only are you able to test how your layouts will look in various IE versions, with the use of the browser’s tabs, you can test multiple versions in the same browser window.

What’s more - it works on both XP and Vista (sorry Mac and Linux users). It’s not flawless, and preliminary usage showed a couple hiccups in the page loading - but for an alpha release, and with nothing else to turn to, who’s complaining.

With users slowly overcoming their adversity of pushing away from the Microsoft monopoly, there’s hope that IE6 will die the death it so rightly deserves, but until then apps like IETester are a welcome helping hand.

It’s so simple  to make your own app (once you have Fluid) that you can do it in just three steps:

1. Launch Fluid
2. Enter a URL, app name, choose a location (in “/Applications“ is fine), and select an icon
3. A few seconds later, Fluid will make a ‘ping’ noise, and offer to launch your new app. All done!

When you roll-your-own app, your new app can be placed in your dock, and launched just like any application. It also brings other benefits, such as: notifications for new messages or events (Growl is supported, but it’s not seamless yet), separating out your work and personal apps, avoiding distractions, and avoiding losing all your log-in sessions in the event of your regular browser crashing.

Fluid doesn’t need to be running when you use these new apps you’ve formed. You just use Fluid itself to roll your new apps (see the three easy steps, above). Thereafter, these new apps - which are known as a “Fluid_Instance_xxx“ (where xxx is the new app’s name) within your Mac’s inner workings - are generally a mere 8 to 10 MB in size, and use as much RAM as a single window of Safari.

Indeed, Fluid’s apps are based on WebKit, the same rendering engine as Safari, and thus your new apps look and feel right, and run natively and briskly.

Spice it up
A bit of fun can be had customising your new apps, in terms of the icon used, and its appearance. As for the icon, a whole Flickr group has sprung up featuring 512 by 512 icons in PNG format which are sharp and funky, and ready to fit into Leopard very nicely, with it’s ‘Coverflow’ browsing of applications. Generally, the site’s own icon (or “favicon“) is too poor in quality to use on your Mac, but it’s so easy to change it, that you may as well spruce it up. Here are 3 I made earlier, sitting in my dock - YouTube, Google Reader and Gmail:

As for the appearance, you can tweak the window style, so that it might be silver or black-framed; semi-transparent or opaque; always floating, or in the background, or hidden; the app can run - if you choose the “MenuExtraSSB“ option - only from the toolbar as a drop-down menu; and, lastly, the window could be split-pane and incorporate thumbnails of all linked pages - useful, say, for Facebook - which can be browsed in ‘Coverflow’ style.

More complexly, you can alter the user-agent, so that you could run, say, the iPhone twitter client Hahlo on your Mac by setting your app’s user-agent as iPhone (or iPod Touch), and it will look and feel almost exactly as it does on the iPhone.

It’s worth pointing out that Fluid is Leopard only, but it is so awesome that it pushed me to upgrade from Tiger a month ago. Better news is that Fluid is free. At the time of writing, Fluid is at version 0.9.2 and seems to be regularly updated with new features at each revision. Fluid is so problem-free and smooth that it feels like it’s version 1+ already. So, if you have Leopard already, you can soon be rolling your own apps to bring those useful web apps onto your desktop.

First, I should preface this with the tidbit that I spent a couple hours looking around the net for some way to hack my lousy Home Basic to enable the Aero theme (glass/transparent windows, thumbnail preview and Flip 3D task switching). Despite the claims of about a zillion Web sites all touting the same registry hack - it appears this isn’t possible. What follows is part one of my free “Aero alternatives”.

Shock Aero 3D

Shock Aero 3D is pretty damn close to the actual Flip 3D effect, and at this price (it’s freeware), we’re certainly willing to overlook any small discrepancies. The program allows you to choose between a flat “tile” display, or the cooler “flip” effect that stacks your open program windows on a 3D z-axis.

The utility also gives you quite a bit of control over animation effects and background styles, both so you’re able to customize things and so you’re able to disable more graphic-intensive processes should your system not be able to handle them.

You can grab Shock Aero 3D here, and be sure to check out the developer’s other cool apps for customizing your desktop experience.

Shock Aero works on XP/2000/2003/Vista systems with OpenGL support.

Madotate

I’ve no idea who comes up with these names, but considering this comes out of Japan, I guess we can allow for a bit of a tongue-twisting moniker. Madotate is similar to Shock Aero in the style of its effect (throwing your open apps onto a 3D axis), however where Shock Aero separates the application selection from your desktop, Madotate integrates right into it.

By a small button which the program adds to the top-right of your windows (beside the minimize, maximize, close buttons), you are able to instantly slide the open app into 3D-mode and out of your way. The windows automatically dock to the screen edge they are closest to.

Madotate comes with a rather comprehensive set of options to customize things. You can turn transparency of the 3D-ified windows on or off, tag the windows, change the angle and distance of the effect, set hot keys to effect both the active program and all programs, and a few more.

As mentioned, Mandotate is a Japanese program, but some kind folks went to the trouble of translating it into English. Grab the English version here, or if you’d rather, get the original from the site of the author, Takayuki Shinohara.

Madotate works on pretty much every version of Windows since Windows 95.

Both of the programs have their pluses. Shock Aero has a slightly simpler functionality about it, while Madotate has more organizational/workflow possibilities. When it comes to resources though, Madotate wins hands down, barely pushing the 6MB mark on memory resources.

Know of any other apps that add some pizazz to the otherwise rather mundane task-switching functionality? Leave us a comment.

Here’s my E-Mail.

How neato is that?

Re-Captcha also offers their service to stop comment spam. They offer plugins for Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Movable Type — basically all the major content management systems.

“I’ve seen Anti-Spam tools before. Why use this one?”

I’ll tell ya why. Each time a person types a captcha, it helps to digitize a book:

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

Isn’t that ingenius?

So you first you name your “drop.” I just made drop.io/tiptrickmod. Choose something easy to remember. Then upload your file, set a password if you like, and “drop” it.

Now while this file sharing feature is enough to make drop.io noteworthy, here are a few more functions which make it thoroughly kick arse:

1. Embeddable Upload Widget

You can also embed an upload widget into your site, and people can upload files to you directly to your drop. See? Here’s ours:

2. Email and RSS

Stay up to date on when the drop is updated. So for example, if my friend shares a photo with me, I’ll be notified. You can also email media to your drop. The email address for our drop is tiptrickmod@drop.io. If I wanted to send a photo from my phone directly to this drop via email, it’s easy. Yes, flickr has that too. But that doesn’t mean it ain’t cool.

3. Phone your Drop

Ok. Here’s where it gets cool. You can phone your drop using the telephone number they provide (each drop is unique) and your call will be recorded in mp3 format. Feel like leaving TipTrickMod an mp3 message? Call 646-495-9203 x 73504. This is a way neato tool. Podcasters, you listening? Oh yeah… There’s a conference call option as well, if you’d like to give that a go too.

4. Receive a fax

And yes, to round it all off you can receive faxes as well.

Hope you guys find that useful! I know I did.

Not only is this support free, it is well organized - across a few key forums and discussion groups, which I shall review below - and is dished out freely by Mac experts who often reply to new queries (or cries for help!) within hours of the original post.

What do such Mac users in these forums get in return? Just some good karma, and a slight warm glow from helping out people with their knowledge.

Being in a minority of global computer users - up against the vast majority of Windows punters - actually proves to be an advantage in terms of getting clear, easy-to-search-for, and helpful free tech support for the Mac. Make a Google search for a Windows-related query or issue, and I’ll guarantee that most of the search results will be for some useless software that will claim to assist in your plight. While a similar search for a Macintosh-related issue will proffer forums and Mac-related tech blogs which have - very likely - already covered and solved your question.

So, if you haven’t already tried, here are five very useful and very active resources which you can browse freely for answers. If you wish to post to the forums you will need to register (again, for free).

Five Top Mac Forums/Resources:

Apple’s very own “Discussion” boards are very well organized by type of software and hardware. Posters are more likely seeking support or answers, than actually ‘discussing’ stuff, so it’s likely that, whatever your query, it’s already been done here.

The MacRumours Forums are a bit more discursive, with space for recent tech news and speculation on future models, as well as various tips and hacks for iPhone and iPod Touch users. More uniquely, these forums also spread into the realms of discussing digital photography, design and graphics, and various other special interests - all from a Mac perspective.

Your best bet if you have a query, however, is the MacOSXhints Forums where the principal sections are dedicated to “OS X Help Requests” which explain how, if seeking assistance from the community, to include as much detail as possible in order that a more expert Mac user might lend a hand.

Similarly, the forums of the MacOSX site are dedicated to community-based help, though it’s not so active - and a bit random - when compared to the afore-mentioned three forums.

One tech blog deserves a special mention - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (also known as TUAW) which has such a wealth of tips over recent years that, when searched via TUAW’s own search box, represent a useful way to learn new features of some complex software such as Aperture or iLife. It’s not a forum, granted, but I’ve found it useful in terms of teaching me new aspects of some software I thought I knew quite well already.

Now, with those five resources - along with TipTrickMod, of course - you’re better equipped to get to grips with your Mac. And, needless to say, support is a two-way thing, so if you feel you can assist a fellow Mac user then weigh in on their post, and feel the karma coming your way.

I like to keep my non-system/program files on a partition, while leaving the standard C drive to hold the bulk of installed programs and system files. This keeps all my media (movies, music, photos, etc.) seperate from the drive that houses my OS - allowing me a quick and easy way of formatting the system drive, and not needing to back up the much bulkier “media” drive.

Windows, by default, works counter to this by setting up the My Documents folder’s location to the C drive. In the past I went around this by denying that the My Documents folder even existed, and just making my own file system.

As many programs use this area as a default storage area for certain data, as well as some games using it for saved game files, this eventually led to a rather messy file structure that had half of my data on the media partition and half of it on the system partition. Sucky to say the least.

But as I said, a new system - new rules. I finally decided to dig a bit and see if I couldn’t change the default location of the My Documents (or “Documents” directory - as it’s called in Vista). The solution was a WHOLE lot simpler than I had assumed, and I felt rather stupid I hadn’t noticed it sooner.

To change the location, simply follow these steps:

1. Click the START button. With the mouse over the My Documents (”Documents” for Vista) folder/icon, right click and select Properties.
2. For XP: On the Target tab (Location for Vista), simply change the Target folder location to whichever location you prefer.
3. To select a location from the standard file/folder selection box, choose “Find Target…”, or if you prefer to move your current My Documents folder to the new location, choose “Move…” and select your new location.
4. To restore the original location, just click “Restore Default”.

That’s it. It’s just that simple. You can get a few more My Documents customizations at Microsoft’s support page.

Many applications on your Mac, however, come bundled with an array of ‘localizations’ so that one release of a company’s app can suit the needs of practically all of their global users. But that represents a waste of valuable disk space for 99.9% of people who use their apps in just one language, and will never need to run iTunes, or Skype, in anything but their native tongue.

Thus, most apps on your Mac have nestled inside them a number of language localization files that you can notice by the designation “.lproj”. Even if you opted not to install other languages when you first installed Tiger or Leopard, many 3rd party apps will have a number of “.lproj” files, which do nothing but use up space and make your apps needlessly hefty.

If you’re curious to see these files, just right-click on an application, and select “Show Package Contents”. Then click on “Contents”, and next on “Resources”, and in here you will find all the language localizations mixed in with other bits which make up the app’s building blocks.

All you actually need are the main localizations that you currently use. So, for English-speakers, you could safely trash all the “.lproj” files within your apps except for the “English.lproj” one, and your app would be unharmed, and your Mac would lose quite a bit of weight, so to speak. The saving is likely to be somewhere from 2 to 4 gigabytes.

Slim down

To automate and ease this process across all your original and 3rd party apps, the open-source Monolingual will do the job. That light-weight app can not only remove unnecessary languages files within apps, but also remove - if you so wish - other language’s input methods, and even older architectures, such as the ‘Power PC’ framework. That seems somewhat excessive, so I’ll stick with the idea of removing the languages inside apps. This is done within Monolingual by checking the boxes next to a language’s name to remove that “.lproj” file wherever it is found.

Personally, I just unchecked the “English” option - and all national variations of English - to ensure that my apps remained in my native tongue. The first time I ran Monolingual, it took over 30 minutes to clean up within every app, which slowed my Macbook rather, so it would be wise to run this at a quiet time.

Image: Simply check the unwanted languages with Monolingual, then ‘Remove’ them

The space saving for me, on a year-old install of Tiger - now 10.4.11 - was a significant 4 gigabytes, which is space well worth saving with my meagre 80GB hard-drive. I googled to check that it works on Leopard, with commenters on various tech forums confirming that it does, and declaring savings of 3 gigs or more on quite recent installs of Apple’s latest OS.

Monolingual can then be run at intervals of the user’s discretion - it will take a mere few minutes to do it’s magic on later runs - to sort of ‘tidy up’ and keep your Mac’s drive freer for more essential things.