Filed under: Internet

Every year there is a torrent made to let listeners download most of the music for SXSW. This year's torrent has recently been posted (previous years' are also available at the same site). I don't usually use Bittorent, so I asked around for client suggestions; Transmission seems to be a favorite among several of my TUAW colleagues.

I also remembered a tip from my friend Guillermo Esteves (who did the awesome Star Wars crawl using only HTML and CSS), about using Dropbox to start torrents remotely. Guillermo provides some detailed instructions for Transmission and µTorrent to set them up to "watch" a folder for new .torrent files, with an important caveat to make sure that you don't download the files to your Dropbox.

One additional Transmission tip: be sure that you un-check the box next to "Display 'adding transfer' options window" so that files will automatically be added, and be sure to check the box next to the "Start transfers when added" option. Guillermo shows both of those settings in his screenshots, but it took me a few minutes to figure out that I had them set incorrectly.

Then I asked myself: "How can I be even lazier?" and I remembered Hazel, a program for automatically moving files from one folder to another based on a set of predefined rules. So I added a Hazel rule for ~/Downloads/ which will move any file where "Kind is BitTorrent Document" to my ~/Dropbox/Torrents/ folder. I repeated this on both my iMac and my MacBook Pro. Now I can be on my MacBook Pro and download a torrent file to ~/Downloads/ and have it moved to my Torrents folder, and have the torrent automatically start downloading on my iMac. So when I'm done with my MacBook Pro I can just close it without having to worry about interrupting any of my downloads.

You may have noticed that we're big Dropbox fans around here. We use it for syncing Things or instead of a USB sync cable or keeping our notes with us or sharing screenshots, along with any number of other uses. Do you know of any other unusual uses for Dropbox? Let us know in the comments.

In the meantime, enjoy the free, legal music downloads from SXSW!

If I ran AT&T, I would leave the subject of whether or not the network could handle the iPad's extra 3G traffic demands completely out of the picture, saying something like "we hope so," or "we'll wait and see on how popular it is." But Randall Stephenson, AT&T CEO, seems to be tempting fate.

First, he promised that AT&T could handle any demand placed on its network by Apple's iPad, and now he's suggesting that it won't be that bad anyway. In a Reuters article, Stephenson suggests that the iPad will be a "Wi-Fi driven product," and that "there's not going to be a lot of people out there looking for another subscription."

That may in fact be true, and while I'm almost willing to offer him the benefit of the doubt that the majority of browsing on the iPad will be done via Wi-Fi, I also doubt that those who elect to go with 3G won't be using the heck out of it. Maybe AT&T thinks the extra charges from the non-subscription usage will shore up the network, but it certainly sounds to me like Stephenson isn't too worried about AT&T's 3G networks, and from both our experiences with them on the iPhone and the expected popularity of the iPad, he probably should be.

Then again, maybe he's got to say that it won't be a problem -- suggesting that AT&T might not be able to keep up with service demands probably isn't the best thing for the CEO of the company to do. But it sounds like AT&T is underestimating, publicly at least, the kind of 3G network traffic the iPad will bring.

As the smack down between Apple and Adobe continues, Virgin America has dumped Flash from its website because of the lack of iPhone support. Virgin's new website, which launched Monday, replaces Flash with HTML to give users the ability to check in via their iPhones in the future. Virgin plans on moving their new site to HTML 5, once it's cleared standards ratification at the World Wide Web Consortium.

Virgin's Chief information officer Ravi Simhambhatla told The Register: "I don't want to cater to one hardware or one software platform one way to another, and Flash eliminates iPhone users. This year is going to be the year of the mobile [for Virgin]."

While Apple has left Flash out of the iPhone since it debuted in 2007, things stayed relatively civil between Apple and Adobe. That all changed when Apple unveiled the iPad and decided to leave Flash off that as well. Four days after the launch of the iPad, Steve Jobs held a town hall meeting with Apple employees where he trashed Adobe and Flash, saying, "They are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it. They don't do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5." Three weeks later Jobs met with the board of the Wall Street Journal where he allegedly talked smack about Flash again, saying Flash is a dying technology and likened it to floppy discs and CCFL-backlit LCDs.

With iPhone sales soaring with no peak in sight, will Flash still thrive without Apple's support? Then again, it's not just Apple that is turning against Flash. Google is openly committed to HTML5 and Microsoft has its own proprietary Flash competitor in Silverlight. Only time will tell if Virgin's dismissal of Flash is a one-off case or the first domino to fall.

John Siracusa drew my attention to an article by Macmillan CEO John Sargent on the agency model, availability and price, in which he says that the company actually plans to keep their hardcover/paperback separation even while selling ebooks. While new hardcover ebooks will sell for $14.99 and $12.99 ("a tremendous discount from the price of the printed hardcover books"), the company will aim to sell "ebook editions of paperback new releases" for as low as $6.99. As Siracusa goes on to say, "now let us all sit back and ponder the concept of 'paperback' and 'hardcover' ebooks."

Macmillan is sticking with an old pricing scheme even in a brand new marketplace. Just what exactly makes the difference between a "hardcover ebook" and a "paperback ebook"? Read on to find out.

You may have noticed that I'm not a huge fan of Flash. My feelings pre-date the iPhone/iPad debate about whether or not Flash should be included on those devices. Even back when I was using Windows and Opera, one of the features I used most often was "Disable Plugins" -- which was really another way of saying "Disable Flash," and I do that these days in Safari using ClickToFlash.

Flash lovers usually talk about how many games are only available using Flash. Flash haters usually talk about performance issues, especially on the Mac. Adobe tries to make the argument that not including Flash is bad for users' freedom of choice.

When it comes to browser security, Charlie Miller says that it's all about Flash. More specifically, avoiding Flash.

Miller, who has won the Pwn2Own contest two years running, was interviewed by Italian site OneITSecurity. They asked him what browser and OS he thought was the safest. The first part of his reply probably won't make Mac users happy: he suggests Windows 7 with either Chrome or IE8 saying "there probably isn't enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about." But the highlight for me was the next quote: "The main thing is not to install Flash!"

The guy who seems to be the best in the world at breaking into your web browser tells you that you shouldn't install Flash. Perhaps you should consider installing ClickToFlash; it's completely free, and tells Flash to load only when you tell it to load. That should make your browsing significantly safer on any platform.

Hat tip to Jay Hathaway at DownloadSquad for bringing this to our attention.

Happy March! The super hip and trendy South-by-Southwest music and tech festival is coming up this month, and like many tech conventions these days, AT&T is working on a plan to keep their network up and running as thousands of iPhones descend on Austin, Texas to send around voice, texts, and data.

GigaOM has a little insight into how they're planning to do it this year, and if you're interested in the nuts-and-bolts of keeping a cell phone network up and running (or at least trying to -- this is AT&T, after all), it's worth a read. They're beefing up the cell towers in the city's vicinity, setting up a whole new system around the convention center itself, and putting money into the backend as well, to try and increase bandwidth coming into the region. I don't know if they've done anything like this before (I can't really judge with Macworld -- while my iPhone worked fine most of the time, I still only have a 1G, and I was using Sprint MiFi on my Macbook most of the time), but it sounds like a pretty comprehensive setup.

Of course, the other reason AT&T is pushing to get ready for SXSW is that the convention has become sort of an unofficial testing ground for the next big social apps. A few years ago, Twitter made its first big push around SXSW, and last year, Foursquare was the app to use (which has since spawned a brand new genre of app, the "check-in" network). So what's going to be the app pushing data through the AT&T network this year? The buzz so far is around Twitter's coming ad platform, though it's hard to think that an ad platform could be a killer app. My money's on some sort of location-based social game -- while Foursquare has gaming elements, I think an app like MyTown could take the concept even farther, and we still haven't really seen an actual GPS-based RPG or MMO break out. Even those of us who aren't at SXSW this year will be paying attention to what people are doing on their iPhones there, because odds are good that the app that clicks with attendees there will be what we're all playing with in a few months.

Research released today indicates that in North America, Apple's Mac OS X is gaining traction, while the Windows share of the OS market is shrinking ever so slightly. That's the report from Quantcast, a company that measures and analyzes web traffic. They say that the market share for Mac OS X is up 7% from December to January. Microsoft held steady for the last 3 months of 2009 with the release of Windows 7, but started a slow decline again in January.

According to Quantcast, Apple has a 10.9% North American share as of January, while Windows has 86.8%. An interesting note is that the largest group of users is on Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6, while Windows XP dominates on the Microsoft side. Apple's relative share in North America is up 29.4 % in a year, while Windows share is down 3.8%.

These figures measure web consumption, so if you're not web connected your OS choice doesn't count. Quantcast measures ad supported sites, so huge traffic sites like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others don't supply statistics.

On the day before Macworld last week, I got a chance to sit down with Eros Remini, VP of Marketing for OpenFeint, to talk about his social gaming network for iPhone apps. He shared with me that the network has claimed a gigantic 12 million users total, with about a million of them active in iPhone games from day to day. Additionally, the average user plays three or four games regularly -- unlike most other consoles, the iPhone is really a device that can split attention rather than have players dive deep in on one game.

He also told us about the OpenFeint app that was released last month, as well as their popular free game of the day giveaway -- once per day, they give away an OpenFeint game for free right there inside the app. And we also talked about both how OpenFeint is serving as connection between developer and customer, as well as why Apple hasn't really shown an interest in an official iTunes gaming network like this.

You can check out the whole interview on video right after clicking through the link below. Enjoy!

TUAW is broadcasting live from the show floor of Macworld 2010. Stay tuned all day long for live video from the show floor, including interviews, demos, and hands-on with vendors, friends, and luminaries. On the schedule today: Blue Microphones, the makers of the Gorillapod, Telltale Games, Shawn King of Your Mac Life, and many more.

Frog Design is here on the show floor at Macworld 2010, and we stopped by their booth earlier in the week to check out what they've been up to on the iPhone. They're a storied design firm (they worked on the Apple II series back in the day) that is diving headfirst into the App Store, with two apps out already and one more on the way.

We've talked about Postcard Express on the site before, but they ran us through the latest version of the app, which has fixed a lot of the problems that users originally had -- the picture size has been tweaked a bit, and the geotagging has been updated and smoothed out to work much better. The most intriguing part of the iPhone app is of course the design -- everything, including emailing out the actual postcard, works completely within the app and is as intuitive as possible. While the actual act of sending a virtual postcard might not appeal to everyone (the charm of postcards is that they actually come through the mail), the app itself makes the process easy and fun.

We also saw two more apps from Frog Design: tvChatter, which is a TV-centered Twitter app, and the upcoming Temptd, a "health-based social networking app." Read on for more about both.

The show floor doesn't actually open for about 40 more minutes (as of this writing), but here you go -- we'll get you in, let you look around, and see what Macworld has to offer this year. From the indie dev booths to the towering Dr. Bott and IBM booths, to our own TUAW livestream studio (look for our livestream later today) and all of the different accessory manufacturers, browse through the gallery below and take your own pre-show walk around the floor.

Stay tuned all the rest of the week for coverage from almost all of these exhibitors, as well as more pictures, video, and blogging direct from the show floor. Even if (like one Steve Jobs) you're not here at Macworld this week, we'll make it feel like you are!

Opera Software announced on Wednesday that they're going to offer a sneak peek of their Opera Mini web browser for the iPhone during Mobile World Congress 2010 (MWC). Several features of the Mac-based Opera will be included, like tabs, Speed Dial and the password manager, says Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner. He also mentioned his app's compression technology that will make browsing fast and reduce data surcharges. For more details than that, we'll have to wait until the cat has been let out of the bag.

Two years ago, Opera claimed that they submitted an iPhone browser to the App Store only to have it rejected, a claim that was later refuted. In a comment posted to the Opera blog earlier today, Espen André Øverdahl, the Community Manager at Opera Software, said "We have not submitted it yet to the Apple App Store. However, we hope that Apple will not deny their users a choice in Web browsing experience."

Before you assume that Apple will deny an iPhone browser because of Mobile Safari, note that there are several other web browsers in the App Store already, including Perfect Browser 3, Full Browser and Mercury Web Browser. As John Gruber notes, however, the browsers that are in the store use the system version of WebKit.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Google revealed its new social communications feature Buzz yesterday while we were all traveling to Macworld, and the new service is now up and running in the Mobile Safari web app, as well as in your Gmail account everywhere else. The mobile app has all the features of the main service (it's kind of like a mix between Twitter and Google Wave, where you can post status updates and media in an ongoing conversation) with some interesting mobile features, including the option to see "buzz" nearby while out and about, as well as comment on or 'like' other people's "buzz."

The whole thing is still pretty new, and as you've probably seen around the rest of the 'net, there's lots and lots of people discussing how this might work alongside (or in spite of) Twitter and all of the other growing social networks out there. Time will tell whether or not the system will be a hit (or fizzle like Wave apparently did), but Google definitely made sure that the iPhone has full capability up and running right away, even if the Apple/Google relationship isn't what it used to be.

For all of the back and forth about the iPad over the last week, only a handful of people (including Stephen Colbert) have gotten to actually touch one. Fox News, of all the outlets out there, posted a pretty clean and objective hands-on with the iPad earlier this week, and you can get a pretty good idea of what it's like to actually hold the device in your hands from them. They say that it works well -- the keyboard is about the same as an iPhone keyboard (though they don't say whether they try the hunt-and-peck of the iPhone, or actually try to lay their hands down as if on a laptop), and they agree to what we've heard elsewhere: that while the iPad is a nice computer, it's much more of an iPhone extension than a full laptop or even desktop replacement.

One of the most interesting notes is that the much-discussed camera might not be the biggest omission from Apple's tablet -- Fox says that an SD slot or a USB port is a much bigger exception, meaning that if you want to actually do anything with files (view photos or print PDFs) from the iPad, you'll have to transfer them to and from another computer first. Of course Apple is introducing an SD addon with the device, and I thought that I'd heard the Bluetooth connection would print from the iPad, but then of course you've got to have a Bluetooth-enabled printer, and as you already know if you've ever depended on Bluetooth, even then it may be a crapshoot.

Still, the device sounds about like what we all predicted a tablet would be: a MacBook Air sort of satellite extension to your household web browsing and minor computing. I still can't wait to get my hands on one -- hopefully we'll get to see a unit in person at next week's Macworld.

[via MacDailyNews]