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# Xtorrent is an OSX BitTorrent client. Nice user interface. Much slicker-looking than the UI for Transmission, which is built on the same library. Strangely, I see no way in Xtorrent to add the URL of a torrent. You have to download it first. But it has a nice search feature that allows you to type part of the name of a torrent, and find it on search engines of your choice (default Google and Yahoo). And it can save searches in folders. The currently available Xtorrent is version 1.0 beta 2. The beta is free, but the final will cost $19, or $16 if you preorder now. $9 more for perpetual upgrades ($6 if you pre-order). I doubt I'll buy it. I'll stick with Tomato Torrent, the straight-from-the-horses-mouth original BitTorrent client, and Transmission. But I don't download torrents very often. Popular torrents make my DSL modem cry, with hundreds of connection requests. [torrentfreak]

# Shira "is a web browser based on Web Kit and written in Cocoa. The goal of the Shiira Project is to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari. All source code used in this software is publicly available." I tried 2.0b2. Looks promising, though more alpha than beta, since it's not all done yet. [gazette]

# Olivier Gutknecht - S3 Browser - a simple app that allows you to browse your Amazon S3 buckets and upload, download, and delete files. S3 is Amazon's "Simple Storage Service". It provides a place to store bits, costing 15 cents per gigabyte per month for storage and 20 cents per gigabyte for transfer. I currently use some simple command-line tools I wrote in Ruby to maintain my S3 buckets, so I probably won't use this much, but it should make S3 accessible to mere mortals. [tuaw]

# Jungle Tools LLC - Jungle Disk enables using S3 for backup. It stores the files in its own, proprietary, encrypted, format, though, so the resulting content isn't accessible from the web. If that suits your purposes, it's about the easiest S3 access going. It provides your data as a WebDAV server, which OSX (or Windows or Linux) makes available as a disk volume. Data is cached locally and uploaded in the background, so everything is quick. I requested a "raw mode" on the forum, to allow using Jungle Disk to maintain a more standard, web-accessible, S3 file structure.

# Jaco Pastorius Big Band - The Word is Out! - Jaco plays bass on only one of these tunes, but the bass playing is all reminiscint of his style. The tunes are funky and the playing supurb. [itunes]

iTunes has a button on each album page labeled "Tell a Friend". This allows you to email an album recommendation. Email it to yourself and copy the link on the "iTunes" button in the message (which Gmail classified as spam), and you can include it on a web page, as I did with the album link above (or click the cover image below).

# I discovered a nice feature in Seashore, the MacPaint-like app that I found a while back. Control-click on an album cover in iTunes gives you copy (and paste) choices to get the cover image in the clipboard. When you start Seashore or tell it to create a new image, you need to specify the image size. The "Presets" button in the lower-left corner of Seashore's "New" dialog has a "Clipboard" choice, which will use the size of the image in the clipboard as the size of the new Seashore image.

# Josh Pigford at The Apple Blog - Macworld Live Coverage - they've got a live chat room set up at theappleblog.campfirenow.com/c60e9. Be there for Steve Jobs' keynote on Tuesday, January 9, from 9am to 11am left coast time (12-2 eastern). [appleblog]

# arn at Mac Rumors - Macworld San Francisco 2007 'Spoiler Free' Keynote Stream - this page will be updated with a link to Apple's video of Jobs' keynote speech when it becomes available. They'll also provide up-to-the-second info at MacRumorsLive.com. [macrumors]

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