I was minding my own business one day, doing my work, when all of the sudden the Opera web browser appears and wants to download a bitTorent file. I was a bit miffed at both events occurring simultaneously - one, I didn't even know I had Opera on my Mac since I never downloaded it, and two, I didn't know where that file was even coming from! I really didn't know what to think of it, so I did a little searching for Opera to see where it was which came up empty in my search except for a few preference files, so I sort of let it go for the moment. Then it happened again, Opera springs up out of nowhere and starts downloading some torrent! WTF! This time, I click on the dock icon and Show in Finder.

Ahhh - It's part of Bridge, the media management application thats part of their CS products. Much of Bridge connects to the internet for photo searching, photographer directory and administering Version Cue, Adobe's version control software. I wonder why they chose to use Opera - possibly because it runs on Mac/PC's - oddly I've been seeing Opera turn up in alternate places besides a default browser, I finally got to try the Wii which uses a highly modified version of Opera.

Kevin Rose, co-founder of Digg.com, has responded with his own thoughts on the user revolt that occurred last night on DIgg.

"But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying."

An interesting event for sure, where the people really did make a stand and it made a difference. It's good to see a positive effect on even large websites against corporate advertisers. Good Job Kevin!

A recent flood of stories posted to Digg today are seemingly bogus posts but with massive amounts of diggs. Recently, posts about HD-DVD being hacked had been posted around and now recently a full hex string is being passed around which apparently is the key to cracking HD-DVDs DRM. A user was even banned from Digg for posting the numbers on Digg. In any event, the users of Digg are in an outrage over the situation where they feel wronged by Diggs actions. It's also been noted that HD-DVD is a sponsor of DiggNation which is where much of this controversy may stem from. Below is a screen of Digg's home page while getting bombed, click the image for larger.

A screen of Digg's home page while getting bombed, click the image for larger.

MailPlane, the GMail desktop email application updated their version to 1.45 this past weekend. One of the first changes is the new icon for the application. The developer of MailPlane, Ruben Bakker, approached icon designer Jonas Rask to come up with something to replace their current 'flat' icon. The result is here in this post which I think it's am much more lively looking icon.



Also the new mail badge icon was changed to a chartreuse which I kind of felt was a little tough to read over the read & white. Other improvements include on the fly spell checking thanks to MailPlane using Macs built-in spell checker, Choosing Spam, Archive or Discard in a separate window will close the window following the action. Bug fixes are included in this release as well. MailPlane is still in beta but they are giving away invitations to try it out and still no word on any sort of pricing.

Using Automator I was able to clean up my desktop by organizing these seemingly un-categorizable files into specific folders quickly and easily.

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