I found a fun little app for the Mac today which turns your digital photos into Polaroid-like pictures, called Poladroid. Here’s one I made earlier from one of my photos of my favourite bookstore in Newcastle upon Tyne…

Once you’ve downloaded the application you simply drag your photo onto the polaroid camera icon where it will make all those realistic noises, then spit out your photo and you can either wait a few minutes for the it to develop or you can even shake it as you would a real polaroid.

Poladroid have a Flickr group where you can upload your creations to.

…if there was a Mac app out there which would show a notification on your computer screen when you’d missed a call to your iPhone while it’s docked?

I was just thinking this today when having to leave my iPhone docked after it completely ran out of juice during the night. I haven’t been at the computer much today but have occasionally popped up to have a look at the iPhone screen to see whether I’d missed any calls. How convenient would it be to come up and see a Growl-style notification message on your Mac (that stays there until you close it) letting you know.

I would pay good money for that.

Instead of analysing the recent Microsoft adverts and getting into deep fanboy/fangirl territory, I’m instead going to leave it to Daring Fireball to sum it all up because it is an excellent observation.

I’m guessing that there are a lot of Mac OS X Leopard users visiting Fruit Bytes and you may even have a WordPress blog of your own. How cool would it be to have a Leopard style WP Admin Panel to replace the default one which is, well, a little bit bland and boring shall we say? Enter Leopard Admin.

It’s the easiest thing to get up and running. Simply download the plugin, upload to your /wp-contents/plugins/ folder in your WordPress installation, activate and voila, a sexy new look to your Admin Panel that will make you want to spend more time blogging, which has got to be a good thing.

Thanks to @chris24 for tweeting this.

For around two years I have been a Camino user on my Mac. It didn’t start out this way when I got my first Mac three years ago - I was very much a Safari girl. However, I started running into annoying issues where I was being beachballed and had to Force Quit on a regular basis.

I then switched to Firefox for the Mac but it’s distinct Mac-look-lack was a turn off for me and then I heard about Camino which is Mozilla power with Mac Style. It wasn’t long before this became my browser of choice and I’ve used it pretty much exclusively since. There are occasions when websites won’t work correctly in Camino such as my online banking or the o2 website which throws an annoying pop-up at me which repeatedly tells me that my browser is out of date, so for these occasions I almost always use Firefox.

I downloaded Firefox 3 last week on release day to help break the Guinness World Record for most downloaded software in 24 hours. I used it briefly but one thing I noticed was how fast it was. Blazingly so, even compared to Camino 1.6. I was also impressed with it’s slick Mac look. I’m glad it’s finally been updated to at least look like a Mac browser. But, I don’t think it’s one that I could switch over to completely. It’s useful for the sites that won’t play ball in my browser, however.

The problem now is the choice: Camino, Firefox, Safari. I *want* to go back to using Safari as it’s much more stable now and I do like the fact that it’s Apple’s own and has a gorgeous UI (fangirl alert!). Plus on testing it out again today I have found it is MUCH faster than Camino. Of course, the other great thing about switching back to Safari on the iMac and PowerBook will be the ability to sync bookmarks across machines with .Mac/MobileMe. So, looks like I’ll be letting Safari back into my affections…

So, what’s your favourite browser?

A couple of weeks ago I found a very comprehensive web tracking and analysis web application called Woopra. After a quick look through it’s feature section I signed up for a free (in beta) account then added my website details in the members section. It took around 5 days for my site to be approved then I was able to choose from putting a few lines of code on the site or installing a plugin for Wordpress. Incidentally, in order to add a website, you need to have direct access to the server in order to install the Woopra tracking JavaScript.

Once I’d installed and activated the Wordpress plugin I then downloaded the Woopra desktop client for Mac (must be a 64-bit Mac to work). There were a few niggling problems with that as it repeatedly told me I needed the latest Java 1.6, which I already had. A quick look through the Woopra support forums and I soon resolved the issue which I will outline here just incase anyone else experiences the same problem. Go to Applications > Utilities > Java > click on Java Preferences and ensure that Java SE 6 (64-bit) is at the top of the Java Application Runtime Settings list, as you can see in this screenshot. If it isn’t then simply click, hold and drag it to the top of the list. You should then be able to install the Mac desktop client without issue.

The desktop client is feature rich and packed with information about your site visitors with lots of tabs to flick through within the Analytics menu. It’s live tracking means it knows who is on your website the minute they hit it and you can view their details (IP, platform, browser, screen resolution, country, referrer etc…). I can easily see which keywords and queries have brought visitors to my site, how long they stay on the site and so much more. Sure, there are stats packages provided with my web hosting, but nothing beats live up to the minute information that is available as a desktop client. A ticker tape also runs along the bottom of the Woopra app window with up-to-the-minute details such as how many visits today, how many new visitors, how long they’ve spent on the site and so on. Woopra is easily the best web tracking app I’ve tried.