Excellent news for folks looking for an ftp client – Filezilla, the excellent open source file transfer client, is being ported to osx and linux. If you manage a lab or corporate workgroup environment and are interested in a single client with a consistent interface that’s available across all platforms, this is right up your alley.

The first beta is out and there are some rough edges but so far on both windows and Mac it’s been solid for me. If you already have something like Transmit or Fugu on the mac you’ll probably be less interested in this, but it’s still worth a look.

There’s a nice concise piece on betanews summing up the prospects of SED, which is by far the best display technology we’ve come up with yet. It has all the virtues of the traditional CRT televisions most folks are still using (color vibrancy, contrast ratio, brightness), plus the primary virtue of LCD (low weight and thin size) and has even lower power requirements, but analysts are increasingly skeptical that it will succeed in the marketplace. A great shame, that. Anyway the article is a short read if you’re interested in the topic.

Picked up an interesting tidbit at work this week. We had an all-staff meeting and the desktop support folk who collect statistics on a number of issues revealed that consistent with their observations, more students are buying macs for their personal computer – this semester, 25% of the student body registered a mac for use on our network. That’s a huge number and contrasts sharply with the under 4% number out in the real world. It also starts to bring apple back to where they were back in the mid 90’s when they owned the education market.

What’s interesting is that in contrast to this, I saw stats on student use of campus lab machines, and the numbers indicated an overwhelming preference for use of PCs in the labs despite ready availability of Macs. I’m not sure what to make of this. Perhaps mac users come with their own machines (laptops?) and use those instead of a lab machine? Perhaps they don’t use lab machines period?

Anyway, thought folks reading here would find it interesting since most of you are mac fans.

Need a texture for a project you’re working on, say a wood grain background? Check out Texture King, a free resource chock full of textures of all types, wrapped up in a nice web 2.0’ish interface.

Omnigraffle is this wonderful diagramming and charting package from the Omni Group. PC users, think ‘Visio’ and you have the general idea, just imagine a much nicer interface. Anyway if you’re an Omnigraffle user, you’ll love Graffletopia, a regularly updated site where developers publicize the stencil templates they develop. Check it out if you’re looking to flesh out your Omnigraffle stencils.

Check out this ars technica piece on the sorry state of broadband implementations in the US. 100Mbs symetrical is ~$35 a month in Japan. You cannot come remotely close to touching that in the US, where most of us are lucky to get asymetrical 5Mbps down/768kps up offerings at ~$60/month. Has the free market failed us, the country which invented the internet? Or is it simply a failure of our legislatures? All I know is it’s pathetic. None of this is news to regular readers but I can’t resist another opportunity to bitch about it. This stuff is seriously, seriously holding us back. The explosion of participatory media, also popularized in this country (think ‘youtube’) is but the latest example of possibilities inhibited. Kindly take this stuff into account when you vote, it sounds like hyperbole but this is our economic future we’re trading on here.

If you’re using a mac in a campus lab environment or off some official image built by your employer, chances are fair to good that you’re using stuffit to decompress files, a legacy of stuffit’s heyday when it was actually a decent tool. My impression is mac folk are simply acculturated to using it even though it’s failed to keep up with the times. Consider Unarchiver as an alternative. It’s free and open source, it handles pretty much every file format under the sun, and it’s not evil. What more could one ask of afile decompression utility.

As an aside, I’d love to slowly throttle whoever manages the stuffit website with al dente cooked egg noodles. Ban it from your system. It had its day in the sun and now it’s time for it to go.

Bryce, the landscape and animation tool that’s bounced from owner to owner for at least the last 6-7 years, is currently at version 5.5. The current owners are giving away free licenses to version 5.0 for a short time as a promotion. It’s an earlier version but it’s still an extremely capable and useful tool. Grab your copy for Mac or Windows from their special offer page now before the offer expires.

[via downloadsquad]

I originally spotted this at TUAW – it’s a great roundup of all the available password storage software for Mac OSX.