My son Abdullah is addicted to Dora the Explorer cartoons, and since I am planing to travel in the summer I am looking for ways to take his DVDs with me using my iPod.

I found this free software that convert videos to iPod ready format, so far it is doing very good job.
Koyote Free Ipod video converter

Recently the 2 most popular browsers IE and Firefox released a new version.

Firefox is already a very good product so improving it is very hard 🙂 The most important new feature is the online spell checker which is really lovely. It also has a new theme, I didn’t like that much but it might take some time to get used to.

IE 7 in the other hand is really impressive (compared to IE 6 of course), it has tab browsing at last, the theme is really really good, the new font rendering engine is really smooth and clear it feels like a Mac.

The Bad

• Mouse movement: Mac OS has very strange mouse movement, if you move the mouse slowly it moves “very” slow, and if you move it faster it move “very” fast. I couldn’t get used to it until now and it drives me crazy.
  I tried different software to fix this weired behavior, but it is still awkward.
• Arabic support is really bad:
  • Keyboard layout is different than PC layout, which is frustrating for PC converts.
  • Most soft wares don’t provide good support for Arabic, Front page doesn’t connect Arabic characters. Apple iWork Pages doesn’t even support right to left writing.
  • Writing in “bold” in Arabic font is the same as non bold.
• Software updates are huge, I guess they don’t have incremental update, you need to download the complete software whenever a new version exists. e.g. I am downloading 51M update for QuickTime, and you have to restart the machines afterward!! So far I downloaded more than 1 GB for software update!!

The Good

• It is UNIX 🙂
• In Mac OS an application is a complete folder when you click the folder the application runs. So software installation is very easy, you just move the folder to where you want to your application folder. To uninstall move the folder to the trash.
• The graphics are awesome, wallpapers, screen savers, application everything is cool!
• The machines is really great looking, and the 20″ monitor is really amazing and bright.
• Super quite you don’t hear any noise.
• Mac OS sleep feature is really fast, one click and the machine is running in less than a second!!

A year ago Waleed Alzuhair asked me about the reason I am still using Windows-1256 Arabic character set, intead of the new standard Unicode. My reason was the lack of good editor that support Arabic and Unicode, my favourite eidtor HTML-Kit doesn’t have any support for Unicode.

But lately while looking for an editor for Mac OS I found JEdit, it is a Java based editor which means it will work with any OS, it supports many charachter sets including Unicode UTF-8, another intersting feature is its support (through a plugin) of remote editing using both FTP, and SFTP (HTML-Kit doesn’t support SFTP).

I always have trouble finding and recommending FTP clients to friends, I used to use WS_FTP but it isn’t free, same thing for Cute FTP.

Lately I didn’t use FTP client any more, because I start using HTMLKit it isn’t an FTP client per se, it is an editor with the ability to open remote files using FTP, so I do most of my file editing using it.

HTMLKit is great but it doesn’t support moving files or directories, or transfaering a complete directory. In these cases I usually log to the machine using SSH and do the need operations using the command line, but this not an option for most people.

Thunderbird is a great email client, it has very good support for international languages, and it displays Arabic emails without any problems, the only problem that I face with it is when writing Arabic emails, unfortunately Thunderbird doesn’t have shortcut or button to change the writing direction from left-to-right used by most western languages, to right-to-left used for Arabic.

But through the power of extensions you can install this small extension (37K) that will add 2 new buttons in Compose window, one for changing the direction from LTR->RTL, and vice versa.

Until now my downloads are basically similar to Windows counter part:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Real Player
• Windows Mediaplayer
• Windows Messenger

any thing else I should look at.

First impressions: WOW, WOW, huh, why, where!!! I guess I need sometime to get used to it. At least I have a terminal program with ssh, after all it is UNIX machine 🙂