Kindle for Mac also offers e-reader features, so you can access all of your e-book purchases, download and read them right on your computer. It’ll also sync the furthest location read with all Kindle devices registered to your account if you want, so that you can continue reading on your Kindle, iPhone or Mac without missing a beat.

Not yet present in the current version of the software is the ability to make and edit notes, highlight portions of the text and conduct full-text searches, but these are all planned for a later update, according to Amazon. Future versions will also let you click on images to zoom in to see a larger version, and to rotate it if you wish. One feature that is present is the conveniently-placed “Buy a Kindle” link found in the Help menu. Subtle, Amazon.

The application also lets you manage your Kindle and make purchases in the Kindle store, although for both of these functions it actually just kicks you over to Amazon’s web site in your default browser. In fact, the Mac software really isn’t much more than a bare-bones e-reading application. Not that that’s a bad thing, but I’m wondering why exactly it took this long to get the software out there.

The answer is probably that Amazon didn’t really have a good enough reason to until the iPad came along. Up until that point, drawing a link between a free iPhone app and a free Mac app to display content that Amazon was originally taking a loss on selling didn’t make much sense. The Kindle itself — the hardware — was the key to success, and it’s pretty easy to chuck that altogether when you’ve got the other two.

Amazon must’ve seen the writing on the wall following the iPad announcement, and realized that joining the company would be considerably more productive than attempting to beat it at this point, and so decided to cover all Mac-based platforms instead of just partially serving Apple customers. Will it pay off in the long run? We’ll have to wait and see how well Apple tolerates iBookstore competitors when the iPad hits store shelves early next month.

Related GigaOM Pro Research (sub req’d): Evolution of the e-Book Market

doubleTwist already offers the ability to sync with pretty much any device, instead of just your standard Apple i-devices. And with Amazon support, there’s little reason for many to venture back to iTunes, especially since Amazon’s prices are often better than those found in Apple’s own online store.

It wasn’t too long ago that doubleTwist’s “DVD” Jon Johansen was taking flack from BART for buying legit advertising space at a very conspicuous location, and then using it to promote the iTunes competitor. With the introduction of the Amazon store, we should see that competition heat up even further.

The new Music Store looks like a very stripped-down iTunes store, and though it isn’t as fancy as Apple’s, it is clean and functional, and it doesn’t cause the program to occasionally fail, as iTunes has been known to do. It pales in comparison to the iTunes store in terms of navigation options, though, with a search bar and two small Top Albums and Top Songs lists providing your only means of browsing the Amazon catalog.

The main advantage, of course, comes for people who don’t own an iPod or iPhone (some really do exist, honest). Plug in your BlackBerry, PSP, Android phone, and any number of other supported devices, and you can immediately copy over your purchased media. You miss out on Genius playlists and other iTunes niceties, but if you don’t have an iPod, that probably isn’t an issue anyway.

It may be a small step towards making doubleTwist a full-fledged competitor to iTunes, but having a major player like Amazon onboard is nothing to sneeze at. Ideally, the next step for DVD Jon and his open alternative for the i-device deficient would be to form a partnership with major video media distributors, especially given that doubleTwist automatically converts video when it syncs to most major devices, including the PSP and the Palm Pre.

In fact, Palm could do far worse than doubleTwist in an official partnership to provide its users a dedicated software solution for syncing media instead of continuing to play leapfrog with Apple over iTunes. I’m sure something could be arranged, so long as Palm agreed to keep the software open to other devices as well.

For now, the Amazon store is only available for the OS X version of doubleTwist, but a Windows version is coming soon. You must have an Amazon.com account with a registered payment method in order to use the service.

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Picasa web users will recognize the “new” features for the desktop version, which haven’t previously been available on locally installed instances of Picasa in the past. They include face recognition, which Picasa calls “Name Tags,” and support for geotagged photos with location data.

With Name Tags, Picasa will analyze your photos and group them according to faces it find in them, at which point you’re able to assign names to these faces, and then search your library based on people you’ve tagged. If it sounds like Faces in iPhoto ’09, that’s because it is, with the exception that when signed into your Gmail account with the app, Picasa will offer auto-complete suggestions of names you start typing.

Google also baked-in location support in Picasa 3.5, which resembles iPhoto ’09′s Places organizational feature. That means photos with embedded geotagging EXIF data, like those taken with the iPhone’s built-in camera, or using an Eye-Fi Geo card, can be optionally displayed on a map in Picasa 3.5. If you’ve taken your photos without embedded location information, you can simply drag them to the appropriate location on a built-in Google map to achieve the same effect.

Version 3.5 also brings an improved importing process, so that you can star your favorite shots, upload to the web, and share with your Google contacts all in one fell swoop. Tagging is also better than it was before, with better batch tagging, quick tags, and tag counts for image groups.

If you’re looking for an alternative to iPhoto, and you’re already very plugged into Google via its various personal information management apps, Picasa is a good choice. It isn’t much of a resource hog, it’s very good at combing and organizing your computer’s image files without much intervention on your part, and it plugs into your existing Google account information to fill in a lot of blanks. If I weren’t a MobileMe user (which I might not be for long after yesterday’s announcement), I’d definitely consider using Picasa as my full-time solution.

Picasa 3.5 is available now for Mac and PC, though not for Linux, and it’s an English-only download. It’s completely free, which is something iPhoto ’09 is not, if you haven’t purchased a new Mac lately.

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Similar to other network apps, the Discovery Channel app allows users to browse select shows from the network and play clips directly on their iPhone. Note that these are merely clips and not actual episodes. Whether this is due to bandwidth concerns or content restrictions is unknown, but Discovery is certainly not the first company to do this.

Users can take their viewing experience to the next level by interacting through quizzes on topics and shows, learning more about show cast and other info, and see a schedule of TV air times. Other interactive aspects of the app include the ability to watch the “most viewed clips” or jump directly to the iTunes Store to buy your favorite episodes.

Currently, the shows featured inside the app only amount to a little less than half of the entire Discovery lineup, but the future potential for this app is limitless. Discovery Communications, the parent company of The Discovery Channel, has a diverse collection of other properties, and I would expect to see apps for their other networks, like Animal Planet, The Science Channel, TLC or Planet Green.

If you’ve had a chance to try out the Discovery Channel app, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

They’ve also added some new core functionality and optimized the backend. To me, this feels like more than a 0.01 update. With every update of Sequel Pro, the open-source project continues to close the gap between itself and commercial competitors such as Querious.

New Features

Sequel Pro now includes full SSH tunnel support built into the connection manager (which has also got a UI facelift).

There is a new Relations screen that lets you view and edit foreign keys for a table.

Enhancements

By far one of my favorite new enhancements is the ability to filter the database’s table list. When the list gets larger than the displayed area, a filter box appears at the top, enabling you to quickly find the one you’re looking for. I’ve been using this a lot already.

When running custom queries, the results used to be presented in a static table. Now you can sort the results on the fly by clicking the column titles. Even better, for supported queries you can edit the results directly.

Browser-like table history navigation has been added, allowing you to go back to previous table views, which is great for flicking back and forth.

Significant Update

There are also plenty of smaller enhancements. Another favorite is the ability to select a record (either in the content view or after running a custom query) and then select “Copy As INSERT Statement”. This is so handy, I don’t know why it wasn’t there before. There are plenty of small changes like this, and almost every part of the application has had numerous bugs fixed.

In addition to all the new features, enhancements and fixes, this release is significantly snappier, and very noticeably so. The memory overhead is also greatly reduced. The developers have done some serious optimizing, and the results have paid off. See the full release notes for Sequel Pro 0.96 for a complete list of changes since 0.95.

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At first, I thought this sounded like only half an idea. There are already some great Twitter clients in the Mac software space, most of which have integrated search functions built right in, so how does Incoming! carve out a niche by offering search alone? What I found out was that depending on your Twitter habits, it might actually be the only app you need.

What it offers is a very robust search manager, well above and beyond what the average built-in Twitter search in other clients provide. You can filter results by matching exact phrases, finding any or all of multiple terms, or by exclusionary keywords (so that I can search for “Apple” but exclude “Pie,” for instance). You can even specify positive or negative attitudes (which just searches for a smiley or frowny emoticon, but it works), or specify that you want only questions.

The interface also provides lots of options for filtering your tweets and navigating between searches and trending topics. On the left, your searches appear in the sidebar, and are only removed when you click the “Remove Search” button. Below that list is a pane containing trends. Double-clicking on any trending term will automatically create a search for said term. On the right you have your list of results and the actual tweet-viewing window. You can filter results by influence, username, following/follower count, updates and date.

At no point during any of this do you log into your Twitter account or post any tweets of your own. Some users will no doubt find this bothersome, and question the app’s usefulness, but if you use Twitter for research as much as I do, the arm’s length passivity of Incoming! is just what the doctor ordered. It might also appeal to people who don’t yet want to take the Twitter plunge themselves by signing up for an account, but want access to all the content that’s available via the service, in a much more manageable package than Twitter.com’s own search page.

For those who absolutely need to reply and retweet, you still can; Incoming! just opens the native Twitter web interface to allow you to do so. The application also has some nice extras, like allowing you to export your results to a CSV database file format, providing “Translate” and “Translate All” options, and allowing you to instantly see all of the links and images your search has returned taken out of their individual tweets. It’s the closest thing to a Google for Twitter I’ve yet come across.

The software is currently in beta, which I think explains why the auto-refresh function wasn’t working for me. It’s free, so long as you only want to run three searches at once. Registration removes the search limit cap, and costs $14 while the beta is on, or $24 after that.

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From the coders who brought you Trip Cubby and Gas Cubby (both of which I use weekly), comes Health Cubby.

If you’ve used either of the aforementioned iPhone and iPod touch apps from App Cubby you’re already aware of the kind of data collection they are known for, and the subsequent graphs of that data. After playing with Health Cubby over the past couple of weeks, I can honestly say that it carries on the tradition of quality design.

After some hang-ups in the App Store approval process, Health Cubby is now here to help you track your New Year’s resolutions. But unlike many of the other Exercise/Health tracking applications for the iPhone and iPod touch, Health Cubby focuses on less detail and more realistic goals (more on this later). The feature that makes Health Cubby the most interesting of the Health apps I’ve tried, is the ability to sync your progress with friends, using it as a sort of buddy support system — or bragging rights, if you want to use the built-in messaging feature for such things.

Health Cubby’s trackable metrics are sort of an enigma. On the one hand there are very specific bits of data that you can track, such as weight (obviously), body fat percentage (if you have easy access to that sort of data), and various body part measurements. These are all very specific metrics that will help you have a full understanding of the progress (or lack there of) that you are making in your diet and exercise regimen.

On the other side of this coin are Meals and Vices. Tracking meals is just a free form entry of whatever it is you’ve eaten, logging the meal type, a description, notes, and a rating. Vices are the other part — decide how many vices you’ll allow yourself each week, and then log them as you cave. Again, you’ll log the vice type (donuts, fast food, etc) along with a description or note if you see fit. From my perspective tracking such vague details does little good in helping me achieve my goals — I’m more the calorie counting type, but as with anything, your mileage may vary greatly from my own. Of course Health Cubby also tracks your weight exercises and cardio time too.

The true redeeming value of Health Cubby comes with the ability to share your results with friends, and track their progress as well. Whether you’re competing in some sort of ‘Biggest Loser’ competition, or just working out together, it’s a great way to see how the numbers stack up. Of course no App Cubby application would be complete without some snazzy graphs representing the data, and it does this very nicely — both with your personal data, or combined with any friends with which you’re syncing results.

If you prefer to count your calories and know specific numbers from your diet and exercise efforts, Health Cubby probably is not going to be for you. But if you just need to be reminded that you’ve already eaten a dozen donuts and had 15 Big Macs this week, and want to be able to share that with others (so they can either ridicule you or encourage you to enter competitive eating contests), then $4.99 for Health Cubby will be well spent.

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Who wants to go to all the trouble of opening a browser window just to search for something? Not me, that’s for sure. Luckily I don’t have to anymore thanks to Google Quick Search Box. The open source app was released today as a developer preview, announced via the official Google Mac Blog. This version of the search box is described as less stable than the Google Mobile App, though it contains clues as to what’s to come from the app in the future.

Among those features not yet active, but to be explored in future iterations are contextual search, actions, and extensibility. In fact, you can see immediately that the search box takes many of its cues from its mobile cousin, and will probably develop along the same lines.

I headed over to the Google Code site for the project and got my hands on the disk image available there so that I could take the search box for a test drive. The app is a light 8.4 MB installed, so my worries that it would be a secret resource hog like Google Desktop seem to be unfounded.

The UI is attractively Simple and Mac-friendly. By default, the app searches your computer and the web, including folders and your address book. You can choose to include/exclude specific locations from within the app’s preferences. Typing a search term generates live results, and displays the icon for the top hit on the search bar itself. Selecting a “Search Google” option immediately brings opens Google in your default browser, and you can choose to add website suggestions to your search box results, an option which is disabled by default.

You might notice some similarities to the now seemingly dormant Quicksilver. The similarities are no coincidence, however, as Quicksilver’s developer, Nicholas Jitkoff, is one of the core developers of Quick Search Box.

All in all, I’m very impressed with Google Quick Search Box, and can’t wait to see what’s in store in future versions. Might I suggest voice activation, as in the Mobile App?

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JobCompass is a new application on the iPhone that allows you to search through millions of jobs, locating and plotting them on a map in relation to your current position. It pulls vacancy information in real time, so new listings appear on a regular basis.

The idea for JobCompass was born when Titus Blair, the developer of the application, discovered that many of his friends and associates were being laid off. He explains that:

Current website solutions are not ideal since they do not pinpoint your location to provide you with job listings in relation to where you are at the moment. I was also traveling regularly and thought it would be interesting to see what jobs were available in my field in the cities and places I was visiting.

After pinpointing your location, JobCompass allows you to search for jobs by keyword, specifying the range from your current location which interests you (5, 10, 25, 50 or 100 mile radius). After finding a position which you seem well suited for, it’s simple to send an email to yourself with a link to the job description or, for those with quick fingers and enough patience, to open the listing in Safari and apply for the job straight away.

Future versions of the app are slated to offer an option to search not only your present location, but wherever you wish based upon a city, state or postal code. Currently the app is limited to the U.S., but international support is in the pipeline, including Canada and the UK. Job listings are currently pulled from Indeed.com, but the developer noted that they are presently working to expand to Monster, HotJobs, Dice and others with the aim of having the most extensive job listing system available on a mobile device.

There is little doubt the idea of being ‘location-aware’ is one of the most useful and widely exploited features of the iPhone — it’s great for ordering pizza, looking for a cash machine or trying to navigate your way around a city. Whether the demand is there for knowing the jobs available in any given location is debatable, and questions surround how useful location-based job searching is. That said, the radius supported by JobCompass is up to 100 miles — more than enough for anyone searching for local employment.

JobCompass currently only supports the iPhone, with iPod touch support being introduced in the next update. The normal price of the app is $3.99, but there’s a significant reduction in the run up to Christmas. You can download Job Compass via iTunes until December 24 for only $0.99.

In addition, a free copy is being given away every day in the month of December. Full details can be found at Jobcompass.net.

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A similar promotion has launched this week, with a few notable differences. Give Good Food to Your Mac (organized by Aquafadas) offers a huge range of different applications, with discounts increasing progressively depending upon the number of applications you purchase.

Claudia Zimmer, Aquafadas’ CEO explains:

We are pleased to introduce the Third Edition of ‘Give Good Food to your Mac’. It’s a chance for us to build a community among developers and together, create opportunities that would not be possible alone. Mac users benefit from it as they can discover our software at great prices.

The Discounts Available

While the promotion doesn’t feature the world’s catchiest name, it does give some great discounts. Buying 3 apps saves you 20%, 4 apps saves 30%, and 5 or more knocks a whopping 50% off the normal retail price. As you add applications to your cart, it’s simple to see how much you stand to save, along with how many more applications you need to reach the next level.

Applications Featured

Rather than the MacHeist route of featuring only a few, large applications, Give Good Food to Your Mac includes a fairly formidable list of developers and apps. Everything from games and fitness apps, through to organization tools and web design software. Several applications which have been featured in bundles previously (such as DEVONthink and Rapidweaver) are present and, while there is some junk in there, the list is fairly impressive:

• AlienConverter from AlienCrypt
• Amigos Number Puzzles from Amigos Software
• Amigos Spanish from Amigos Software
• BannerZest from Aquafadas
• BannerZest Pro from Aquafadas
• Bee Docs’ Timeline 3D edition 2.2 from BeeDocs
• BeFit – Get Fit, Stay Fit, BeFit! from Jon Brown Designs
• Blue Crab from Limit Point Software
• Cheetah 3D from MW 3D-Solutions
• Comic Boom from Toon Boom Animation Inc.
• DejalNarrator 2.0.3 from Dejal
• DEVONagent from DEVONtechnologies, LLC
• DEVONthink Personal from DEVONtechnologies, LLC
• DiscLabel from SmileOnMyMac
• dJay 2.1.3 from Algoriddim GmbH
• Dossier from Vortimac
• Dragoman from Dare to be Creative Ltd.
• FastCut 3.0.6 from TimesForFun
• Flip Boom Classic from Toon Boom Animations Inc.
• Fluffy’s Log 1.1.1 from Shallot Patch
• French Verb Game from Amigos Software
• FunBooth 0.9.3 from SourceBits
• Geoaze Pro from SilverLint Creative Software
• Geoaze Standard from SilverLint Creative Software
• GhostReader English Version from ConvenienceWare
• GhostReader French version from ConvenienceWare
• HoudahGeo from Houdah Software
• HoudahSpot from Houdah Software
• Hydra 1.6 + Aperture plug-in from Creaceed
• iArchiver from Dare to be Creative Ltd.
• iDive from Aquafadas
• iKanji 1.0 from ThinkMac Software
• JABMenu 2.0.1 from JNSoftware
• Kameleon From Option-6 Products
• Librarian Pro from Koingo Software
• MacCleanse from Koingo Software
• MacPilot 3 from Koingo Software
• Mail Attachments iConizer from Lokiware
• Mental Case from MacCoreMac Software
• Money 3 from Jumsoft
• Nutritionist from Dr. Frank Kowalewski
• PearNote 1.0 from UsefulFruit Software
• PulpMotion from Aquafadas
• Pulpmotion Advanced from Aquafadas
• RapidWeaver 4 from Realmac Software
• Relationship from Jumsoft
• Renamer4Mac from Dare to be Creative Ltd.
• ResizeMe 1.2.0 from Dare to be Creative Ltd.
• RubiTrack from Toolsfactory software inc.
• Scorecard 1.4.1 from CynicalPeak Software
• ScreenAudit 1.3 from ArtenScience
• Scribbles from Atebits
• Secret of the Lost Cavern From Coladia
• Share Tool from Yazsoft
• ShoveBox from Wonder Warp Software SP
• Speed Download 5 from Yazsoft
• SplitFuse 1.3 from LikelySoft
• SWF&FLV Player from Eltima Software
• Syncmate from Eltima Software
• Tangerine! from Potion Factory
• Today 1. 3 from Second Gear LLC
• Together from Reinvented Software
• Toon Boom Studio From Toon Boom Animation Inc.
• VideoPier HD from Aquafadas
• Voice Candy from Potion Factory
• VoltaicHD from Systemic pty Ltd. Trading as Shedworx
• You Control: Desktops 1.3 from You Software
• Yummy Soup from HungrySeacow Software

The “kitchen” will remain open between the 17th of November and the 1st of December 2008. It’s worth taking a look at the above list — if any more than 3 applications stand out, you’ll be in for a great discount.

Enjoy the Christmas meal!

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