Flash is a bad idea, according to Steve and Apple. To avoid Flash from ruining your desktop experience with 100% CPU usage, you can block Flash from loading into Safari on your Mac OS X using this little ClickToFlash plugin.

Once installed, Flash content will not be loaded. Instead a gradient gray area will occupy the Flash content. Click on the blank area if you want to load the Flash anyway.

You can choose to turn on or off the plugin from its settings page. To access the plugin settings, either click on the icon on the left-top corner of blank gray area or from Safari menu Safari > ClickToFlash > Settings.

The advantages of ClickToFlash are numerous. Since Flash isn’t loaded until you specifically ask for it, your CPU usage will stay at normal levels when browsing the web. This has tons of benefits: web browsing stays speedy, your Mac laptop won’t get as hot, and your Mac’s fan won’t come on as often. In fact, we guarantee* that ClickToFlash will quintuple your battery life and that it will protect those precious parts of your body on which you rest your laptop! (*note: not actually guaranteed)

With ClickToFlash, you can setup the plugin to load YouTube video in H.264 format instead of Flash. H.264 video perform favorably compared to Flash video in Safari.

You can use Finder, Disk Utility, iTunes, iPhoto, or iDVD to burn files into writable CD or DVD. Apple Support has a summary guide on how to go about burning a CD or DVD. If you want to burn a disc image file (commonly in ISO disc format and with an ISO extension), a separate Apple Support article describes how you can burn a disk image file on a CD or DVD in Mac OS X.

However, if you have DVD Video files in VIDEO_TS folder, there is no quick method using the bundled apps in Mac OS X to burn a DVD-Video disc to be playable in regular DVD players.

Burn is an open source and free app that can help you burn the disc to the correct DVD Video format.

Or if you prefer the command line using Terminal, the steps are:

• Create a new folder to house your VIDEO_TS folder, for example ~/Downloads/XMas2008/VIDEO_TS.

• On a Terminal session, enter the following command:

  hdiutil makehybrid -udf -udf-volume-name MY_DVD_NAME -o MY_DVD.iso /path/to/folder/containing/VIDEO_TS

  Using the above example:

  hdiutil makehybrid -udf -udf-volume-name XMas2008 -o XMas2008.iso ~/Downloads/Xmas2008/

• Make sure that /path/to/folder/containing/VIDEO_TS is the path to the folder containing the VIDEO_TS folder, not the VIDEO_TS folder itself.

• The command will create an ISO disk image file XMas2008.iso.

• Start Disk Utility, drag the newly created XMas2008.iso into Disk Utility and click the Burn button to create the DVD-Video disc.

VMWare has released Fusion 3, a major version upgrade to its popular virtualization software on the Mac. This version is touted to have more than 50 new features. It is available for $79.99 or $39.99 for the upgrade.

Among the new features:

Snow Leopard Optimization

VMWare Fusion 3 has a new 64-bit core engine to take advantage of Snow Leopard’s 64-bit kernel for improved performance and reduced overhead.

Better Windows 7 Support

VMWare Fusion 3 is the first virtualization software to support Windows Aero user interface effect, including Flip 3D and Aero Peek. Support for DirectX 9.0EX with OpenGL 1.4 enable more Windows games to be playable. You can run both 32-bit or 64-bit Windows 7.

Migration Assistant

VMWare Fusion comes with a built-in Migration Assistant to help you to move a physical PC to a virtual machine. Just connect your PC to your Mac using an Ethernet cable, and you can move the whole PC to Fusion 3 in a few simple steps.

More Mac-like Experience Running Windows App

VMWare Fusion comes with a Application Menu where you can access your Windows App via the Mac menu bar, even when Fusion is not running. Find and launch Windows apps using spotlight just like Mac apps. Fusion 3 supports Expose and Dock Expose for Windows apps, and you can quit Windows app using Command-Q just like Mac app.

Visit VMWare Fusion 3 Home Page.

Wi-Fi Alliance has announced the near completion of Wi-Fi Direct, a new specification that allows devices to connect to each other without joining a Wi-Fi network.

“Wi-Fi Direct represents a leap forward for our industry. Wi-Fi users worldwide will benefit from a single-technology solution to transfer content and share applications quickly and easily among devices, even when a Wi-Fi access point isn’t available,” said Wi-Fi Alliance executive director Edgar Figueroa. “The impact is that Wi-Fi will become even more pervasive and useful for consumers and across the enterprise.”

Wi-Fi Alliance expects to begin certify devices with Wi-Fi Direct specification in mid-2010. Compete directly with Bluetooth for peer-to-peer networking, Wi-Fi Direct is expected to be 30 times faster than Bluetooth (with 802.11n) and has a wider coverage of up to 300 feet radius. Wi-Fi Direct can be implemented as a software upgrade for existing Wi-Fi devices. And Wi-Fi Direct device is able to create connection to hundreds of millions of legacy Wi-Fi devices currently in use.

Apple is a sponsor corporation for the Wi-Fi Alliance, so it is likely that Apple will adopt Wi-Fi Direct on Macs, iPhones, iPod and future Apple equipments.

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A few users have reported in Apple forums incidents of total data loss using Guest account after upgraded to Snow Leopard. Apple has confirmed on Tuesday that the company is “aware of the issue, which only occurs in extremely rare cases, and we are working on a fix.”

According to reports, the bug occurs when you upgrade from Leopard to Snow Leopard with an existing Guest account in Leopard. After the upgrade, all data are gone after users logged into their Guest accounts and then back to their normal accounts.

PC World has unsuccessfully tried to replicate the bug, suggesting it is indeed rare.

It is better be safe than sorry, make sure there is a usable backup before you upgrade to Snow Leopard. And avoid using Guest account in Snow Leopard until Apple fixes the problem.

Snow Leopard comes with subtle changes that refine the Mac OS X experience, minimize application windows to application icon is one of them.

When you minimize a window under Mac OS X, the default behavior is to shrink the window into the thumbnails of the dock, one icon per window. This leads to irritating Doc clutter if you have a number of minimized windows.

Snow Leopard has an additional entry “Minimize windows into application icon” in its System Preferences > Dock settings where you can select to hide minimize windows into application icon instead of thumbnails of the dock.

You can accessed minimized windows as usual from the application’s Window menu or from the icon menu by Control-Click on the app icon on the Dock. Minimized windows also appear below at the bottom in Dock Expose when you click and hold the app icon on the Dock. Similarly minimized windows appear at the bottom when you activate Expose.

VMWare has released VMWare Fusion 2.0.6 which fixes multiple issues when running VMware Fusion on Mac OS X Snow Leopard 32-bit kernel mode. It also improves 3D performance on Mac with NVIDIA graphics cards running Snow Leopard. All together there are over 20 bug fixes in this release.

View VMWare Fusion 2.0.6 release notes

Download VMWare Fusion 2.0.6

Skype has released a minor update to Skype 2.8 for Mac OS X that include fixes for Snow Leopard. You can update Skype from within the app itself, or visit the Skype Mac website for the 44MB download.

Once in a while you might come across CD images in the format of a .bin file and .cue file. These are format popularized by CDRWin which is a Windows program. In order to use the CD image in Mac, you have to convert the bin/cue format into the disk format supported by Mac OS X using third party application.

Roxio Toast CD burning software is able to convert bin/cue format into Mac OS X disk format. But this will set you back at least $80. Or you can use the free and open source command line tool bchunk to convert the bin/cue files into iso image that can be mounted on Mac OX X.

It is recommended to obtain bchunk from MacPorts:

• Download and install MacPort if you have not done so. MacPorts is a community driven effort to make it easy to obtain and update open source software on the Mac OS X.

• Open the Terminal app and install bchunk port using the following command line:

sudo port install bchunk

• Let say your bin/cue files are image.bin and image.cue, you can now convert the bin/cue file to iso using the following command:

bchunk image.bin image.cue outputimage

bchunk will create the disk image outputimage.iso which you can open for it to be mounted on your Mac.

VideoLan has released version 1.0.2 of everyone’s favorite free and open source VLC Media Player. This new release comes with 64-bit support for Snow Leopard and fixes for SSA decoding, ogg/theora, x264 module and other securities issue. This new version supports Kazakh and Croatian two new languages.

Download VLC 1.0.2.