I was recently contacted by a certain Tiffany of TuneUp Media. After giving me a brief insight into her company’s product, I was sold. TuneUp for Mac is an excellent iTunes plugin that fills in the blanks in your iTunes library, so to speak. TuneUp will examine your music and fetch album artwork, fix the ID3 tags, and add even more information. It can also tell you about upcoming concerts for the current artist. It’s really a nice piece of software, and is perfect for anyone with a less-than-optimal iTunes library. The free version will fix up to 500 songs and add up to 50 sets of album artwork for you. An unlimited version (TuneUp Gold) is available on the developer’s site (listed below) for a very reasonable $20.

Rating: 4.5/5. Awesome program, but the user interface looks more like a website attached to iTunes.

Developer site:
TuneUpMedia.com

For those of us with jailbroken iPhones, it can be frustrating when you finally find a PNG image in your filesystem, only to see that it can’t be read on your Mac. Such images appear as question marks in Apple’s Preview.app. The first fix for this problem was a terminal command and library called fixpng. However, knowing that not everyone is handy with the Terminal, indie developer Malcom-Mac has created a GUI alternative. You just drag and drop your images into iPhonePNGApp, and they come out as normal, readable images. This strange phenomena of unreadable system is explained in-depth on his site. But anyway, if you’re interested in theming your iPod touch or iPhone, or just want to take a peek at what makes up the iPhone’s gorgeous user interface, iPhonePNGApp is a great solution for you.

Rating: 5/5. Works great, images come out clean.

Developer site:
Malcom-Mac.com/Blog/iPhonePNGApp

PwnageTool is the official jailbreaking and unlocking tool (from the iPhone Dev Team) for iPod touch and iPhone firmware 2.0.1. It’s very user friendly, and has a nice (and humorous) user interface. If you don’t have an iPhone or iPod touch that you know you want to jailbreak, this tool is not for you. If you manage to unplug your device while it’s being “pwned”, you can cause major problems (and possibly even the bricking of your device). Overall though, this is an extremely useful tool, and works great. Awesome job, iPhone Dev Team. Keep it comin’.

Rating: 5/5. Easy-to-use, almost makes jailbreaking an iPhone or iPod touch fun.

Developer site:
Blog.iPhone-Dev.org

Note: Sorry for the missed post yesterday. I planned on writing this review yesterday, but the late release and initial lack of download mirrors caused me to not be able to review this app until today.

iPodDisk is an old freeware favorite on many different sites. Its main function is to let you copy music from an iPod to a computer with ease. Over time, this project has improved a lot, and is becoming better all the time. Another interesting use for this app is to restore all of your music to iTunes if it gets deleted. Definitely worth the download for any iPod user. Note that it only works with iPod Classics or Nanos that have Disk Mode turned on.

Rating: 5/5. Very, very useful.

Developer site:
Code.Google.com/P/iPodDisk

TrailRunner is one of the most visually stunning applications I’ve ever seen. It has loads of incredible features that are extremely well-implemented. It supports lots of athletic gadgets, including the Nike+iPod device that goes in your shoe. You can keep an exercise diary within the app, as well as comprehensive exercise plans, all within its gorgeous interface. On the right side of the main window, you’ll find a map of the world, where you can click and drag areas to draw routes for yourself. These routes can then be exported to your GPS device, or even your iPod (as well as import it back). Another nice feature is the ability to select your map type. For example, you can select a roadmap, overhead satellite map, hiking map (which is awesome), a terrain map, or an “OpenStreetMap”,which combines several of the views. Then you can describe your route with directions. Another added bonus is he ability to add and save common waypoints and routes, or even search the world for a waypoint. This app is one of the most amazing free apps I’ve ever seen. Even if you don’t plan to use it, you definitely have to give it a test drive. You’ll be blown away.

Rating: 5/5. They could charge $99 for this app with all of its features. Absolutely stunning.

Developer site:
TrailRunnerX.com

So, I just finished making my list of Windows apps (and Mac equivalents). It includes about 50 apps for Mac and Windows, which essentially offer the same features. The new, fancy HTML table is below! Note that these aren’t necessarily the best Mac apps, but they’re free equivalents to Windows apps.

Thanks to PolishOX for all of his help on this.

Simplify Media is a cool music sharing app that lets you create a buddy list of up to 30 people, and play their music on your computer without downloading it. It keeps you from using all that hard drive space, and saves you lots of money, too. There’s also a mobile client for jailbroken iPhones and iPod touches that lets you make an account and buddy list, then listen to other people’s music when you have wifi. It’s really quite useful for music buffs. Note that it can’t send video yet. It’s available on Mac and Windows.

Rating: 4.5/5. Connecting can take a while, but it’s an awesome app.

Developer site: SimplifyMedia.com

iLibertyX is the ultimate iPhone and iPod touch jailbreaking solution available to date. In just minutes, you can jailbreak, unlock, and activate an iPhone on any firmware. In less than 45 seconds, you can jailbreak an iPod touch. It also has a feature that lets you install “payloads”, which are essentially applications. You install these during the jailbreak, which is very easy to do.

iLibertyX is essentially the same thing as ZiPhone (it uses the same exploit), but it credits the people who really made it, and has tons of bug fixes that competing developer Zibri has not included in ZiPhone. Also, the code in iLibertyX is used with permission by the creators, unlike ZiPhone, whose code was stolen from the official iPhone developer team by Zibri. Zibri stole this code before he was kicked out of the iPhone developer team. iLibertyX is the superior solution in many ways. The most important difference is that ZiPhone makes many more changes to your filesystem than iLiberty+.

Rating: 5/5. Gorgeous GUI, works fast and flawlessly.

Developer site: TheiPhoneProject.org

DasBoot is an awesome diagnostics and repair tool for Mac. It’s a great idea: you install DasBoot on a portable media device, and put any tools you want on it. Then you plug in the portable device and use the tools you want. Most tools that you’d put on it (i.e. DiskWarrior, etc) would cost you some money, but DasBoot is free. This is one of the most useful apps out there. As a bonus, it even works on iPods!

Rating: 5/5. This one has saved me a few times.

Developer site: SubRosaSoft Page for DasBoot

Tooble is my personal favorite YouTube video downloader for Mac. It not only looks nice, but is extremely easy to use. This app is awesome. It can also directly import to your iPod. Very cool.

Rating: 5/5. Looks and feels great, and is very simple.

Developer site: Tooble.tv Acknowledgments: Thanks to Justin for finding this app.