One of my biggest gripes about my Nokia N93 and Nokia in general was the lack of support for the Macintosh platform. For the longest time, there was no real alternative to the Nokia PC Suite. Updating the OS on my Nseries phones is also difficult as OTA updates seem to be unavailable in the U.S. and other updates typically required the use of a Windows PC.

That has changed now. Nokia just released a beta version of the Nokia Media Transfer program for the Mac. Yay! While it doesn’t address OS updates, it is a cool way of auto-filling your Nseries phone with content as well as getting content off the Nseries.

Rather than describing the entire process of installation and functionality, I thought I’d give you a little picture book intro here:

Nokia Media Transfer allows you to use either a bluetooth connection or a USB-cable. I chose the bluetooth connection.

Strangely enough, the program found the N93 and the N95, but did not detect the N800.

You enable each device for use with iPhoto as a camera. You can also load photos to the phone, thereby giving you a ‘mobile’ photo album that you can carry around with you. While this is great for the N93 and N95, it really would have been a killer-app for the N800 considering that the N800 has a much bigger screen.

Nokia Media Transfer auto-fills your phone with music as well. I really like this feature.

Now it gets interesting, clicking the Create Folders button launches a series of Apple Scripts that are designed to create folders in iPhoto and iTunes that function is locations for the auto-fill features.

Well, it didn’t really work with me. iTunes complained, iPhoto did too.

Info boxes started popping up – the software is beta after all, so I’m not too worried about it at this point.

Once you are done with the installation process, you access the Media Transfer program through the top bar.

And here it is – running in all its beauty.

Thank you Nokia for finally making a commitment to the Mac! Me and millions of other users will thank you!

Via TUAW:

Skype, today, released two treats for us Mac users: Skype Beta 1.5 and Skype Video preview. Both are basically the same program with the exception that that the Video preview supports video chatting, though it is in it very early stages so it will crash (the Beta is more stable).

New in Skype Beta 1.5 is a totally new (and Macified) UI, detachable call window, the ability to import contacts from Address Book and Entourage, and a bunch more. Check out the changelog for the full dope.

Skype is free.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog’s David Chartier posted a ‘handy little app can help you make molehills out of mountains and start managing your time again’ today and caused the Macintosh community to plummet into some crap-tastic situations. It seems that the program contained somewhat malicious code – technically no problem. However, when one of the bloggers on a widely read Apple Macintosh weblog posts the program, recommends it and does not even feel the need to REALLY test it, that’s when you have a problem. Procrastinatr caused a deletion of iCal calendars and consequently freaked a whole lot of users out. Here are some comments:

Dammit! This is sure way to **** up your iCal events! I’ll admit I (stupidly) trust software downloads/mentions from TUAW… last time ever.
You TUAW bloggers are getting lazy and sloppy. You grab anything that looks like “news” and post it without even testing it.

Downloaded it because I trust TUAW. It totally f*cked up my iCal. I’m extremely angry!

yet another example of some fine blogging.
and to think that in previous posts, people actually commented to defend the “integrity” of this site.

All right. I am very disappointed at what seems to be the downfall of a once-great blog. TUAW’s quality has consistently gone down for a couple of months now and as a matter of fact, Eli and I were just talking about how TUAW sucks a couple of weeks ago.

As a consequence, I will no longer be reading TUAW.

Additionally, we as Mac users are proud of our platform’s supposed immunity to a lot of the crap that’s floating out there for the Windows world. Unfortunately, however, we rely on (formerly) cool Macintosh blogs that recommend that most helpful, coolest applications out there. TUAW has failed its readers today. I also think that TUAW is somewhat indicative of the ‘new’ generation of Macintosh users . . .