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I am TRYING to start this software of the week thing. It will probably feature mac osx apps but could also feature excellent Palm or Windows apps. But I reckon 99% osx stuff.

There are actually THREE excellent ones I would like to highlight this week. Two are from the same developer.

This week I bring to you Photo Desktop. It’s one of those must-have apps to me. What it essentially does is to allow one to display photos from one’s iPhoto library as “Polaroid” style snaps on the desktop. It’s very easy to use and very nifty to be able to rotate, resize and even manipulate it’s “z-index” or stacking order to you non HTMLers…

And its donation-ware, and yep I intend to donate something to this great app. I really am loving it!

Next up, from the same developer, we have Dashboard KickStart. I am sure all of us Tiger users will notice that Dashboard always takes some time to start up for the first time in a clean boot. This app works by initialising Dashboard in the background upon system startup so that when you call Dashboard, it’s right there waiting for you instead of waiting a few seconds or more for the widgets to actually start working.

Nice stuff.

Lastly, as if we don’t have enough web browsers… look at the browsers I have installed already!

BUT my new default browser, Shiira, (as you can see above) seems to be an actual contender. It seems fast, looks decent, and has a few rather interesting features such as “tab expose” that tiles all your browser windows, gimmicky page transition effect so that it looks like you are flipping web pages like an actual book. You can also change the user agent very easily and perhaps if you somehow find it useful, have sound feedback for page load/errors. You can also toggle Aqua or Metal interface within Preferences. And well you have privacy browsing too. And oh Growl support as well. It passes the acid2 test, as it is based on Web Kit.

That’s not all the features but I’d say, I am impressed. I’m sticking with it as my default browser till I find reasons not to.