After fifteen months, the Camino Project has finally unveiled Camino 1.5. This is the latest and most substantial update to their Camino 1.0 web browser.

Some of the new features in Camino 1.5 include a built-in Mac OS X Spellchecker that works on every text field and added support for session saving. With the latter, Camino can now automatically load whatever websites you were visiting when you quit or when you suffer a crash.

RSS feed detection has also been added to the Camino browser. In Camino 1.5, an icon will appear on the location bar when a feed is found. Clicking on that icon and selecting a feed will send the selected feed straight to the user's default feed reader. Tabbed browsing has also been improved with new tooltips and navigation features.

Camino 1.5 runs on Mozilla's popular Gecko 1.8.1 rendering engine, the same engine used by Firefox 2. The browser is available as is a universal binary and runs natively on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs.

MacNN reports that Google Desktop is now available to Mac users the world over. Google Desktop is a new Universal app that indexes the contents of a Mac's hard drive. This includes everything from applications and files to Web histories from Safari, Firefox, and Camino, enabling users to keep a closer eye on their files, including results from previous Gmail searches when offline.

Google Desktop for Mac is currently in beta form and supports Spotlight plug-ins. It also uses Spotlight privacy features to prevent some documents from being searched. The app also includes a new Google app that lets users stay updated and download more Mac apps from Google. It also has an optional feature that integrates with Google's Web search, allowing users to search their PC's local desktop from Google.

Future iterations of Google Desktop are expected to include support for Gadget integration. Google Desktop will run on PowerPC-based and Intel-based Macs with Mac OS X 10.4 or later. Mac users can download Google Desktop by clicking on the link below.

Download: Google Desktop for Mac beta

  
  

  

Thanks to the Hawk Wings blog, we found out about a new email client OS X users can try out. It's called Correo and, according to its creator Nick Kreeger, it "blends technology from two popular Mozilla projects, Camino and Thunderbird, to create a polished native Macintosh application."

Correo's currently pretty basic, but it does give offer some viewing options, from a "mail.app" styled layout to an Outlook-like version, as you can see from the above pictures. The application also supports multiple POP and IMAP accounts, so a family of Mac users can pick this up just as easily for their own personal use.

Kreeger mentions adding more functions in the future, from a plugin capability to let people make their own customizable program extensions, to address book support, one feature almost every full-fledged mail program has these days, even if you don't actually use it. The source link has more information on the application, along with the program's source code and its own wiki. Give it a try and see if it fits your tastes.

Features:

• Create multiple mail accounts (POP and IMAP)
• Reply, Forward, and write new messages (via SMTP)
• Ability to setup interface for 2 column split view or 3 column view

You can never be too rich or too thin, but one sure can overload on passwords! So how do you make it hard for hackers and ID thieves to crack into your accounts without overwhelming your brain cells? You can use the same password for all your web-based accounts, which is the Dodo bird's way of doing things, since you can just imagine the damage if someone got hold of that single password.

1Passwd for the Mac OS X frees your mind from memorizing hundreds of user IDs and passwords. The app manages all your passwords for you with just a single password to unlock all your accounts. But isn't that the same thing as the Dodo way?

Not at all. 1Passwd stores all information into its built-in Keychain. This allows you to switch between browsers without divulging your information. You can also synchronize 1Passwd keychain to your Mac to manage your passwords across machines.

The app is the first password manager and form filler for the Mac OS X platform and it is designed to work with

• Safari
• Firefox
• Camino
• Flock

If you want to test drive 1Passwd, download the free version. Drag the 1Passwd.app file into the Applications folder and run it from there. If you like it, you can purchase the license code. Single user retails for US$ 29.95. The Family License costs US$ 39.95 and can be used by up to three users in the same household.

Download: [1Passwd Free Version]

Shiira is a web browser based on Web Kit and written in Cocoa. The goal of the Shiira Project is to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari. In case you missed it Safari "won" the 4th Mac OS X browsers test conducted by Macintalk beating Firefox, OmniWeb, and Camino. The project is about to release Shiira v2.0 and here is the Â?technology previewÂ? of the upcoming browser: 
 
So far, the reviewer doesn't think Shiira v2.0 is not ready for daily use since some key features are still not available in the prototype. Among them are the Growl and RSS support, the management and creation of custom search engines, the ability to display Safari / Firefox bookmarks using ShiiraÂ?s built-in bookmark parser and the export bookmarks as html function. But then again the browser update isn't ready for general release at this point. The finished product, however, is expected to sport the following features:

• Tab Exposé
  
• Tabbed Browsing
• PageDock - Tab Thumbnails
• FullScreen Mode
• Preference Pane
• The Shelf

Although the project's mission of creating a better browser than Safari, Shiira is evolving into a simple yet powerful alternative to all major browsers. With a little more polish Shiira v2.0 will be ready to takes its place on Mac's desktop although that will probably take months.

The team behind Macintalk conducted their 4th test of the four major browsers for the Mac OS X namely Safari, Firefox, Camino, and OmniWeb, and they have noticed several improvements on almost all the browsers. The browsers were judged based on RAM usage, loading speed, RSS support, and PDF viewing.

The editor's choice: Safari. Firefox is a great browser for Windows or Linux. On a Mac, you're better off with Safari, WebKit, and OmniWeb, which are not only more Mac-like, but also faster and more efficient. FireFox fans love it for the extensive support for extensions but the review team say it's a subjective decision. To help you decide, here are the test results summary:

Firefox

Pros:

• Cool feature: extensive support for plugins, themes, and add-ons
  
• Acceptable support for CSS and Web Standards compared to IE

Cons:

• ItÂ?s ported to OS X and not a native browser
  
• It uses Gecko, which performs horribly on Mac OS X
  
• Windows-style buttons and UI elements
  
• Can be slow at times

OmniWeb Beta

Pros:

• Uses latest WebKit framework
  
• Cool feature: Interesting sidebar tabs function
  
• You can set preferences for each web page
  
• Saves browsing sessions
  
• Shared bookmarks

Cons:

• Costs money Â? who wants to pay for a browser?

Safari/Safari WebKit

Pros:

• Cool feature: Built-in DOM inspector
  
• Nightly build available with latest WebCore

Cons:

• Nightly Build is sometimes unstable
  
• Plug-in architecture is crappy

Camino

Pros:

• Based on Cocoa Â? more Mac-like than FireFox
  
• Integration with Mac OS X Standards

Cons:

• It uses Gecko, which performs horribly on Mac OS X

The Camino 1.0.2 web browser has recently been released by the Camino Project. Camino, with its web-browsing capabilities of the Gecko rendering engine, is a secure, functional, elegant and powerful application for the Macintosh.

Users are required to be running Mac OS X 10.2 or higher and Universal Binary for the Camino 1.0.2 Web browser to work. Here's a rundown of what the good folks at the Camino Project fixed to come up with this version of the browser.

• Fixed several critical security issues, including those fixed in version 1.8.0.4 of the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine.
• Fixed an issue in Camino 1.0.1 where proxy auto-config (PAC) files were ignored.
• Fixed an issue where CaminoÂ?s bookmark metadata could not be added to the list of locations Spotlight is prevented from searching.
• Fixed an issue where using Camino on a network with many Bonjour hosts could significantly degrade performance.
• Fixed an issue where Camino would ignore the Â?Link from other applicationÂ? tabbed browsing preference in certain cases.
• Fixed an issue where Camino displayed some search fields on Apple.com incorrectly.

Download: [Camino 1.0.2]