Bruji News

The holiday season is standing on our doorstep, ringing the bell and stomping its feet against the cold. That means it’s also Child’s Play time! Penny Arcade is running their yearly charity drive to get games, toys, books and cash to children’s hospitals in the US and around the world (even a children’s cancer hospital in Egypt is part of the drive). Last year they managed to raise over a million dollars; I’m sure the gaming community won’t disappoint this year either. We’re proud to once again sponsor Child’s Play - join us and head on over to their site to buy some toys!

Free Rice is an excellent idea - perfectly simple and infinitely rewarding for all sides. You match words to their meaning and for each correct match, the UN donates 10 grains of rice to help end world hunger. So not only can you do a charitable act every day, you will also improve your vocabulary along the way. (It’s all paid for by advertising on the site and Bruji’s favourite company is one of the sponsors.)

With Leopard finally loose in the wild, the feature that’s caught our attention the most so far is Quick Look. The description of Quick Look, previewing documents without opening them, doesn’t sound all that impressive; after all that’s what programs are for – to view documents. But with the combination of Quick Look, Cover Flow and smart folders you no longer need the Pedias to view your media. 
The smart folder gathers all your Pedia items, Cover Flow lets you browse them and Quick Look serves up the details for an item. To show you just how cool this is, we’ve put together a little video.

Luckily you still need the Pedias to add and edit your items. Maybe 10.6 (Small House Cat) will have Quick Edit and programs will be optional; but in the meantime dive into the Pedias’ Leopard features.

Getting presents is always fun. But sometimes the present is extra special - like this gorgeous Bruji book we received recently from Ediciones Minimas. It’s a nice thick notebook, completely hand-made with an awesome cover design sprayed on. “Look out, Bruji crossing”, which is something every Mac user should keep in mind.

We are the quiet ones, the shy ones, the reserved ones, the blogless in a world of posts. Here we are trying to change that with our new Wordpress installation. Daniel Jalkut convinced us that if lawyers have blogs then all Mac developers should as well. But in the years that we have been without a voice our users have taken up our cause. Now that we are blogging the first thing I would like to thank all of those out there that have spread the word about our programs. We know from emails and sales that this group includes most of our users. You have told family members, friends, reviews, previews, competitors, blogs, podcasts, forums, social bookmarks, in French, in German, in English and via email. Thank you. Here’s to great users.

DVD Sphere has ceased development and we have swooped in offering a discount to all their customers to switch to DVDpedia. In truth we are honored to be considered the best competing program for Spherecorner to refer their customers to and we welcome DVD Sphere users into the Bruji family. We are actually sad to see Pascal leave the media organizer arena since competition benefits all Mac users. He will be using his new found time to concentrate on his security related software and we wish him the best of luck.

We are excited to be sponsoring the Daring Fireball RSS feed for the week. Daring Fireball is at the top of our NetNewsWire reading list thanks to John Gruber’s witty and funny writing. It’s like writing from a Nick Hornby doppelgänger – not a completely evil one, just with a tendency. Like all fun reading his posts are rare but between posts his linked list keeps us entertained. The linked list does have the downside of leading to the discovery of interesting bloggers that end up on our ever growing RSS feeds list. Either way you are likely to already be a Daring Fireball reader and a Pedia user. If not, subscribe to the Daring Fireball RSS feed and download our programs; we’re sure you will enjoy them both. Also to celebrate the sponsorship and the launch of our new 4.0 (a free upgrade for all 3.x users) we have scrounged up two cases of some great Chianti Classico wine to give away.

Version 4.0 of the Pedia programs is finally here. We have been working hard on this release and are very proud of it. Although it includes a number of new features, a lot of the work has been behind the scenes. Tremendous effort was made to make the programs easier to mantain and give us more time to dedicate to implementing all those features still on our to do list. Apple’s Core Data has been essential in making this a possibility.

Due to the enthusiasm of our users in sharing the Pedias with friends, 3.x was an immense success; that is why version 4.0 is free for all our users. If you are not already a Bookpedia, DVDpedia, CDpedia or Gamepedia user, try them out and let us know what you think.

In order to stay with the times this is the first post of our new iWeb RSS feed that will contain Bruji news for your subscribing convenience and possible entertainment.