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For Mac OS X users, desktop social media clients almost always involve a trade-off. We can either use multiple apps to update our profiles and services or we can use programs like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop that work with lots of services, but rely on Adobe AIR and thus have a tendency to eat up memory and bog down our processors.

Earlier this year, an app called EventBox entered the Mac marketplace as an option to fix this quandary. It was a native Mac OS X app but allowed users to access and update multiple social services. In October Realmac Software acquired the app and renamed it Socialite. Over the last two months, Realmac has worked to refine the interface, add features like Twitter Lists and just generally give the whole client a good coat of polish. Today Socialite 1.0 is available for download.

Multiple Services, One Clean Interface

As we’ve discussed in previous preview articles, Socialite handles Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Flickr, Google Reader and standard RSS feeds. What’s nice about Socialite is that you can view information from all of these services in one clean interface, without getting bogged down by columns or multiple windows.

Check out this video from Realmac that shows off how to add an account to Socialite:

Photos, Retweets and Lists

Since we last wrote about Socialite, Twitter Lists support has been enhanced to support lists you subscribe to, as well as lists you have already created. Creating lists and managing lists is a feature that Realmac is considering for a future update, but it isn’t available in the 1.0 release.

Socialite uses Twitter’s new RT system. You can do this by either hitting a key-command or selecting RT from a tweet’s option bar. You get confirmation of a Retweet by the appearance of a translucent black bar just above the status update menu. This is how Retweets look in Socialite:

One of the nicest features of Socialite is its integration with both Flickr and Facebook’s photo systems. Lots of Facebook clients can offer ways to update status messages and view status messages from others — and even view photos in-line — but uploading photos or viewing photographs in a more album like manner isn’t a common feature.

Socialite lets you upload and also view photos in both Facebook and Flickr in an easy to browse kind of way. For users who don’t like using the web uploaders, the ability to upload and tag within Socialite is really nice.

HUD Option

Socialite’s main interface window is uncluttered and easy to navigate, but if you are low on screen real estate or just want an easy way to see what’s going on with a particular feed, you can use the HUD, or Heads Up Display, option. It’s a nice alternative to having the full menu and you can perform almost every action from the main interface within the smaller HUD column.

Overall

Socialite is a solid Mac app with a great look and feel and great integration with different social services. We would love to see LinkedIn added as a supported service, especially now that they have an API, but Socialite covers the gamut of the most widely-used social platforms. Socialite is $20 but you can try the program out for free.

Have you used Socialite? What are your favorite social media clients for Mac OS X? Let us know!

Tags: digg, facebook, flickr, mac software, realmac, Socialite, twitter

Nothing makes a blog post more eye-catching than a great header image, but not all publishers have artistic talent. And even accomplished digital creatives often crave some found material to start from or work with in a project. Luckily for all of the above, sources abound for finding a compelling photo to grab your readers’ eyes and draw them in, or to locate fresh multimedia to remix.

Creative Commons search

You may be familiar with the Creative Commons free licenses that aim to give creators more freedom to allow sharing and remixing of their content. If not, you can find out more about the history of the organization and the different types of licenses from their About page. The most important thing to note is that many CC-licensed images, audio and video files are usable on your blog or site, typically with credit given to the original creator — a quick and easy way to hat-tip the source of the media you’re using.

Here are several excellent spots to search large pools of Creative Commons-licensed images:

1. Creative Commons search: this search page aggregates several CC searches into a handy tabbed interface.

2. Yahoo Creative Commons search: search within the Yahoo index for CC-licensed media.

3. Flickr Creative Commons search: search just within Yahoo’s Flickr for CC-licensed images. This can be especially useful if you’re looking for photography in a more artistic vein.

4. Google Advanced Search: though Yahoo has been offering its CC-specific search for a while, Google much later caught up by adding some options to its advanced search interface. Expand the “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more” link to access the “Usage rights” dropdown.

Free stock and public domain images

Need a professional-looking image but don’t have the budget for spendy stock photo houses? Check out these great alternatives for free stock photography. Much like with Creative Commons images, many just require attribution be given to the original creator. If an image is in the public domain, it is completely free for you to use for any purpose, altered or not, without credit required.

5. Stock.XCHNG: SXC is a community of photographers who share their work free of charge for use as stock imagery. Grab some shots from here, share your own, and chat with other photographers in the community forum.

6. MorgueFile: Using its own specially-adapted morgueFile Free License, this site offers free commercially usable and remixable high resolution digital stock photography without any attribution requirement so long as you don’t claim ownership or resell unaltered works as is.

7. Everystockphoto: A search engine for free photos, Everystockphoto also allows you to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos. Source and licensing information for each image is available on the search results pages below the photo.

8. PDphoto: Thousands of royalty free and public domain images are searchable here, with high-resolution versions available for many of the photos for a small fee.

9. Openphoto.net: Offers photographic resources under Creative Commons licensing from an open network of photographers, focusing on animals, nature, landscape, architecture, still life, and technology.

10. FreeDigitalPhotos.net: Searchable collection of royalty free photos for corporate or personal use, with high resolution versions available for purchase.

11. PicFindr: Aggregate search engine for free stock images from several of the above sites and others, PicFindr compiles the search results into a single interface with links to the individual photos from their thumbnails.

WikiMedia Commons

Aggregating all of the associated media from the various Wikimedia Foundation projects, the WikiMedia Commons is a large database that includes primarily freely reusable images, audio and video broken down into their various license categories. To browse within the free subcategories, there’s a handy landing page branching off into various free license repositories, and you can browse by individual media types as well. Just be sure to note which type of license the image you want to use is under and follow the reuse guidelines for that particular license. Some useful collections include:

12. Public domain

13. Creative Commons

14. Sound

15. Video

Free audio sources

Whether you need some background music for a video project, some fresh tunes to incorporate into a music blog, or are looking for audio from a particular geographic location, these free audio file resources may have a usable sound waiting for you. As with the image sources above, always be sure to double check the license for any particular file you want to use and follow its attribution guidelines if applicable.

16. opsound: A community of musicians and sound artists, opsound contributors upload their works under Creative Commons licenses for sharing and remixing.

17. soundtransit: A searchable archive of field recordings from all over the world, soundtransit’s community shares recordings under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

18. pdsounds.org: The mission of pdsounds is to capture the acoustic phenomena in the environment of our daily lives and contribute them to the public domain for free and unfettered reuse. Search for something specific or browse the catalog of public domain sounds.

19. Internet archive open source audio: One subsection of the mighty Internet Archive collection, the open source audio section is primarily full of reusable Creative Commons-licensed sound files. You can also find usable audio files pocketed throughout the broader Audio collection as well.

Free video sources

Although almost everything including Tiger Woods getting air and browser-induced projectile vomiting is embeddable these days, if you need video footage that’s remixable or republishable these are some great destinations to check out.

20. Internet Archive Moving Images Collection: the Internet Archive is a big winner in this category, with thousands of free movies, films, and videos on hand featuring everything from classic feature-length films to zany educational shorts shown to impressionable school children in the 50s, 60s and 70s to cartoons now old enough to be in the public domain.

21. Open Source Cinema: A community site for creating and remixing video online, users upload footage under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.

22. Vimeo: You can browse the videos tagged with Creative Commons or use a complex search query to search for videos tagged both “creativecommons” and the keyword you’re looking for.

23. Flickr: You can use Flickr’s Advanced Search interface to look only within video content that’s Creative Commons-licensed.

Further resources

Beyond the primarily larger collections above, there are many smaller sources for Creative Commons and remix-friendly media from individual creators, collectors and collectives. If you’ve got the time to traverse some of these, you could find even more usable media off the beaten path.

24. Wikipedia list of public domain sources

25. TeacherLibrarianWiki’s list of copyright-friendly image sources

26. NASA: The vast majority of images, audio and video published by NASA are not copyrighted and may be reused, although for commercial usage be aware of NASA’s non-endorsement guidelines.

More blogger resources from Mashable:

- Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Promote Your Social Media Profiles
- 25 Great Blogger Widgets
- A Guide to Protecting Your Online Identity
- 8 of the Best Social Media Extensions for Joomla

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Johnnyscriv

Tags: blogging, creative commons, public domain, remix culture

We’ll say it right off the bat: there’s a good chance you have a recent version of Adobe Reader installed on your computer, so that probably means you’ve also installed Adobe AIR, the company’s cross-platform runtime environment for RIAs, as well as the Acrobat.com application. You may not even be aware those came bundled, but you still have the option to uninstall both and still keep Adobe Reader. Glad we got that out of the way.

On to the news: by means of a blog post, Adobe Systems has just confirmed the number of installs for Adobe AIR that had been floating around the Web ever since CTO Kevin Lynch mentioned something along those lines at the recent Flash Camp Keynote in San Francisco: 200 million, double the amount the company touted at the end of January 2009. The number was reached a little over two weeks ago, about 16 months after its debut on the market.

Whether you’re aware that you’ve installed Adobe AIR at some point or not, or whether you think the 200 million installs is actually on the low rather than the high side (I think the number is fairly moderate), there are some really good applications out there that you don’t know yet but might want to check out:

imeem Uploader :

Allows users to upload music, videos, and photos to imeem. This app will automatically discover all your iTunes playlists and enable you to easily zip them over to your imeem profile. You can also drag and drop your desired tracks for upload to imeem, create custom playlists and share your music with others.

Flair:

An elegant search tool for Flickr, which utilizes several methods of its public API. Flair matches search queries by tags and makes it easy to jump to the original resolution upload (often easily wallpaper quality) and the source photographers photostream (by clicking their user icon).

Comapping:

An intuitive and extensive desktop app for mind-mapping purposes, tied to web app Comapping.com. Use it to manage and share information more efficiently.

NetBook:

Ebook reader for the Gutenberg online book library. Ebooks are available free of charge in both text and audio format. NetBook lets you search the Gutenberg database, download and read/listen to ebooks and store them in cache for offline use.

MyMediaPlayer:

Yes, Hulu has an official desktop application too, but this one is worth a second look (we’ve covered this one before). MYMediaplayer allows users to browse the Hulu library while watching videos, and you can dock the window to the side of the monitor so you can work and watch TV at the same time. Perfect for procrastination!

You can find these and 500 other applications on the AIR Marketplace.

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