Raves!
See my iPhone review here.
Sometimes the world is cruel and other times everything goes your way. Sometimes something good happens despite all odds against it. Or sometimes good stuff just happens quietly.
Apple's Mac Pros
- Buying something and getting more money handed back to you than expected.
- A car repair that only costs $300 instead of the $800-$1100 you expected it to cost you.
- You S.O. waking you up with coffee for you in hand.
- Meeting people you've seen around, and finding out that they're pretty cool.
- See old friends and aquaintances, and being greeted warmly by both groups.
- Seeing the HTML/PHP page you just wrote displaying correctly the first time.
- Seeing a band you've really liked for ages live for the first time.
- Finding a $5 bill in the pocket of your jeans when you're broke and hungry.
- Finding an extremely cool freeware application.
- Discovering how powerful your computer is, even though it's already 3 years (or more) old.
- Streetlight Records Employees. They know their music and they seem genuinely nice in stark contrast to other record stores standoff-ish, often clueless staff. Leopard up and running without only minor hiccups.
- ...And of course, Clan Lord
I highly recommend this product: Slim Devices' Squeezebox Boom for anyone that loves internet radio or a wealth of other internet streaming services OR a ton of MP3s on a server (like I do) they want to stream without having the computer (that's not the server that is) on. I listen to a lot of music, and if you love it as much as I do and your life is digital get this product. It simply rocks!
Also, it works great with Pandora!
I moved over this site to Dreamhost after it being on my home computer for somewhere in the area of 5 years. Dreamhost is pretty good so far. Only minor hiccups thus far.
Cool Software For OS X
Coda by Panic Software
Coda is an all in one text and CSS editor, FTP and SSH client for OS X aimed specifically at hand coded web sites. If you write your web site's code in a text editor as opposed to using tools such as Dreamweaver or iWeb, you need to try Coda and get the feel for it. At the time of this writing the price of this software is $99, but it's worth much more if you want to streamline your workflow. Coda is made by the same company that makes Transmit, and has all the power that Transmit has. Also, if you own BBEdit you cna set that as the external editor. However, the editor built into Coda is so powerflu and flexible that you'll be opening BBEdit less and les as you get used ot editing in Coda. Coda is just about perfect, that's why I give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Default Folder X by St. Clair Software
Default folder in one incarnation or another has been around over 10 years, and it's one of the first thing I install on my Macs. If you remember a program in the dark age of Mac-dom called "Boomerang" (not the data recovery tool for OS X) then you know what Default folder does. But it's like Boomerang on steroids. Default Folder X quietly keeps track of the last folder you were in on an application by application basis. Let's you go from your pictures folder in Photoshop, then go to your documents folder in Pages and go to you movies folder in Quicktime. Without Default Folder X, If you were to go back to Photoshop, then you'd have to navigate from your movies to your pictures folder. With Default Folder X, you simply go back to Photoshop or Pages and when you choose "Open..." from the file menu it will present you with the pictures or documents folder (or the last folder you were in last time you used the "Open..." command). This is a huge time saver. But wait there's more! If you already have the folder open in the finder that you want to navigate to, you can simply click on the folder when the "Open..." dialog box comes up. On top of that DFX keeps a history of the last few places you went to so, if you are navigating between 2 or more folders in one application, you can quickly switch paths without having to repetitively navigate back and forth between them. It also has a favorites menu as well as other nifty OS X integration features. This is truly a five star utility, and well worth the price. Check it out at St. Clair Software.
Folder Icon Maker X by NiteOwl Software
This little piece of software does one thing quickly and easily. It allows you to make custom icons from two other icons (one small for the foreground and one larger for the background) jut by dragging an icon in the proper bounding box. After that's done the small icon becomes an object that can move, scale and rotate.
It's great for customizing generic folders for applications that came with generic folder icon.
You might think that having a custom icon for Application folders is like flair: pretty but useless (you could just read the text below to figure out what is in the folder, right?). Wrong. When you use a lot of different applications, it helps to have a visual clue that tells you at just a glance without having to stop and take the time to read all you folders to find what you want. Because of the ease of identifying folders it decreases the time you work on navigating the system and anytime you do that your productivity increases and those few seconds saved each time add up to, well a smile in my case. Oh, that and I get a "purdy" system. Because of these things I'm giving F.I.M.X 5 out of 5 Stars.
iClip Llyrics is a simple prgoram that comes in quite handy if you're like me and like to havd the lyrics to you favorite songs available. It searches the lyric wiki at http://lyrics.wikia.com/ which includes entries for thousands upon thousands of songs. It main selling point is the abiltiy to search and clip lyrics within its built in browser if it doesn't find the lyrics at the wiki. But with features like batch processing, and automatic updating, iClip Lyrics is not without its problems. In a previous version iClip clipped the lyrics fine but it failed to recognize carriage returns. So, I dinged it half a star to take it to a very respectable 4.5 stars out of 5.
Skitch is a screen capture utility like no other. Skitch allows you with a few clicks to take picture, upload it and share it with people over the internet. Not only that, but the account to host your pictures is free. Also, you can edit the picture in the window that pops up after you do a screen capture and drag an icon preview of your capture into any open folder. It completely streamlines the process of doing a screen capture, opening the file, editing it, uploading it and sharing the address from minutes to seconds. That's why Skitch gets 5 out of 5 Stars.
Opinionit was recently reported that Apple's market share has increased back up to 4.5%. It's up 37% over last year. Sales increased significantly after the intel switch. They're picking up steam, and critical mass is approaching. I can imagine so some will be able to triple boot a MacPro into OS X, Linux AND Windows XP/Vista.
Update: It's at about 8%-9% now...
There's more but I sense people have already nodded off....
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This page was served on March 10th, at 10:51 AM |