Archive for April, 2008
Continuing on with the Mac Bells and Whistles kick – next up is MenuCalendarClock.
I often need to know the current date (and I can never remember). I know that iCal displays the current date in its dock icon, but I hide my dock, so that requires mouse work. I know the current date is available [...]
This has been an unusually difficult season. Death has been more present over the past year than it ever has been for me – death of a grandfather, death of family members of friends and colleagues, death of marriages, death of jobs, death of comforts. The latest was the death of a friend and colleague’s little girl who [...]
This will be of no interest to the QuickSilver nerds, but for the rest of us, Spark solves a small annoyance for me. Unless you want to set up hot corners, there’s no quick way to activate the Screen Saver in Mac OS X (and, by extension, lock your computer). Spark lets you assign the [...]
If you’re a slow (or moderately slow) typist like myself, Text Expander is a great utility. I’m in the middle of a doctoral thesis and I find myself typing the same phrases again and again – like “Stone-Campbell Movement” or “Lord’s Supper” or “Independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ.” Text Expander lets me set [...]
I ran across this a while ago, but was recently reminded at the TUAW blog about Caffeine. If you’re nursing an elderly battery like I am, you’re always looking for ways to save power – and having your screen automatically dim after a few minutes helps out quite a bit. It’s wonderful…until you start to [...]
Jott is one of those great little utilities that makes a 30 minute commute more productive than you think. Jott lets you dial your phone and dictate a message that gets transcribed and emailed to anyone on a customized contact list or to web-apps like Evernote. It’s pretty accurate and takes less time than writing [...]
Stickies are OK, but when you’re looking for integrated notes management via your computer, handheld, or any browser anywhere; Evernote keeps them all together with an elegant interface and plenty of power under the hood.
I usually collect info in a number of ways:
copy or paste from a document on a computer
type something while I’m at [...]
I love loved Firefox before it became a third-party extensions nagware experience made possible by a bloated system footprint. If you visit sites that need Firefox to operate properly (I have a few work sites), Camino is a satisfying alternative. It’s built off the same engine as Firefox, but leaves the bloat behind [...]
If you use a lot of web-apps like I do (Gmail, GoogleDocs, Facebook, GoogleReader, etc.), it’s nice to have those websites function more like a stand-alone application that dwells in your dock rather than inside your browser. Those using Leopard can run a fun little app called Fluid to create stand-alone applications that connect [...]
Since I’ve been using the Mac OS now for around 20 years (started in Junior High), and since a lot of students and colleagues I know are just now jumping into the Mac pool, I tend to get a lot of questions about what “bells and whistles” they should install on their freshly opened Mac. I’ve been keeping a [...]