Command-Tab

Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 12:07 AM

I’ve been a long time NetNewsWire fan and have readily dismissed most other RSS readers in favor of it, however I just tried out NewsLife, and I’m quite impressed with it. While it doesn’t sport all the bells and whistles of NetNewsWire, NewsLife has just the right feature set, making it seem more of a NetNewsWire Elementsâ„¢ application.

Working on only one Mac now (with Core 2 Duo hopes for 2007), I no longer require NetNewsWire’s great syncing abilities, and I never really used the built-in browser tabs. I tend to browse straight through the news list, opening any interesting links in the background, and rifling through the pages after they’ve all loaded. NewsLife works with me in this fashion, offering a News Bin, where I can store pages to-be-read-later. Stories in the News Bin persist across application launches, meaning what you put there stays there until you remove it. It’s a clever little concept I find very useful, especially when just skimming the news with little time to spare right then.

Like NetNewsWire and a few others, NewsLife is a uniquely Mac application (you can tell from the screenshot alone) which combines the best of NewsFire and NetNewsWire, making for an RSS reader that may actually win me over. I’ll be using it throughout the next week or so to see if it really holds up.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 12:07 am and is filed under Apps, Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 10:56 PM

iPodDisk is a clever and more intuitive take on the “get music off your iPod” application, which works by creating a virtual disk “containing” your iPod’s music. While the music is already fairly accessible by browsing through hidden folders, iPodDisk attaches a new volume filled with folders arranged like those of the iPod’s own nested menus:
iPodDisk → Artist → Album → Songs.

Copying a song or album off your iPod is as easy as opening the folders in the Finder (or Terminal), locating what you want, and dragging it to your Desktop. iPodDisk invisibly retrieves the file from it’s hidden location on the iPod, and hands it over as if nothing out of the ordinary is going on.

Best of all, there’s no search function when using iPodDisk. How is this beneficial? When the virtual disk is mounted, Spotlight indexes the volume and readies it for live searching, making finding your desired music effortless.

I’ve written about applications like this before (such as PodWorks), but this solution seems just a tad easier, and it’s free (donationware).

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 10th, 2006 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Apps, Mac, iPod. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 at 7:49 PM

As often as I use Toast and refer to it in postings here, it’s easy to overlook some of the freeware options that will usually work just as well. Burn is one such program which allows you to easily burn data, audio, video, and disc images. Unlike Toast — and more like Disk Utility — Burn uses Apple’s disc burning APIs, which are provided for developers to add CD and DVD writing capabilities to their programs with little effort. It can handle Mac and PC formatted discs, audio and MP3 CDs, all kinds of video discs (DVD included), as well as a number of disc image formats. While it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles Toast has, Burn may provide all the features you need at a price that can’t be beat (free!). Download it here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Apps, Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 7:54 PM

The Unarchiver is a replacement for Apple’s relatively hidden “BOMArchiveHelper” application, which is responsible for the Zip, Tar, and gzip abilities built into the Finder. Not only does The Unarchiver come pre-loaded with much better icons, but it handles Zip, Tar, gzip, bzip2, RAR (including multi-part RAR), 7-zip, StuffIt (but not SitX, sadly), and many other formats. Installation is as easy as dropping the program somewhere on disk, perhaps in /Applications, and then associating preferred formats to be opened with The Unarchiver. I find it’s a much better archive handler than Apple’s own, and the “brown box” icons help differentiate compressed files from regular documents.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Apps, Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.