Recommended Apps!
App: World Clock Deluxe
The worst part of working with companies in multiple time zones is constantly figuring out what local time is.
I know it is simple math, but you have to remember all the offsets, and frankly that is just one piece of information that doesn’t seem to fit in my head.
I’ve loved the World Clock in the iPhone, but I lacked something on my desktop that I could glance at when send an email of scheduling a call. I’ve looked for a Mac widget, but they all look like ass.
I finally found a great tool called World Clock Deluxe. At first the options seemed a little overwhelming, but after a few minutes of tinkering I was able to get a nice semi-transparent floating window on my desktop of the seven time zones I work with the most. Plus the app has a ton of ways to customize to taste.
If you are like me and can’t seem to remember what time it is outside your home time zone, take a look at World Clock Deluxe.
Times looks to be the feed reader I’m looking for. I still want an online version, but at first glance this is closer to my concept of the perfect feed reader.
I’ll use for a few weeks and see how it goes.
I Love TextExpander
I downloaded TextExpander a few weeks ago, but didn’t try it out until yesterday. And I have to say that once I figured out how it works (they could use some help on the sell), I immediately fell in love with it.
Basically it works in three ways:
1. A Shortcut Tool In other words, if I type “sig” in any application it will insert my email signature (Handy for messages outside of your email client). Or I can use it for common information that I need to share, for example, if I need to provide my mobile, fax or conference bridge number (the latter two I can never remember), I’m able to type a quick shortcut that I define like “mmobile” or “confbridge” and it fills in the rest.
I’m a big fan of keyboard shortcuts, so this comes in handy for not having to stop what I’m doing to look up common information that can’t seem to fit in my head.
2. An Autocorrect Tool When I saw this in action, was the moment I fell in love. I make a lot of common spelling mistakes. TextExpander has a built in collection of dozens of common spelling errors and can immediately fix them. Similar to how Word autocorrect, but now its in every application!
3. An Autocomplete Tool TextExpander also has a bunch of built in shortcuts to common HTML phrases, like head, img, link etc. TextMate has these built in, but I find myself trying to trigger TextMate shortcuts anytime I’m writing HTML in something like a blog post.
Try it out. If you aren’t convinced it will even track the number of characters it has saved you from typing and you can decide if it is worth $30 bucks.
Okay, I’m going to do it. For one project I’m going to try and use Pixelmator instead of Photoshop.
If you don’t know, Pixelmator is an all GPU-powered image editor based on the open source project ImageMagick. But it also has all the cool tools of Apple’s Core Image technology built right in. It is wicked fast! It has a nice clean interface and almost all the features of Photoshop that I need (except for layer groups, boo!). And at $59 (roughly 1/10 the cost of Photoshop) it is the bargain of a lifetime.
I’ve been meaning to use it from start to finish for a while, and today I decided to finally do it.
Xslimmer
One challenge with the MacBook Air is making sure you don’t run out of hard drive space. Enter Xslimmer which is a nice $12 app that scans the file and removes unnecessary bloat, like PowerPC files and language translations contained within each app, which can be about 50% of the overall app size.
Running it on 10 applications saved me 150 Mb of hard drive space and made them a bit zippier to boot!
Photonic: A Flickr client for the Mac
A nice full feature app for viewing, managing and uploading photos the Mac way.
Page 1 of 1
