CheckUp, from App4Mac, is an application I have been using for some time now. It has really helped me in controlling my core temperature, disk speed and memory usage. With its powerful Growl notification integration you can really know and understand very easily what is happening inside of your Mac. In this review I will look at this application section by section.
As many of you know, I, in my spare time, develop applications for Mac under the banner of Blue Pyjama. I tend to have bursts of energy where I just feel like I need to write applications, followed by periods of several months where nothing new is made and things are just let to rot.
I’ve always wanted Blue Pyjama to one day become a money-making company, whether it be via the iTunes Store or through the sale of a desktop app. So far the day hasn’t come yet. This weekend was one of those super productive weekends. I wrote 2 applications that will be appearing on the Blue Pyjama website soon. One of them is a simple app for checking if your Internet is down, while the other is a web browser called Wildfire. Wildfire is actually reasonably OK. You wouldn’t want to use it as your main browser, but possible as a secondary one.
This got me thinking about sales. There are tons of apps that sell very cheaply ($10-$15) that are very simple and plain. How come browsers are free? With a web browser, you can do so much. Not that I want to pick on any apps in particular, but take Blitz for example; Blitz is a small utility that forces your computer to focus all of the CPU on one app. Blitz is $17.
How did this come to be? A web browser that gives you endless possibilities is free while a menubar app that makes other apps shut up costs $17! I’d have thought that the market should be the other way around, with a web browser selling for $17 and an application shutter-upper going for free. Once Wildfire is complete, I doubt that I’d be able to sell it – at most it would be donationware.
I guess that this shows how bizarre this world is. I’ll be interested to see what the comments are on this.
There are four basic steps to GTD: Collect, Process/Organize, Do, and Review. I’ve taken you through the first two, and the third doesn’t need much explaining. The fourth, the Review, I haven’t. And that’s because I’ve been a very bad GTDer. I haven’t been doing my review.
All right, I’d better tell you what it is. The thinking behind it is that you don’t see all your tasks every day, so it’s easy to have them fall out of your mind. After all, that’s a principle of GTD, to not have your tasks cluttering up your brain. The Review is where you go and look at either (a) the tasks you don’t see on a regular basis, such as a Someday/Maybe list you keep, or (b) everything. Yes, everything. (more…)
In this post not only am I going to tell you all about this amazing application, I’m giving you a chance to win 1 of 2 copies, kindly donated by the amazing folks over at Agile Web Solutions.
So, you have about a dozen email accounts, a list of forums longer than your arm, your online banking, all those must have members only sites and just about every other website under the sun that in some way wants you to remember some form of authentication to get through the gates. The simple, and by far the most insecure, way of handling this would be to have a single password to all these sites, even worse it’s a dictionary password or something so obvious even a dog could guess it (yes that’s right Beiju, I do mean you!)
So, the best way to handle all those logins is to have multiple passwords, all über secure and all so hard to remember you’ll have to reset your password on said site every time you visit, well that’s where 1Password from Agile Web Solutions comes in.
This is the last part of my series on The Hit List. You can read the first, second, and third posts, or the full article as it was meant to be seen.
Everyday millions of people express their emotions with Twitter. Not only do they tell their followers what they’re doing but what they love, hate, think, believe, wish and feel. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could collect those feelings. Presenting twistori.
Twistori is a website that annonomusly shows in real time, tweets that contain one of six emotions (love, hate, think, believe, feel or wish). When you load the website all you see is a left-aligned list of the emotions displayed in an eye pleasing range of colours against a funky dark background. At this point you can either click on an emotion to see its tweets or wait a few seconds and twistori will randomly choose an emotion. The list shrinks to the side and tweets containing the verb that you’ve chosen start to fly past.
So, how is this related to the Mac? twistori has come out with a screensaver for Mac OS X that I love. It’s essentially the same thing as the web-based version except in a screensaver. Also, there’s a product called twistori desktop which allows you to set your own parameters (eg; Tennis, Elbow, Foot) I tried the desktop version and although it worked it wasn’t very amazing.
twistori is a great little webapplet. There are so many possible places that you could use it – just imagine. The twistori website (and the screensaver) is free. TwistoriDesktop is $19.95.
Cocoa is my girlfriend. That is a phrase coined by the popular cocoa blog of the same name, and it rings sadly true for me, both as a developer of mac apps, and more importantly as an avid user of mac apps.
Somehow things like Adobe Air, X11, and even Apple’s own Carbon give me flashbacks to my time on Windows. Up until a few weeks ago I was using Twitterific as my main twitter client, unfortunately for it, it took its own concept of simplicity too far.
Also, it doesn’t look all that cocoa-ish, especially in Leopard, where HUD windows are supposed to have a glossy looking header. So then I was a rogue twitterer, on a hunt for some good Cocoa twitter clients. I found 5 contenders – here and now they will battle it out for my usership. ding ding
