After almost two years of heavy daily use, my poor little MacBook was getting a bit worn out and doing some crazy things. So about a month ago I reinstalled OS X. I backed up all my files and just wiped the whole computer.

My experience doing that with Windows and Linux computers has always been pleasant. It’s refreshing to start anew. It was not so with my Mac. I think it’s because using my MacBook was normally such a pleasant experience and I’d had things set up the way I liked them for so long that I didn’t even know some things weren’t just there. I couldn’t remember everything I’d installed, such as Gutenprint and Xcode developer tools, so I couldn’t understand what went wrong when certain things didn’t work.

Anyway, all that is a bit of a tangent to what I really wanted to say, which is “Yay, for easy application installing!” or perhaps “Kudos to you intelligent developers!”

These screenshots are all for free software and all you have to do is drag one icon to the other.

Skitch

Inkscape

Darwine

It must be a reasonably simple thing to do since so many applications do it, but occasionally there’s a program that makes a fancy background for their install window and makes it difficult for you to put the program anywhere. If it were just the normal Finder window, at least it would have the shorcuts on the side, but no— it’s fancy, but not fancy enough!

Bibdesk

Not to pick on BibDesk. It’s a top program, just the most recent, nonless-friendly installer I’ve used (why do they assume the hard drive is where you want to put it?).

Print Selections

I felt like such a noob yesterday when I complained that Macs can’t “print from selection” like you can on Windows. It’s probably the only thing I’ve wanted to do that I knew about in Windows and couldn’t do with my Mac.

My husband said it depends which program you’re in. I said, you get the same print window in all Mac programs…

Then I opened the print dialogue and saw something I’d never seen before. A menu item for Camino! Programs can have their own specific printing instructions. There’s one for Firefox too.

The Option Key

As a scientist who’s writing µ all the time, it would have been so handy to know that holding the Option key on your keyboard produces a whole lot of other characters.
There’s quite a few Greek letters, symbols and abbreviations. Some of my favourites are µ º © … They all took the hit of a few keys, instead of scouring the special characters dialogue!

I went through all the keys and made a PDF of what they do. If it’s useful or you, please download it. Or you can just tap away on your keyboard and see what you can find!

Download: The Option Key (PDF)

I found myself wanting to make a quick sketch to get an idea out of my mind, while I got on with something else. I could have gone and got my Moleskine, but it’s nearly full and I didn’t want to start a new project in there. I could have opened up GIMP, but it’s a bit hefty to open up every time I want to make a quick sketch. So I went on the hunt and found some interesting-looking pieces of software.

Only a few of these suit my “quick sketch” purpose, but some I already had bookmarked and some I’d never seen, so I thought I’d share them anyway. These programs are all free, or relatively inexpensive (they’re free unless stated otherwise). They’re all useful, innovative or have potential to be.

Image editing

GIMP is great. As if you haven’t heard me say that before! It’s free and very powerful. What it doesn’t have that the rest of the programs on this list have is running natively on OS X: it runs under X11. Hoping they will bring out an X11-free version soon.

Acorn is a newish image editing program that uses layers, filters, gradients, text and selection tools. It costs $49.95 with a demo (from memory the demo doesn’t save images, or it watermarks them). Definitely worth a look if you don’t need the million features in Photoshop, and don’t want to spend the money.

Pixelmator is also relatively recent. It’s very attractive, if you like the dark window thing. It’s got everything you want: brushes, erasers, selects, layers, layer masks; and some stuff you didn’t know you want: colour tools, curves, levels, brightness/contrast adjustment. It costs $59 and is pretty nice; worth a play with the demo.

Chocoflop is one I hadn’t seen before today. It looks a bit lighter in features than Acorn, but has an impressive sounding live filter feature; effects can be applied directly to the image or kept as a layer (more flexible, able to be removed). This program is very young, so it probably has a fair bit of growing to do. At the moment it costs €14.99, but can be used for free if you answer a simple maths question every time you save!

Seashore looks a lot simpler than Acorn or Chocoflop, but that can be a good thing if you just want to crop, resize, fill in a background, delete a background… stuff like that. It looks like it uses some OS X built in software, like Color Picker, and it uses layers.

Drawing

Paintbrush essentially looks like Paint for Mac. Very simple paint, flood fill, eraser, shapes.

Scribbles is the sort of thing I wanted today. Simple, clean, scribble down what you want and be on your way. It has some cool features: layers, “infinite canvas” — you can just keep drawing out the edge of your page… it costs $19.95, which seems pretty good. Most Moleskines cost more than that in Australia.
Update 28 May 2008: I’ve had a play with this one. It’s quite nice, the tools are pretty intuitive. It looks like you can keep using the demo until you decide to pay for it and it will ask you to register every time you open it.

Cocopad, similar to Scribbles in simplicity. It lets you draw without a whole bunch of stuff in the way. It is also versatile, allowing you to draw on top of images, on a grid, over lines. It’s free, so I’ll be trying this one to do that quick sketch I wanted to do 3 hours ago!

Sketchbox is way innovative! It’s sticky notes with typing, sketching and rearranging. I like the look of it a lot.
Update 28 May 2008: I had a chance to play with this program a bit. I liked it, but you can’t save your stickies. It seems to keep them as-is when you close the program, which is really good; you don’t lose your notes. It would be nice if you could save them into different projects too — it could be great for organising ideas and workflow.

Vector

Inkscape is open source vector software. I use it; it’s great. It has lots of options and is continually improving. I highly recommend it!

DrawBerry looks like a nice, simple vector drawing program. It’s free and based on Apple technology. The website doesn’t say much more than that, but it looks like a good “investment”.

Draw It looks pretty cool. Vector, layers, masks, clean Mac interface… it costs €29, but you can get Draw It Lite for free (no masks, plugins or some other things that I’ve never used when vector drawing).

3-dimensional

Blender is probably the most powerful free 3D software around. It has a steep learning curve, but I think it’s worth it.

Art of Illusion is also free. It probably has a more friendly and intuitive interface than Blender, but I’m not sure that it’s as powerful or effective (I may be wrong, I’ve only used it briefly).

Kids

Doozla might not be for you, but if you have kids it looks like a very cool way to get them into digital graphics. Colouring in without the messy paint and crayons — not that crayons aren’t cool too! Doozla isn’t free, but for $24.95 it’s hardly an expensive children’s toy.

Tux Paint is award winning and free (and open source!). It has big bright buttons, not very Mac-like, but probably great for kids. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Mosaics

MacOSaiX creates a mosaic of one source image from other images in iPhoto, Flickr, Google, or folders on your computer.

Metapixel doesn’t have much information on the website, but the results look quite good.

Have you used any of these? How did you like them? What imaging software do you love?

Switching from Vienna to NetNewsWire

For the last year I’ve been a faithful Vienna user for reading RSS feeds on my mac.

It’s a fantastic program: very intuitive, open source and full featured (including tabbed browser, skins for reading feeds, good search tool and AppleScript support).

Recently I decided to try NetNewsWire. Now free, but it didn’t used to be.

My main reason for wanting to switch is that I would like something I can read both on- and off-line. Recently, I’ve found myself in the lab waiting for something to incubate or centrifuge. There’s a free computer right there, but I can’t just jump on and surf the net; I’m dependent on my RSS reader and bookmarks to give me a direction for reading.

NetNewsWire syncs with NewsGator online, giving you access to your feeds anywhere.

I’ve imported my feeds into NetNewsWire and I’ve been using it for about a week. Here are some thoughts.

Vienna

In Vienna I had a system that I like and works well for me. I managed to get unread feeds of over 1000 down to less than 200, through some reading and some sacrificing (knowing that I would never read all of them). Now I oscillate between about 50 and 200 unread feeds.

In Vienna I had,

• Topical folders (blogs, design+blogging, friends, photography)
• Stuff that doesn’t fit in those (Dave’s Comic Feed, for example) aren’t in a folder
• I have some blogs that I read as soon as they publish, others can wait
• I usually knock the photography folder over all at once (with an internet connection to load images)
• Friends (the people I have actually met and know well) hardly ever update their blogs so the folder usually stays contracted
• If I get overwhelmed by unread feeds I mark them as read — they’re there to enlighten, interest and teach me, not stress me out!

What I loved about Vienna

• Sorting by multiple factors — if you click on Date it will sort by date (ascending or descending), then you can hit the circle button and the feeds will remain sorted by date but all the unread ones will be on the top
• If you select multiple articles (by Cmd+click or Shift+click) they all show up in the viewer, it’s a combined view without having to change the window layout (see screenshot above)
• Clicking in the space where an unread dot or a flag would be toggles the unread or flagged status
• The rest of the stuff is cool too: skinable layout, nice design, sorting into folders… stuff that most decent feed readers have now

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire has a typically pleasant layout (I expected one since people used to pay for this software). Upon setting up it asked whether I wanted to sync with NewsGator and offered log in/sign up opportunities. It’s very easy to use.

The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t have the little tricks I liked in Vienna. The most disappointing was that it didn’t combine the view when I selected multiple feeds. I used to do that every morning to load the comics and read them on the train. Then I’d read other feeds that don’t rely on loading images.

Other than not combining the view (unless you change its layout) it doesn’t easily toggle statuses with the mouse. The most efficient way is to learn the shortcuts (f = flag, u = unread, k = all read etc).

I like the way the internal browser works. By default it uses website icons in a sidebar rather than tabs. It’s a fresh way to do things; you can change them to regular tabs if you want.

NewsGator

NetNewsWire is a nice program, but to be honest the only thing it has up on Vienna (apart from some superficial features) is that it syncs with NewsGator.

At the moment I’m not particularly excited about that… NewsGator is not very pretty: the text is quite small, sections aren’t well delineated, it takes a while to load, and I can’t figure out why it’s put all my photography feeds in the main folder. It has clippings and tags, which seem cool… maybe not cool enough.

Conclusions

I’ve given NetNewsWire a fair chance. I like it, but I think Vienna suits me better. I might give Google Reader another go — if you use Firefox and install Google Gears you can read a certain number of feeds offline. As my husband pointed out, if I’m going to open another program to read feeds, why not Firefox?

Update 13 Apr 2008: If you’re excited by NetNewsWire, but you’re using Windows, check out NewsGator’s windows application FeedDemon.

Also, I’ve switched back to Vienna. I tried Google Reader with Google Gears and while I like Google Reader and Google Gears might work well for text, it doesn’t work with images. I didn’t expect it to download the images from 2000 posts, but I’d hoped it would retain the ones that I’d already loaded. So I could load the comics, go offline then read the comics and other text feeds on the train. I guess it wasn’t meant to be. Still, Google Gears is pretty young, it might do better with images in the future.

A while ago I downloaded iGTD. I used it to put aside the things I’d rather be doing than studying for exams, so I could do them in the holidays. I also wanted to get used to the software before I started my rather busy year this year, in the hope that I might feel organised.

Before I downloaded iGTD I had a look around at the different software options:

• Omnifocus was announced, but not released – it came out last week. It looks nice, but a bit expensive for me.
• Things also looks good, but isn’t out yet.
• Actiontastic is there, but it’s hard to get a handle on what it’s like from the website (not much in the way of screenshots or documentation).
• Anxiety looks excellent, I’m not sure why I didn’t try it before. Now it’s only available for Leopard.
• iGTD is very popular and has lots of features. There’s some things that I don’t really like: I couldn’t decide on how to organise my “contexts”; the icons are quite loud and yellow – they seem a bit angry to me – which isn’t what getting-things-done should feel like.
• iGTD2 is coming out and looks great! Again, it’s only for Leopard.

I didn’t think I’d get left behind without Leopard so quickly!

When I was studying for the HSC (final high school exams) I alphabetised my CD collection. Does everyone do that? Does everyone find normally silly or mundane tasks scintillating and satisfying when there’s something worse to do?

At the moment I have several assignments to do, when they’re done I have exams. It’s not a good time. So last week I mentioned Inbox Zero, which is working out well for me. After that I also read the suggestion that I could put iTunes on a diet. It seemed like a great idea. I suspected that I had music in my iTunes library that I either didn’t like or didn’t know was there. I thought while I was going through files I could make sure the ID3 tags were correct. Then I can download as many album artworks as possible and the iTunes album view is prettier and more informative.

To do that I felt that a simple, easy to use program would be helpful. After some searching I found Musorg. It’s excellent! It’s simple, but extremely easy to use and functional. It edits ID3 tags (artist, album, track number etc) for individual files and in batches. It can also edit the file names and folder names according to track number, artist, song name, whatever criteria you give it. I can’t recommend it enough for simple mp3 editing.

There could be some improvements made in future versions; changing folder in the program loses unsaved changes, it took me a couple of goes to figure that out. Also, if you delete something in Finder it doesn’t register in Musorg, you have to go backwards in file hierarchy so that the file or folder isn’t in view anymore.

It all worked well though. Perhaps now I’ll focus on assignments! :sheepish:

My husband introduced me to this game the other day. It’s great!

We love Scrabble. We own the board game and we play Scrabulous on Facebook. This variation reveals letters one by one and you have to make a word with them before the other person (or computer player) does. You can also steal words from the other person by adding a letter and rearranging one of their words somehow. However, you can’t just tack one letter on. So ‘tone’ could become ‘noted’, but not ‘toned’.

It’s good fun. The demo allows you to open the program a certain number of times before you have to buy a copy. I’ve never paid for software before, but I’d consider buying this one. :grin:

Why install a program when you already have one installed that does the job.

Mac OS X Hints tells you how to combine PDFs using Automator.

I found this really handy this morning and just had to share. :)

When I was using ubuntu I used a handy dandy shell script that my husband wrote to resize whole folders of photos. Since I still store all my photos on that machine I’m sure I’ll use it again, but I don’t seem to have the required elements installed on my mac to use that script.

Thanks to Automator (something I’ve previously completely ignored, but knew I didn’t want to delete) I can now do batch resizing on my MacBook. Mac OS X Tips tells you how. From the screenshot in that article you can see that there are a bunch of other things that you can do as well (cropping, rotating, thumbnails etc).

I thought Automator was going to be more trouble than it’s worth, but it’s really easy to use, with a simple, friendly interface!

I posted about some spiffy looking programs a while ago. At the time I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to install Skim, software for reading pdfs. Today, confronted with the prospect of reading many papers I decided to give it a go.
It’s great, much handier than Preview. It has all the things preview has and more. You can circle (as you would in preview), outline with rectangles, underline, highlight, strike out, note, anchor note, draw connector lines… it’s pretty sweet.
Yay for more ingenious freeware! :heart: