Selenium
“Selenium is a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browser, just like real users do.” Easy automated Web site testing — cool, and something I’ll for sure use the next time I make a major site update
Via Web405
May 1, 2008 in Da WebDa WebDa WebDa Web | Comment
Today
“Today is a powerful, easy to use event and task management application for Mac OS X Leopard. Built on top of the same data engine as Apple’s iCal and Mail programs, Today lets you quickly see what events and tasks are on today’s agenda with the click of a button.”
Via Daring Fireball
Apr 22, 2008 in Mac Stüff | Comment
Disable Space switching on Command-Tab in 10.5.2
“Spaces. You can now set OSX to not automatically switch between spaces when you press Command-Tab. This is great for me, because I like to divide things by task, rather than by app.” Brilliant, now I might actually use Spaces.
Feb 22, 2008 in Mac Stüff | Comment
Lingon
“Lingon is a graphical user interface for creating launchd configuration files for Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). You get all your launchd configuration files listed hierarchically so you can easily see all and choose which one to edit.” Way simpler than crontab, which has been deprecated anyway.
Feb 16, 2008 in Mac Stüff | Comment
Monocle
“Monocle hangs out in the menu bar and you bring it up with one hot key. You can easily switch between engines to search exactly where you’d like to. Google, Wikipedia, Windows Live and Yahoo! may be preloaded, but you can add any search engine (or web site with a search function) you’d like.”
Jan 24, 2008 in Mac Stüff | Comment
Hint: Automatically sync with iCal every hour
Yay that crontab is available, but boo that it doesn’t have a good interface in OS X. Seems like Sync Services should handle some of this automatically maybe too.
Jan 20, 2008 in Mac Stüff | Comment
Fluid
“Are you a Gmail, Facebook, Campfire or (Insert Your Favorite Webapp Here) fanatic… Are you tired of some random site or Flash ad crashing your browser and causing you to lose your (say) Google Spreadsheets data in another tab? If so, Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) provide a great solution for your webapp woes. Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite webapps as a separate desktop application.”
Via Signal vs. Noise
Jan 18, 2008 in Mac Stüff | Comment
What is 2o7.net?
2o7.net is a service that apparently tracks you for software vendors. Pretty disgusting, in that the URL is supposed to appear to be 2O7.net, so that an address like 192.168.1.2O7.net gets past filters and looks safe at a quick glance. Yech.
Via Daring Fireball
Dec 28, 2007 in Mac StüffMac Stüff | Comment
SmugMugExport
“Upload photos to SmugMug directly from iPhoto! SmugMugExport is an iPhoto plugin that uploads images to your SmugMug galleries from within iPhoto.” Handy, although its uploads are modal, which is moderately annoying.
Dec 28, 2007 in Mac Stüff | Comment
10.5.2 fixes Stacks!
“…Apple has fixed Stacks by adding the missing “list view” option that should have been there all along!” Leopard’s grid view for folders in the Dock struck me immediately as almost useless; I’ll be glad to have it gone!
Via Daring Fireball
Dec 21, 2007 in Mac Stüff | Comment
Merlin 2
Intuitive- and powerful-looking project management software. Looks like it incorporates a lot of the good points of tools I use currently. Also, won a Macworld Eddy for best software, which is usually a good sign in a picky marketplace. I always wish I had better tools to give me visibility on what I’m doing… this might be it. Steep price, tho.
Dec 19, 2007 in Mac Stüff | Comment
Things
Fancy, GTD-style to-dos. Fun! Looks pretty and full-functioned. I look forward to an eventual shootout between all of the great to-do managers on the Mac.
Nov 25, 2007 in Mac Stüff | Comment
OmniFocus public beta/introductory pricing
Finally out of beta! Get your GTD-y goodness here, Mac folks… of which I may soon be one! Looks like it has some great features… and others that strike me as weird, such as “clean up.” Why do I need to hit a button to make my changes take?
Nov 19, 2007 in Consumer LustConsumer Lust | Comment
mactactic
“We estimate the release date of new macs so you get a chance to buy when they are the best value.” With clever little bar graphics to tell you how close you are to replacement. The MacRumors Buyers Guide has more info if you like to dig, but isn’t as quick a reference as Mactactic.
Nov 19, 2007 in Mac StüffMac Stüff | Comment
Plain text wiki
How to do it in TextMate or, linked, in VoodooPad. I kind of think I need more wikis in my life, the ideas of how to set them up just haven’t crystallized yet. But there’s enough info and thoughts out there that I should be writing them all down.
May 26, 2007 in Mac Stüff | Comment
Color Oracle
“Color Oracle takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see.” Nifty!
May 18, 2007 in | Comment
Daylite
Focuses on relationships between things, people. Seems full-featured. Looks like it focuses on planning quite a bit. Wonder if it could be talked into working in a bit of a GTD way. Also wonder how much I can trust my productivity to a small vendor.
May 2, 2007 in Mac Stüff | Comment
New OmniFocus Movie
Caught the OmniFocus fever? Learn more about what it can do from this long-but-not-boring screencast. Droolicious.
May 2, 2007 in Mac Stüff | Comment
Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X
I believe this falls into the “reasonably soon to be useful” category (unless I decide I like Django better).
Apr 13, 2007 in Mac Stüff | Comment
Top 10: Free Computer System Recovery Tools
“Don’t pay the extortionists at the computer repair shop 800 bucks to get your data back or start up your dead computer. Plenty of free tools can help you and are available for download right now.”
Apr 13, 2007 in Mac StüffMac Stüff | Comment
How to run a Disk Scan/chkdsk/fsck and Troubleshoot your iPod
Just in case.
Apr 6, 2007 in Mac StüffMac Stüff | Comment
GanttProject
Crappy Web site. Reasonably usable, free project management application. It gets a solid “eh” in my book, which at least means I can get stuff done with it.
Mar 30, 2007 in Win StûffWin Stûff | Comment
FaxZero
Send files for free via fax. This may come in handy.
Dec 15, 2006 in Win StûffWin Stûff | Comment
Moneydance 2006 - The Most Intuitive Personal Finance Application
Looks much like Quicken, but perhaps easier to use and — I hope — less susceptible to data file corruption.
Nov 6, 2006 in Mac StüffMac Stüff | Comment
Buddi - Personal budget software for the rest of us
“Buddi is a personal finance and budgeting program, aimed at those who have little or no financial background. In making this software, I have attempted to make things as simple as possible, while still retaining enough functions to satisfy most home users.” But is it too simple for me? No online banking, from the looks of it.
Nov 6, 2006 in Win StûffWin Stûff | Comment
Introducing LightZone
“Based on photographic principles and the Zone System method, LightZone is a more natural and intuitive approach for photo retouching, allowing you to focus on what to do with your images rather than how to do it.” Hmm, sounds like an easier way to do 85% of the stuff I do in Photoshop…
Aug 18, 2006 in Win StûffWin Stûff
Lest We Forget
“Much as I love to trot out my list of Mac OS X Finder gripes, I was thinking today about how quickly I mentally buried my least favorite things about the Classic Mac OS.” May I add: the Launcher, option-apple-escape, Mezzanine and NuBus cards, don’t unplug the ADB! and the clever placement of the power button on the Centris series.
Cyberduck
“Cyberduck is a open source FTP and SFTP (SSH Secure File Transfer) browser licenced under the GPL with an easy to use interface, integration with external editors and support for many Mac OS X system technologies such as Spotlight, Bonjour, the Keychain and AppleScript.”
Lemonade Stand
Now available for OS X! If only I knew what it took to compile RealBasic code on Windows… droool. One of the greatest games of its era, along with, say, Oregon Trail.
Wireless LAN security guide
“One of the most common questions that people ask me about Wireless LANs is ‘are Wireless LANs really safe?’ immediately followed up by ‘what kind of security do I need for my Wireless LAN?’ The answer to the first question is ‘yes, if you implement good security measures’ but the second question forces me to resort to the old ‘it depends’. It depends on what level of risk is acceptable to your home or organization.”
Aug 5, 2005 in Win StûffWin Stûff
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger By John Siracusa
“Tiger is the best version of Mac OS X yet. It offers substantial improvements over Panther in all important areas. The performance improvements are immediately noticeable. Every major bundled application has been improved. There’s an unprecedented number of substantial, totally new features and technologies: Spotlight, Core Image and Video, Quartz 2D Extreme, Dashboard, and Automator, just to name a few.”
New RSS Screensaver in Mac OS X Tiger
Drool. Another reason to switch back.
Jef Raskin, Mac Interface Expert, Dies at 61
“Jef Raskin, the human-computer interface expert largely credited with beginning the Macintosh project for Apple Computer, died Saturday at age 61.”
Tinderbox
Outlining, note-taking, and mapping all in one. I should think of tracking down a program like this (and they’re making a version for Windows!)
Restore Your iPod's Battery Life
Some people seem to be having trouble with iPod battery life. I don’t know; I’ve had mine for about 3 (?!) years now and have no problem with the battery life at all (> 6 hours, easily). But some people have problems. If you have problems, these tips can help you out.
The True Story Of Audion
Fun story of the evolution of a good software product from cutting-edge to cool to passed by.
Running Mac OS X On A 25 MHz Centris
“That makes for a 0.05MHz G3, at the best. That’s around 4000 times slower than the Athlon boots, and since that takes roughly 2 and a half minutes - I’m looking at at least 6.99 days. One week to boot!”
TextMate
Competition for BBEdit?
A Month With A Mac: A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective
An experienced, tech-savvy PC user gives us his review of OS X. Balanced, fair, and interesting.
Choplifter!
RCDefaultApp
Expose the relationship between every protocol and its handler app in OS X.
How Mail.app's Junk Filter Works
Not only an interesting article about how the junk filter works, but an interesting article about technology Apple has to allow it to relate different text snippets to each other. I’d love to see where they can take this technology.
Big Fat Stinking Software
Possibly useful software, including AppleScripts to do all sorts of Unix processes.
pizza_party -p -m 1 medium thin
Pizza Party: order Domino’s from your command line!
MoreInternet
In recent versions of OS X, Apple made the brain-dead decision to move your control of what application handles what internet protocol from an Internet Control Panel and to its own default applications (Safari, Mail, etc.). This free Control Panel puts you back in charge.
BluePhoneMenu
A menu to interact with your bluetooth phone. Seems pretty cool.
Play .avis on OS X
Not that I would, um, be downloading and playing videos from the Internet…
OmniWeb 5
I’m always on the lookout for a better browser. I liked Firebird, and have considered making it my default browser on my Mac, but OmniWeb 5 sure looks nice! Full of features, using Apple’s great (and standards-compliant) WebKit as its basis, and, best of all, with new ideas about how to make a better interface, it looks like I’ll have to seriously consider OmniWeb 5 as a replacement for the very satisfactory Safari.
PDF Browser
One of the very few nice things about Web browsing on a PC is that .pdf documents display directly in the browser, rather than requiring a download and cluttering up your desktop. This plugin brings that capability to the Mac.
Panther Maintenance Tips
A list of things to do to keep your OS X installation (any version) running smoothly. Cool article! Except, almost no maintenance was necessary with OS 9 and earlier. Is this really progress?
On the upside, the requirement for periodic maintenance definitely makes OS X more like Windows!
Mailsmith scripts
Scripts to add various functions to the way-powerful and extendable Mac e-mail app Mailsmith.
iRate Radio
“iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering client/server mp3 player/downloader. The iRATE server has a large database of music. You rate the tracks and it uses your ratings and other people’s to guess what you’ll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal downloads of their music.”
PhotoReviewer
Review your digital photos before they go into iPhoto, to pick only the ones you like and file them usefully in folders on the disk.
iSeek
A search field in your menu bar through which you can search the Internet. Kind of like an ultra-convenient Huevos
Get some color into your 'ls'
“The new OS X comes with bash as the default shell and a color capable ls binary.”
iSport
“Exercise waistpack for iPod” — a cool waist holder for your iPod, exercise stuff, even has a light for night running. Not sure how comfortable it would be when working out at the gym, though.
The AppleMatters Interview: Herbie Hancock
Jazz great Herbie Hancock is apparently a gigantic Aple fan from back in the beginning. He loves Macs and uses them throughout his life. Go Herbie!
Testing slow connections on OS X
“…it’s possible to use the Apache web server built right into OS X to fake a slow connection on your local machine…”
SwitchBack
Backup, mirror, synchronize or archive files using this backup utility.
Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes
“Download over 200 free user-contributed AppleScripts for Apple’s iTunes that will make maintaining your digital music collection easier and more fun.”
MenuTunes
“MenuTunes provides a system-wide interface for controlling and interacting with Apple’s iTunes 4.”
ABMenu
“ABMenu adds a menu item in the upper right hand corner that gives users quick access to the information stored in the Address Book application that comes standard with Mac OS X 10.1 and above.”
MenuMeters
“MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for MacOS X.”
Add full ANSI color support to Terminal.app
“I was becoming fairly frustrated with terminal.app because it would not do a good job of displaying ANSI color. I found a hack that would let me display colors with ls, but mutt, lynx, emacs and so on would stubbornly stay in black and white. The solution is to make the proper terminfo file for a VT100 terminal…”
iTerm
“iTerm is a full featured terminal emulation program written for OS X using Cocoa.”
Wallet
“Use Wallet to keep passwords, credit cards, serial numbers, contacts, and more. Wallet can store almost anything you want.”
/usr/share/calendar
Get a fun list of what happened today in history every time you log into a shell session!
sshLogin
“sshLogin is an application and a preferencePane designed to help users manage ssh-agent and ssh-add features in Mac OS X. It is useful for setting the ssh-agent environment variables at login so that the Finder and Dock inherit the ssh-agent environment variables.”
BuddyPop
“BuddyPop lets you quickly access your Apple AddressBook via a customizeable shortcut.
It is small, light, and discrete ; there is no icon in the Dock and you access it at any time.”
What's on Your Dock?
“You know how it is. You’re sitting somewhere, next to another Mac user you don’t know (at a conference, in the Apple Store, on the plane, wherever), and you just can’t resist the urge to send a sideways glance at the other person’s Dock.”
Huevos
“Huevos is a customizable search engine helper for Mac OS X. It’s easy to use: type in some text to search for, choose a search engine, then hit the Return key.”
CoooL
“CoooL is the Cocoa openoffice.org Launcher for Mac OS X. CoooL acts as an interface between Mac OS X and the OpenOffice.org development release. It provides a launcher panel for easy, drag-and-drop access to Writer, Draw, Calc, Impress, and Math, as well as a drawer for access to various AutoPilot routines.”
units
“The ‘units’ program converts quantities expressed in various scales to their equivalents in other scales. The ‘units’ program can handle multiplicative scale changes as well as nonlinear conversions such as Fahrenheit to Celsius.”
ServiceManager
” The Service Manager allows you to enable and disable applications’ services. It also lets you change key commands and menu item organization. “
MenuPrefs
“Hate having to go through two to three steps to change your Mac’s Energy Saver preferences? Tired of click after click just to change your sound output device? Tired of Apple’s System Preferences application altogether?”
Putting Your Picture Into Mail Messages
“Users of Apple’s Mail program are used to seeing pictures attached to people’s email messages, but only if they are .mac users.”
Who Killed Apple Computer?
“I did it. I killed Apple Computer. Of course you helped too, if you worked there.”
BlueChip G3/900 "Pismo"
900MHz PowerPC G3 upgrade for 4-500MHz bronze keyboard “Pismo” Powerbook G3s.
Random Password Generator
Safari Icon Manager
“This little piece of software can do two things: It can browse your Safari icon cache, and it can edit/empty it.”
BBEdit Version Control
“If you’re a Web developer, even minor errors — a simple typo in your code, for example — can create major problems. But you can easily track down and reverse such mistakes by setting up version-control software.”
Quirk Distress
“Damn it, Quark. I’m done defending you. From this point on, it’s Adobe InDesign or nothing.”
Macintosh Browser Smackdown
Clean Up SMB Mess
Clean up all of those invisible . and ._ files from non-Mac volumes before you unmount them.
BlueService 1.2.1
“This service sends selected plain or rich text of Cocoa applications and of Carbon applications supporting services to BlueTooth devices”
TextWielder
“Text Wielder is a native Mac OS X program that will let you do things such as search for text on your favorite search engine, check a stock quote, track a mail package, or clean up those messy email quotes all without ever leaving the application your [sic] in!”
ThumbsUp
“ThumbsUp is a simple, drag & drop based utility to create thumbnails for a bunch of pictures and supports all image formats of Mac OS X and Quicktime (including PDF documents).”
LaunchBar
Aqua Data Studio
AutoPairs
“AutoPairs modifies the behavior of certain keystrokes, to help you keep paired characters such as parentheses properly matched.”
Apache, PostgreSQL, etc., for Mac OS X 10.2
“All of the software available here is provided in Mac OS X package installer (.pkg) format.” Also include System Preferences panes for control.
Classic Window Management
Safari Menu
View all your bookmarks from the Safari web browser system wide, plus easy dialogs to go to URLs and search Google.
DesInstaller - Uninstall Mac Software
AutoComplete For BBEdit
Make Running Apps Not Show In The Dock
Enable iCal Syncing with Nokia 3650
How To Get iCal Reminders Without Launching iCal
"Technical Self-Employment Is A Fat Paycheck Waiting to Be Pocketed"
Maybe I should consider this career…
PDASmart iPod Center
I hope I never find this handy, but someday I bet I’ll be glad I blogged it!