mac/evangelism

The other day I found a piece of software that's quickly becoming one of my favorites. It's called Sidenote. It open up a "drawer" on the side of your screen (you can pick right or left). When your cursor gets over towards that side the drawer pops out. You can then start making little notes! It's much nicer than having to use stickies (the application) or having to move over to Dashboard and use stickies or someother notepad widget.

You can add notes, delete notes, change their names, all from this little drawer interface. It has a button that you can press to force the drawer to stay out even when you move your mouse away. You can assign notes a color, and that will be there background color (just like in stickies). You can format the text as much as you want, and even spell check it.

Then when you're ready you can email it, print it, export it as an rtfd document, or copy it to the clipboard. This easly makes it one of the most usefull apps available for the Mac. I'm already at the point that I don't know how I worked without it! If you want more info go to the developers page, or the MacUpdate page, or the Versiontracker page

So if you're reading my blog on the web (as opposed to my feed). You'll notice over the last few days I've made some changes to my side-bar. I've added a Technorati box, and put up a button to add my blog to your Technorati favorites. I've changed the main icon for the site (which is at the top of the sidebar) and used that mikon to make a favicon for the site using FavIcon from Pics site. I've also added my Clipmarks feed to my list of "other stuff," as well as a cliproll linking to my 10 most recent clipmarks. Additionally, there is now a tag cloud for my blog provided by ZoomClouds, whose links will show you what posts those words appear in. I've also added a list of my favorite blogs I read as well as including a link to an OPML file of every blog I subscribe to. And finally I've added a hit counter thanks to the folks at BlogPatrol.

So the latest and greatest thing everyone wants to do with computers is create websites, and put creative stuff up on-line. Well it just so happens MacOS X is the perfect place to do that, no matter if you're a just learning to use a computer or a pro-user. For starters you have Apple's built-in softwareiLife, which includes, iPhoto, iWeb, Garageband, and iMovie, and they're on-line service .Mac. Using these together one can quickly create a website, a blog, put pictures on-line, put out a podcast , put up home movies, etc. Without more than a few clicks, drags, and drops. There's no difficult configuring of components, hardware, or settings. Everything just flows easily the way it should.

Also since MacOS X is has UNIX at it's core, it interacts seamlessly with web servers, since most are based on UNIX as well. Well, that's really great for the more advanced user. No need to download an SSH client like on Windows to connect to your server. Just pop open Apple's Terminal application and you're on your way. You can even connect to some servers right from the Desktop (although unless they're WebDAV you won't be able to upload anything from the Desktop). Also MacOS X comes with Apache (a web server), MySQL (a database server), PHP, and Perl built right in so you can use your Mac for a web server if you want instead of uploading your site to one. Now you would assume well you must have to configure this in Terminal, and it must be really hard. Nope! It's ready to go the instant you start your Mac up. Alright, so it's not as easy as just pushing one button, but it's almost that easy, and certainly easier than on Windows. Well, what if the basic install of UNIX based web server software just isn't enough for you? Say, you want to use Ruby, or get some Perl mods, or some other great UNIX open source software. And let's also assume that you aren't a UNIX geek and you don't know how to build software from the source code (as I surely don't). Well you can download either Darwin Ports or Fink, which are both easy to install and then allow you to easily download and build much of the open-source UNIX software available. If you feel comfortable with the Terminal app (which you should be if you're using Darwin Ports or Fink) then you can easily add on software, and if you're not there's even a couple GUI's out there to make it easier. (Although I really have to stress if you aren't comfortable enough running Darwin Ports or Fink from the command line, I'm not really sure what you're going to download with them that you can actually use through the GUI's, because both are really easy UNIX apps to use).

OK, enough about UNIX. There's a world of tools out there JUST for the Mac that making building complex modern web sites and web apps even easier then you could ever imagine. But that's to come in my next posts. So stay tuned…

• In honor of my own Dad's enthusiasm to helping others with their trouble shooting problems I offer up Qunu. This is a site where people can get help with their technical problems from "experts" in that area. It works by having people sign up to be experts and others signup saying they have a problem. Then Qunu connects them together in real time. YEAH!
• For all you game lovers out there you just need to check out Arcaplay. This is web games gone Web 2.0 very nifty. It's clearly still in the early stages but none the less very functional, and a very good way to waste time. Because clearly we all need more of that!
• For all you news connoisseurs out there, there's Newsvine. This is a place that has users submit stories from the popular press to be published on the site (much like digg), but also allows users to write their own stories (much like blogs), and then allows for tagging (much like Technorati). As well they include wire posts from the AP. Of course just like digg, the homepage is determined by how much people vote for an article.
• Need to create a personalized map. Well Google Maps mashups are the new "hot" item, because in my humble opinion the API is easy to leverage and everyone knows what maps are about. Unfortunately, as with any new fad, this results in a lot of just bad services. Luckily, there are a few great ones out there. My favorite right now being Wayfaring. Simply put this is Google Maps on Web 2.0 Steroids. It does everything you should be able to do with a web based mapping service on the web. Create midway points, move the marker, add descriptions, add links, add pictures, etc. This allows you to do it. And then it allows you to tag it and share it with the world!
• My Dad being a writer I thought he might appreciate Writely. Recently bought up by Google, this is a web based word processor for collaborative writing. Not as much fun as some of the other links but very impressive, and is for sure a very modern web service.
• Do you like music? Then if you haven't heard of Last.fm or Pandora you need to go there right now! You simply let them know what sort of music you like (say a particular artist or a particular song) and then they make and play suggestions for other music you might like. Check it out!

• The first two being apps for the services I just mentioned. One is the Last.fm player which is made by the people at Last.fm. The second is PandoraMan, which is a small MacOSX app for playing your Pandora channels.
• Now in honor of my Dad's troubleshooting tradition I'll mention my favorite MacOSX utility: AppleJack. This is a command-line app that you can run when you start your computer in Single User Mode. It does all that fsck does and more. If you've got a problem it's a good starting point. Or at least I think so, but I guess that sort of recommendation is more my Dad's territory.
• The last is THE Tool for understanding the CSS behind ANY web page: Xyle scope. Basically you load a URL, or a local file into it's browser window (it uses Apple's WebKit to render the page), then you can select any element on the page and it tell's you what parts of the css code is effecting it's style, as well as showing you how the cascade works on that element. Finally it also shows you the document's DOM structure. Overall this is any web designers gift from heaven so to speak. Allowing you to both find nifty tricks others have used, as well as trouble shoot your own code.

Many, many people have been reviewing, discussing and critiquing the new web service offered up by Google: Google Spreadsheets. Now some people have been very happy and pleased with the service but other seem intent on picking it apart and making Google look as bad as possible. Here's my response to those very harsh critics:

Some people seem obsessed with the fact that this doesn't have as much functionality as Microsoft Excel. Well, Excel wasn't always that spiffy, it's a program that has grown and grown through the years as any app does. Some people even make the argument that apps like Excel and word have "ballooned" too much, and have so many features now it's difficult to use for simpler functions. So I'm glad that Google didn't try to implement all that functionality right away. After all better to get a smaller feature set working well then a large feature set being buggy. Also, did any one notice that it's a part of Google Labs, which means it's still in beta, i.e. it's not a finished product and it's going to get better. Finally, a number of people have pointed out that most people use spreadsheets for fairly simple uses. Indeed the home and small business set of consumers use spreadsheets for the very uses that Google Spreadsheets provides the functionality for. And really I don't think Google is after the same market that wants to do highly complicated things with a spreadsheet, and even if they did, I doubt they would do it with a web app. Ultimately a web app is limited in what it can do, and for more advanced functionality you want it as a stand-alone app.

Well there it is that's my little rant. I like the new Google Spreadsheets. I think it's a very good addition to their already impressive list of web services (Gmail, Gtalk, Calendar, Notebook, Reader, Page Creator, and Maps). I'm looking forward for whatever they churn out next.

I saw Max Kiesler's mHub blog post about this amazing html/css prototyping tool the other day. WOW! It's called render 2 and it's a great tool quickly double checking some code and seeing what it will look like with realtime changes. Perfect for web designers wanting to work out color combos, size issues, etc. As you type the sample page changes, INSTANTLY! No waiting for it to update or anything. Not only is it a good useful tool, but it's just plain fun!

So this site has to be one of the coolest sites I've seen in a while. It allows you to create vector based icons quickly and easily on the web. It's also one of the few uses of Shockwave that doesn't seem gratuitous. It allows you to then share your nifty new creations with others. They even have a library of prebuilt "clips" that you can use to make your own original creation!

The interface is clean, simple, and works. Anything you might want to do to create an icon there's a tool for. You can create shapes, draw lines and curves, add and subtract and manipulate the paths. They have buttons to scale, rotate, and flip objects as well as group and ungroup objects together. They allow you to move objects up and down in the stack of items. You can control the thickness of your paths, as well as the alignment of objects to each-other. All in standard easy to understand methods. You can also add a grid to help layout your objects. And to top it all off there are also convenient keyboard shortcuts for most of the tools/commands.