Archive for category Quicklook
Blogo – Integrated Desktop Blogging
Posted by Elliott Bradley in Blogging, Quicklook on March 4th, 2010
Blogo ($25: Shareware, v1.3b3) is a desktop blogging app. This new version (1.3) has full support for micro blogging like Twitter, Tumblr, and pretty much any other through Ping.fm. There is even a twitter client with growl support. This is in addition to its already very good compatibility for standard blogging platforms like Wordpress, Blogger, and Moveable Type. Not only is the compatibility quite good, it has the two features I’ve been looking for in a desktop client: a visual editor that doesn’t produce tag soup and excellent handling of images. If you blog more than occasionally and you have a mac you should try Blogo, it’s that slick and useful.
iTiVo: The TiVo App For Macs
Posted by Elliott Bradley in Quicklook, Video on July 28th, 2009
iTiVo (Free: Open-Sourced, v1.7.6) is an unofficial app for retrieving videos from your TiVo. Admittedly, this app has a limited user base to appeal to, but for those people it is great. It is even better than the official TiVo application in that it allows you to pull the original MPEG-2 video from the TiVo and run commercial cutting algorithms on the video. Recent versions have been very stable and work as advertised. If you have a Mac and a TiVo this is a must-have app for your mac.
SweetFM Is Pretty Sweet
Posted by Elliott Bradley in Music, Quicklook on July 18th, 2009
SweetFM (Free: Open-Sourced, v1.1.1) is a combination Last.Fm and iTunes controller. Aside from the standard controlling of Last.fm stations through media, it offers the interesting feature of saving songs from the stream directly to iTunes. Questionable legality aside, this is an excellent feature that is implemented well and sets it apart from the competition. SweetFM is a free app that I would recommend trying.
eBook Management with Calibre
Posted by Elliott Bradley in Quicklook, eBook Readers/Managers on May 19th, 2009
Calibre (Free: Open-Sourced, v0.5.12) is a app that attempts to be the iTunes of ebooks, which such features as conversion, library management, and downloading to devices.
It supports converting numerous formats to various ebook formats easily, and has a built-in reader for the ebooks as well. It will also use the feeds from popular magazines and news sources to generate ebooks that can be read on the go. Finally, it supports downloading ebooks to Stanza the popular ebook reader for the iPhone. These features make it a worthwhile download.
Anki: Smart Memorization
Posted by Elliott Bradley in Memorization, Quicklook on February 25th, 2009
Anki (Open-Source: v0.9.9.6) is an app that helps you memorize things.
We have problems remembering things. David Alan made the point that our brain is good at making decisions but terrible at retaining information. But when we do have to memorize something, there are many strategies for doing so. Flash cards are one of the most common approaches, and this is where Anki comes in. It’s program that knows when to show you a card based on how well you remebered it last time and how many times you’ve seen it in the past. There is even a free web-service which can sync your cards with the desktop. I can even access my cards on my iPod. This is not a native mac app, but it won’t look too out of place your desktop. Anki is available to download here for most platforms.
Safari 4
Posted by Elliott Bradley in Quicklook, Web Browsers on February 24th, 2009
Safari (Freeware: v4 beta 1) is Apple’s web browser based on webkit.
Apple has released the first public beta of Safari 4. This browser has some very notable new features. First, a very Chrome-like treatment of tabs, that is, above the location bar. Second, the integration of Cover Flow with your bookmarks and history. Third, and finally, some notable speed improvements. I’m actually typing this up in Safari 4 now, and it’s pretty good so far. The only problems I have with it now are the lack of 1Password support (which is very important to me), and some minor annoyances with the handling of tabs. It might be that I’m too comfortable with the Firefox way of handling tabs, but I think Chrome does a very similar but slightly better job with the tabs. The windows version of Safari 4 is also much more windows like than the previous version, which did look like a clone of the mac version. The beta is available to download now.
Update: 1Password does work with Safari if you enable the beta releases in 1Password.
Cmd Task Manager
Posted by Elliott Bradley in Quicklook, Task Managers on February 18th, 2009
Task (Open-Source: v1.4.3) is a command line program for managing tasks
I just found out about this task manager for the command line. It is really nice. I like the idea of a todo text file for keeping tabs on my tasks; but I also like the features that many of the GUI programs offer, like recurring tasks and other such niceties, to leave for a text file. This program seems to remedy my concerns. I’ve only played with it for a few minutes, but it’s really nice. As it does use the command line, not everyone will like it, but if the cmd is your cup of tea then give this a try. Here is a video demonstrating its use.
