osx
Skitching that Image Captioning Itch
TinyURL'd
I was talking to a friend about the new setup I have around my MacBook, she asked me how happy I was with it and I responded in glee. After then I told her she was the reason I decided on a Mac, or at least, it was an application she often showed me; Skitch.
Skitch is a freeware Mac OSX program that does such a great percentage of the average Photoshop usage; screenshots, captioning and captioning screenshots. To best describe how it works, I have used it to describe itself;
And if those arrows look familiar, websites like Lifehacker use it in their tutorials all the time, as well on my own website (all the bloody time). A small but really nice feature, as well, is the drag me option there in the bottom, where you just drag it onto your desktop, and in the case of my use of TweetDeck and the integrated TwitPic, I can simply upload my Skitches. It is pretty handy.
Even when I am captioning my own photos, I just open it in Mac’s preview, take a shot of the image itself and then caption it, it’s pretty nerdy, and I accept this.
Skitch (Mac)
Swap the TweetDeck’s!
TinyURL'd
There are very many Twitter applications out these days, the Twitter API is, undoubtedly, one of the major reasons for its popularity. And believe you me, there is a crap load of popularity! TweetDeck is one of the larger of Twitter apps, aeshetically, at least. But I like that, as a late user of Twitterific (and Twhirl, and Spaz, and Google Desktop, and Digsby), I did not feel as centralized. TweetDeck is an Adobe Air application, its layout is a series of very useful columns that can be moved around horizontally; All Friends, Group, Replies, Direct Messages, Search, Favorites, TwitScoop and 12seconds. As well as a vertically expanding Tweet section with a very nice TwitPic integration and a TinyURL-esque service as well… with more than enough URL shrinkers to your service.
I find it to be a very clean layout and for me, someone with a second monitor, it is very nice to have it maximized all the time. As a recent adopter of TwitPic , I found the integration fantastic, as well as how simple it is to follow your own conversations in the Replies column. But more than anything, I love the use of the TwitScoop column; as a blogger (talented or non) it is a fast way to see what the general Twitosphere is currently interested in.
And the great part about this all is that, by the time you read this there will be a new one out, just as damn good.
Remembering Your Milk
TinyURL'd
My sister was attempting to convert so-many-cups to so-many-milliliters for her class gingerbread house assignment. As I do to most questions in life, I advised her to ‘Google it’, she said she knew and I went back to wating spoonfuls of Nutella. Half an hour later, she asked me for some help with this conversion website she found, I felt ashamed that so many useful features (unit conversion in this case) were strickly of Nerd knowledge.
Like Google and Twitter, Remember the Milk is a website which fools the users with its deceptively simple interface as to how damn useful this bugger is.
As was exposed on my MacBook post, I got one, as as a nerd I just had to try every little thing out. This information tidbit applies only once in this article, so fret not John Hodgman. Since, and most definately not because, I got my Mac, Google has done some really great things with their GMail serivce — and I use the Graffiti theme.
And for the sake of laziness and for the fact that the list I half wrote was nothing but a crappy version of the official one, these are the applications I use for Remembering my Milk.
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Now you can manage your Remember The Milk tasks alongside your emails. Available as a gadget (with Gmail Labs) or Firefox extension (connect your tasks with your mail, contacts, and events in Gmail). |
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Use Remember The Milk offline (requires Google Gears browser plugin). |
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Add new tasks to Remember The Milk, interact with existing tasks, and receive reminders — all via Twitter. |
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Remember The Milk for Google Calendar Use Google Calendar? Now you can manage your Remember The Milk tasks from within Google Calendar. |
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Manage your tasks from iGoogle. Review upcoming tasks and add, edit, complete and postpone your tasks with this handy gadget. |
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Manage your tasks from Netvibes, with handy features such as searching your tasks with Netvibes in-page search. |
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Dashboard Widget for OS X by Yoel Inbar Yoel Inbar created a cool widget that displays your Remember The Milk tasks on your Dashboard. Mark tasks as complete with one click. |
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Deskbar module by Sebastian Pölsterl Sebastian Pölsterl developed a cool Deskbar Module for GNOME users that lets you add and manage your tasks. |
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The folks over at IMified have made it possible to manage your Remember The Milk tasks via instant messenger. Review your lists and add tasks via IM. |
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Mind Like A Sieve Yahoo! Widget by Graeme McCormack Graeme McCormack developed a great widget that allows you to view your tasks in a flexible display, and complete and postpone tasks with a context menu. |
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Quicksilver plug-in by Brian Moore Brian Moore created a handy Quicksilver plug-in that allows you to quickly add tasks to Remember The Milk. |
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Tasque by Boyd Timothy and Calvin Gaisford Tasque is a very cool simple-yet-powerful task management tool for GNOME that integrates with Remember The Milk. |
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Twit2RTM Dashboard Widget for OS X by Takashi Nomura Takashi Nomura created a handy widget for sending direct Twitter messages to RTM from your Dashboard. |
Now, for what I know of, this step is only for the Mac, or at least anything with iCalendar (so the Mac). Although I am sure there is a myriad of Calendar programs that sync with atom feeds, your iPod does not sync with any of those. If you cant find the sync menu for your iCalendar, I borrowed this link from, again, the Remember the Milk website;
From the iPod > Contacts > Calendars section you can select to sync your iCal with your iPod, which then gives your iPod Calendar section an actual amount of use.
This post took way too long to write and re-write, so I wont bother with an ending, bye.
OSXP?
TinyURL'd
Windows Vista has 18 thousand different versions, all will poorly placed changes. An example would be the Photo thinger in Enterprise (I think). And from what I have heard, there are three major groups developing Windows. There is the core group, they develop the kernel and the things around it, and then Windows and Windows Server. The latter two are based off of the first.
There is a new Windows every 4 years, generally, and an update every 2. Wherein Mac has smaller updates every year. There are two major consumers using Windows, company and personal. As Mac does not have a company version and I cannot use it as an example. But generally, as someone who helped in my school with computers, companies do not want a vast amount of smaller updates. Wherein the personal side, in this internetz age, we are used to frequent updates.
Businesses want a secure OS that works. Plain and simple. They do not want updates all the time that can fuck up a system. They are not as concerned about pretty OS effects, they would find more use with a very stripped down version of an OS.
Mac has these nice, frequent and small updates. Would that not be very nice with Windows? Not only updates you go and buy for, downloads and updates and more personal things. I know Windows Update does this, security and the like… I guess a better example would be the XP SP3 update, although I have not used it, it has the new Vista Aero theme. The OS would be updated more frequently, but less disruptive. And not having the big bang with new Windows OSs.
A really cool way I can think of would be if you could buy a stripped down Windows and instead of buying different versions, why not just let you buy small packs for updating. So instead of paying for a feature in a certain version, you could buy the ‘Media’ packet, and the ‘Gaming’ packet and stuff of that nature.
And everyone needs to adapt the package downloading that Linux does. Let the OS check the internetz if there are updates and let you download them all together. It would be so much nicer and safer if you were told when there were updates (I mean for smaller programs, not just Nortons and shit) and not have to go around and checking the internetz.
INTERNETZ WITH A Z
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