#Tools

Scarily, most of the most popular posts on my blog are not about my fascinating rock-star lifestyle, but actually revolve around:

1. Getting your iPod unstuck (all time highest)
2. A macro I wrote way back for converting Word docs to dokuwiki
3. Software I use on my mac

It’s been ages since I wrote about the software I use on my desktop, and it definitely needs a refresh as the changes are huge compared to when I first posted on what was on the desktop , but I did want to draw some attention to some new apps that are out recently that are definitely worthy of attention.

If you’re like me and use the excellent menu bar extra Meteorologist to keep up with the weather everywhere you’re going (or want) to be, you’ve probably been pretty annoyed that it’s impossible to add cities for a while now due to a broken search function.

I don’t know how I missed it, but someone released an unsupported patch that has a better solution to fixing the non-updating problem than I supplied a /etc/hosts hack for fixing both the update and the searching and adding cities problem.

I have a love/hate relationship with Apple’s Mail.app. It’s pretty and powerful and has good rule based filters, ok junk mail detection and good support for imap, pop and even Exchange accounts.

However, at times I have to say I’m looking longingly at other mail clients, in particular Thunderbird (so don’t even get me started on the fact I should already be back on Ubuntu… I’m looking for a good laptop before moving back.).

If, like me, you use the excellent Meteorologist toolbar application on OSX to keep track of weather in loads of different places (especially handy for travel, though I just noticed I track London, Paris, Vancouver, Kelowna, Whistler, San Francisco, Mexico City, Toronto and Amsterdam… ahem…) you were probably put out this week when it suddenly stopped working.

Normally, when this has happened in the past, it has been a problem with parsing the XML data that weather.com sends.

I’m constantly shocked at the quality of software that is consistently available on the OSX platform every day. Despite my love of all things linux and a need to move back to ubuntu based laptops to start walking my own talk, OSX makes it harder every day.

Today, for instance, Actiontastic , the Getting Things Done app with tight integration for rapid to do making via Quicksilver announced it would be completely free as in beer and speech. Yep, better than what commercial companies have tried to develop, the developer has open sourced it as well. I’ve been using it in beta for a while now and have to say it has really allowed me to focus on the things I really need to get done at work. Highly recommended.

I have to admit that the multitude of emails I get from work, friends, pro bono and charity work were getting to the point of near unmanageability for me. It was causing a lot of stress. Rather embarrassingly, two important mails slid by me the other week because I had been depending way too much on Apple Mail’s ability to have everything in one Inbox and just search it via Spotlight and flagging, marking as unread and auto filtering rules to try and manage things.

I’m like to think I’m pretty good with goal setting every year. It’s the followup I suck with. Generally, I try and look at the month end tracking on what I want to accomplish in a year and fall off somewhere around September as my life gets crazy.

I just need to get nagged a little more. That’s where HassleMe (dead link) comes in.

It chimes in at irregular intervals you’ve set to bug you about the things you’ve asked it to bother you about. It’s like emailing yourself a nagging at a fuzzy time in the future.

Some very cool open source news just to round up.

OpenOffice 2.0[http://openoffice.org] with full support for the OpenDocument format and (IMHO) a very worthy replacement for Microsoft Office for the vast majority of people who use Word, Excel and Powerpoint in anything under uber-expert mode.

It now includes a quite cool MS Access database replacement as well as a good drawing package. Sadly, a native OSX port still lags but the Linux and Windows versions should keep everyone happy. Also, it’s free, open source and virtually future proof format-wise.

I mentioned the quick Applescript I hacked together](http://blog.wakatara.com/2005/10/10/vienna-rss-reader-and-news-aggregator-for-osx/ ) the other day to allow the superb and free Vienna rss reader and aggregator by Steve Palmer to work with my fave blogging app, MarsEdit.

Steve posted it up and in no time flat Graeme West tweaked it a bit and made it even better with attribution and block quoting. You can find his tweak here (nicely done Graeme).

I made a super minor mod to them to fit my style and am using it already myself.

I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about the software ecosystem on OSX, so I’m always surprised when someone points me at a program I’ve never heard about before, particularly when it’s better than what I’m already using.

Vienna 2.0 , the free, open source news aggregator and rss reader from Steve Palmer is fantastic. I’ve said how much I like Ranchero’s NewsGator’s NetNewsWire before, but it has been bogging down with the volume of news I’ve been looking at lately and getting slow, particularly using functions like “Mark All as Read” which sends my hard drive spinning and slows down the rest of the system. It is also commercial, and while reasonably priced for the professional version (particularly when bundled with the MarsEdit blogging program), I still prefer my programs open source and free in principle whenever possible.