Apple Mac HQ

Back when I was on Windows, I would often make various lists of things in text files and stick them on my desktop somewhere. Text files were fast, easy, and required little thought about fonts, text size, etc. While the creation of the text files were easy, organization of the files was certainly not. Once I had a number of lists, my desktop (or the folder they were in) became this crazy explosion of files. When I found xPad on the Mac, my lists became so much easier.

xPad is a free application from Garrett Murray. xPad is like an all in one TextEdit and document folder. You can create files from within the application and then access then from the expandable document drawer (see pic). You have the flexibility to change the font, text size, font color, highlight text, text strikethrough, and more.

I use xPad to jot down short notes about things I want to remember, copy for web pages, conversations about specific topics, and packing lists. xPad is absolutely perfect for those short little files of text that you are working on where you don’t care about text formatting. xPad makes it dead simple to refer back to the text files later. I open xPad every time I go on a business trip or go camping. I have a packing list for both occasions inside xPad that makes it very easy to pack.

xPad is a free application that requires OS X 10.3 or higher. The application seems to be no longer in active development, but it has worked just fine for me in Leopard. Every time I upgrade my OS, I just use the handy export feature to make sure I have a backup of my xPad files. At one point the application was going to go open source, but that hasn’t happened yet. If you just want to toss some text into a file, xPad might be the application you’re looking for.

Popularity: 1% [?]

I often tag articles on my del.icio.us account to read later. At some point I’ll go back through my del.icio.us account and read the article I’ve tagged with the “readlater” label. Sometimes it’s later that day when I read the article, and sometimes it’s later that month (or longer). I recently found a cool application to help me read those article when I ordinarily would not have the time.

Lips is a great little application for converting text into audio (aiff format). I use Lips to get all those “readlater” articles into my iPod or iPhone so I can listen to them on my way to/from work. Here’s my workflow:

1. Toss the article text into lips
2. Hit the Export button and save the file to my desktop
3. Drop the file into iTunes
4. Change the genre on the file to Article; which is a custom genre I created
5. The next time I sync my iPod or iPhone the article is automatically tossed on the device through the use of a smart playlist. The smart playlist just looks for any audio with the Article genre.

Here’s a screenshot of the Lips UI:

Lips gives you the choice of using various Leopard voices. In addition to choosing which voice you use, you can also change the voice speed. The resulting audio is very listenable through my ear buds. While I like Lips, it could use a few small enhancements to make it even better.

• A stop button. When you choose to play the text directly in Lips, the only way I found to stop it is to kill the application
• An option to export the audio directly into iTunes

I realize that text to audio Applescripts exists. Lips is nice because it allows you to take text from multiple pages (or sources) and export them to one file. The Applescript methods I’ve seen are limited to what text you can highlight at one time, limiting the audio to text from one page. Lips is a free application and requires OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Popularity: 4% [?]

The newest version of the ever popular Firefox browser will launch today at 10:00 PDT. While the news is exciting for all users, Mac users should be particularly excited due to the “under the hood” changes. The biggest change took place in the Gecko engine (version 1.9) for OS X , which was largely switched to Cocoa. While Gecko is not entirely Carbon free, the days of Carbon code in the Gecko engine appear to be numbered.

If you’re into the super geeky under the hood change details, you can check out a blog post by Josh Aas, one of the Mozilla Mac developers. Josh has even posted about the development for Gecko 1.9.1 for OS X.

The official Download Day website for Firefox 3 is HERE. It sounds like Firefox 3 will be the best Mac version of Firefox yet!

Popularity: 7% [?]

Looks like I might be a little late on this piece of news, but I only found out about it a few minutes ago.

If you like (or just need) Windows on your Mac, one of the leaders in Windows virtualization on the Mac has released Beta 1 of their product. VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1 is now available for download. Beta 1 will set you back absolutely nothing; it’s free!

Among the new features in Fusion 2.0:

• Multi-Display Support
• Experimental 3D Acceleration
• Easier Printing
• USB Improvements

The blog post announcing the Beta 1 release has a cool video of the multi-display feature. If you would like to test the beta, you can download it HERE. Don’t forget to file bugs or issues with the Fusion team if you encounter a problem!

Popularity: 13% [?]

In a somewhat surprising announcement, David Watanabe has announced that Inquisitor, his search extension for Safari, has been acquired by Yahoo. This announcement was made simultaneously with the release of Inquisitor 3.1. Among the changes in Inquisitor 3.1 is the default search engine for new users is now set to Yahoo (it was previously Google).

Details on the acquisition are a little scarce. No word on the acquisition price or other details. What is known is that Watanabe will not join Yahoo, but will remain the lead developer of Inquisitor.

So what’s in this for Yahoo? I suspect the acquisition is just an attempt to buy search queries. The search box in Safari is powered by Google. If you install Inquisitor, the search box now defaults to Yahoo. Yahoo is paying for your searches.

Disclosure: I own a small number of Yahoo shares.

Popularity: 20% [?]

If you updated to Camino 1.6 in the past few days, you’ll notice that 1Password is not compatible with the newest Camino release. Luckily the developers behind 1Password are on top of things. The developers (Agile Web Solutions) issued an update to the great Password Manager the same day Camino 1.6 was released.

Launch the 1Password application (from your applications folder) and you should be notified that 1Password 2.5.13 is available for download. If not, just select the Check for Updates option from the menu-bar. Once you have 1Password updated, just relaunch Camino and you’ll see the familiar 1Password button in your application menu-bar!

It’s great that the developers are so quick to release an update to support a new browser release. If you’re not familiar with 1Password, head on over to the 1Password website. A license for 1Password will set you back $34.95 USD.

Popularity: 21% [?]

If you’ve been reading the blog for more than a few months, no doubt you heard me talk about MacHeist before. The folks behind MacHeist released a boxless “retail bundle” recently. Basically it’s like the other MacHeist software bundles but without the hoopla involved; missions, locked applications, etc.

The bundle includes 12 applications and will set you back $49 USD. The bundle will be on sale for a “limited time”, but no word on exactly how long it will last. Here’s a list of the applications included:

Awaken
Cha-Ching
CoverSutra
DEVONthink Personal
iClip
Overflow
Wallet
WriteRoom
XSlimmer
Enigmo
Bugdom 2
Nanosaur 2

I purchased the last MacHeist bundle but I’m going to skip this one. While there is no denying the value of the bundle, there just doesn’t seem to be that “must have” or killer app to take it over the top. Both the previous MacHeist bundle contained that one applications that pretty much sealed the deal to purchase it. While that killer application will vary from user to user, an application like TextMate or Pixelmator can really bring in the buyers.

The bundle is on sale now and you can buy it HERE.

Popularity: 27% [?]