Apple Mac HQ

If you’ve spent any time on the Mac, no doubt you have seen the icon to the right. NetNewsWire has been around for over five years and was one of the early RSS readers available for the Mac. NetNewsWire was originally shareware, but went freeware earlier this year.

For the first time, the Software Pick Of The Month is actually multiple applications. Collectively, all applications are from NewsGator.

I’ve talked about NetNewsWire many times on this blog. If you have used Mail.app, you know how to get around NewNewsWire. On the left is a list of blogs, on the top right pane is a list of posts, the bottom right is the text of the currently selected post. You also have something called clippings, which is kind of like an inbox for posts you want to come back to later. The UI is clean and a search box allows you to easily find a post within a feed. You can see a small screenshot of the application below.

Up next is NetNewsWire. Again? You bet, NetNewsWire for iPhone (iTunes link). Basically NetNewsWire for iPhone is a scaled down version of the full blown Mac client. The best feature of NetNewsWire for iPhone is that you can use it offline, just like the Mac version. While the iPhone version isn’t perfect, it’s pretty good. It would be great if you could mark posts as unread and if pictures were downloaded with the post so you can see them while you are offline. Despite those two gripes, NetNewsWire is a great addition to any iPhone.

In addition to a Mac and iPhone client, there is also a web application. NewsGator Online allows you to view your feeds online. It’s features are similar to many online RSS readers so I won’t bore you with the details. One very handy feature is that you can manage which feeds show up on the iPhone client. If you only want to see your must read feeds on NNW for iPhone, it’s easy to do so with NewsGator Online.

Last but not least, NewsGator online mobile edition. NewsGator mobile gives you a slimmed down version of NewsGator Online. You can visit NewsGator mobile on any phone. If you visit it on your iPhone, you’ll automatically be redirected to the iPhone optimized version. I still use NewsGator mobile despite having NNW for iPhone installed too. Why? NewsGator mobile allows you to view a post, but not have it marked as read until you click the “Read” link. This is handy if you encounter a long post that you want to come back to later. Viewing the post on NNW for iPhone marks it as read.

So why on earth did I choose all these applications for the Software Pick Of The Month? It’s all about one word really, synchronization. While you can use these products by themselves, they are designed to be used together. NewsGator has designed a powerful synchronization engine behind their product lineup.

Once you sign up for NewsGator Online (top right corner), you are ready to enter RSS reading bliss. Within both NNW for Mac and NNW for iPhone, you sign into your NewsGator account and the client will download all the feeds you are subscribed to. When you mark any post as read, that change is synchronized across all other NewsGator clients that you are using. When you delete a feed on one client, the feed gets deleted on the others. I can read a post a work, home, or on the go and the change is reflected on every NewsGator product I’m using. There is even a RSS reader for Windows from NewsGator called FeedDemon.

Simply put, if you read RSS feeds from more than one location, you’re missing out if you aren’t using NewsGator’s products. I simply can’t recommend their products enough. If synchronization matters to you, check out the products mentioned in this post. If you aren’t using NewsGators products, what are you using and why? Let me know in the comments.

I’ve wanted to write about Skitch for some time now. In its most simple form, Skitch is a screenshot application. In its most complex form, Skitch is a drop dead simple, yet powerful, image manipulation tool.

When you launch Skitch, it shows up as a menu bar icon. You’ll most often use Skitch when you activate it with a keyboard shortcut, though you can click the menu bar icon too. You can capture images several different ways.

1. Drag-able cross-hair snapshot
2. Full screen snapshot
3. iSight snapshot

Once you take a snapshot, you’ll be presented with the image in the Skitch window.

From the Skitch window, you have an enormous number of options. You can add text to images, add arrows, erase, circle, color fill, resize, and so much more. Once you’re done manipulating the image, just click the “drag me” tab (see the red arrow) and move the image wherever you want. You can drag the image straight from the Skitch window into emails, the Flickr upload tool, or just about anywhere else. You don’t need to save the image, just drag it!

Along with the Skitch software, there is also Skitch.com. Skitch.com is a webservice that gives you “1-click uploading of images for fast and fun image sharing.” Skitch.com gives you a place to store your Skitch images if you don’t have online storage else where. You can set the Skitch images to public, secret (open but with a secret URL), and private. People can even add comments to your Skitch.com images. If you want to get comments from multiple people on an image, Skitch.com will certainly come in handy.

If you take screenshots of any kind or frequently add text to images, Skitch is absolutely invaluable. If you are blogging and don’t have Skitch, you’re wasting time. Skitch is perhaps the single most useful tool on my Mac. Don’t know if Skitch is for you? Watch the video below for a quick 3 minute video tutorial.

Skitch has been in beta for quite some time. Skitch is currently free, though I’m sure it will cost something once it leaves beta. Skitch was created by Plasq, the folks behind Comic Life.

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.

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.

I was recently on a business trip and one of my coworkers decided to buy an iPod Classic while we were at the Birmingham Apple Store. The next day he was looking to put some content on his iPod. In addition to a few songs on his laptop, he also had some videos he converted to avi files some time ago. He didn’t know how to get those videos on his iPod though. That’s when I thought of iSquint.

iSquint is a simple tool for converting videos to an iPod compatible format. As the screenshot below shows, it’s very easy to start converting video. Just drag a file into the application window, choose your optimization format and quality, and click start. If you selected the “Add to iTunes” checkbox, your video will be added to iTunes when it’s done converting. Sync your iPod and it will be transferred to it. It really is that simple. If you’re looking to put video on your iPod, iSquint is a great tool.

iSquint is available free of charge from Techspansion. iSquint is the little brother of VisualHub, the fantastic video conversion tool that I frequently use to add content to my Apple TV.

I don’t know about you, but I love to listen to music. I listen to music at home, at work, on the train, in the car, and in between. I have a steady playlist of artists I like to listen to: Black Keys, Allman Brothers, Guster, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Will Hoge, and many more. As much as I enjoy those artists, I enjoy finding new music too. This is where the March Software Pick Of The Month comes in.

iScrobbler is a small program that sits in your menubar. The beauty of iScrobbler is the ability to send the music you listen to on your iPod or in iTunes to the Last.fm music service. Last.fm is basically a social network built around music. Even though other social networks have a music presence, music is the focus on Last.fm.

As iScrobbler sends music to your Last.fm profile, Last.fm begins to crunch the data behind those songs and creates a whole host of recommend artists, friends, concerts, neighbours, videos, and more. The more music you “scrobble”, as they call it, the better those recommend items become. What I like about iScrobbler is that it performs the intended function (sending your music to Last.fm) and gets out of the way. It’s a super easy program to use and it performs flawlessly. Using this program I’ve found some great new artists on Last.fm, most notably Sara Bareilles.

iScrobbler sends what you listen to Last.fm just as it should. In addition to music, it also sends your podcasts too. While I don’t care if people see what podcasts I listen to, I’d like to keep Last.fm focused on just my music. Here’s a tip from Rory Parle to stop iScrobbler from sending your podcasts to Last.fm.

1. Quit iScrobbler
2. Type the following in the terminal: defaults write org.flexistentialist.iscrobbler “Track Filters” ‘(”Podcast”)’
3. Start iScrobbler
4. Now your podcasts won’t be sent to Last.fm!

iScrobbler is free and can be downloaded from the iScrobbler group forum. If you’re on Last.fm and have a similar taste in music, add me to your friends list.

I’m introducing a new featured post here at AMHQ this month and it’s called the “Software Pick Of The Month”. Each month I’ll feature one piece of software that I’ve enjoyed using recently. Sometimes I’ll do a full review of the software, and other times I’ll just post a little blurb about the software.

My first Software Pick Of The Month is called ColorTagGen by R.A.D. Productions. ColorTagGen is a perfect example of a piece of Mac software. ColorTagGen does one thing, and it does it well. Simply put, ColorTagGen generates HTML/CSS tags from a color on your screen. Do you want to find the hex code for a specific color on a website you like so you can use the same color on your website? With ColorTagGen, finding the hex color is a simple two click process. Open ColorTagGen and click the magnifying glass, then click the color you want. Copy and paste the hex code given into your CSS and you’re done.

ColorTagGen is free and available from R.A.D Productions here. In addition to downloading the application, you can also download the source code. There is no OS X requirement to run ColorTagGen given on the website, but I’ve run it on Tiger with no problems. If you do any sort of web design, this is a great tool to add to your application arsenal.