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Favourite Software of 2007

I’m not a fan of big expensive applications (with the notable exception of Final Cut Pro), but I love open source and shareware that is the product of small companies or individuals. There is something satisfying about sending money to someone who crafts something useful and affordable. Over the past few years I’ve come to rely upon a small collection of applications to read, write and create things for the web. With many of them I didn’t realize how much they have become part of what I do until I switched to my newer MacBook Pro and there were a lot of things missing.
Essential software for me would be NetNewsWire, MarsEdit, Pukka, Twitterific, Flickr Export, Graphic Converter, and Transmit.
Continue…

December 23, 2007 del.icio.us, flickrexport, graphicconverter, lists, marsedit, netnewswire, pukka, shareware, software, transmit, twitterific

Bye Bye Browser

I’ve been using the browser less and less since I started using NetNewsWire to read RSS feeds. It’s one the best shareware investments that I’ve made. It’s simple, well-designed and works well. Most of the time I can quickly get a lot of information via the feeds and NNW lets me check out things that I’m really interested in. When I used to click on a link it would open in my browser which is usually Safari, but I’m using Firefox a bit now. Now I’m using the latest beta which makes a good thing even better. Support has been added for Atom feeds and the weblog editor has been broken out into a new application called MarsEdit. The thing that has changed the way I look at things the most is that now (thanks to WebCore) I view pages within a tab that pops up in NNW. It’s a great idea and now I’m going outside to the browser less when I want to check something out. Simplifying things is always good.
MarsEdit is something that I wasn’t sure I’d use that much. But I’ve been using it a bit and I think that I’ll use it more. I’m not using Movable Type as much now which is what I used the weblog editor for before, but I am using Blogger and I can post to Blogger using MarsEdit with the quirk of not being able to set the title, but that’s on the way. I’m also thinking of using it a bit with this blog which is Blosxom-based with me editing the posts in BBEdit. The change in the interface of MarsEdit is that it now works and looks a bit more like email, which makes a lot of sense. The email workflow is closer to how blogging works intellectually. That being said, why am I writing longer posts now?

October 17, 2004 atom, bbedit, blogger, blosxom, firefox, marsedit, movabletype, netnewswire, rss, safari, software, web

Final Cut Pro HD

I’ve been working with Final Cut Pro for a long time. It’s one of those programs that I loved right from the first time that I’ve used it. It feels comfortable to me and it’s like working with an old friend. With the latest version which adds HD instead of a version number (but it’s really version 4.5) it’s even better. I haven’t done any HD stuff with it, but someday I’m sure that I will. What I like about FCP is that it doesn’t get in my way. I can sketch out ideas fairly quickly now and don’t have to think much about how I will do it. When I’m editing I want to focus on the story I’m telling and how things will look and sound without needing to remember a lot. One of the challenges with any application that you’ve been using for a while is to learn new tricks and to break out of old habits. I’m using some of the new features such as the full-screen preview with an external monitor. It makes a big difference in how I work. The other thing is that I’m consciously trying to work in a more visual way and moving away from a list of clips to thumbnails arranged in a bin. My secret dream is to combine some of the very cool XML parts of FCP with CVS to have a way to roll back to different edits and allow multiple editors to work together. All of the pieces seem to be there and I’m hoping that Apple is thinking this way too. I would love to set something like that up, but I don’t know if I’ll have the time. Wouldn’t it be great to have something like a Project Manager that would let you check out the latest cut of the film that you’re working on? You’d have the captured footage on a local hard drive and would just need the XML that describes the timeline. Then I could change one part of the timeline and someone else could change the other. You’d just need to make sure that your footage was in sync and it would work. I’m working on a simplified version of this (without CVS) that will use an iPod and maybe iDisk to share and synchronize things, but true version control would be the ultimate goal.

July 7, 2004 editing, finalcutpro, software, video

Omni Outliner

One of the things that happens quite often is that you don’t notice the things that are always in front of you. That’s what has happened with Omni Outliner from the Omni Group. I registered it last year and use it just about every day. I started using it because I needed to organize a bunch of information for a report that I was working on. I was able to structure and write the bulk of the report and then move it into another program for laying stuff out. I really like working in the outlining mode as it helps me structure things and flesh them out. At some point I think that I’ll be using Keynote to create support material (but I’m waiting for a teacher deal like the one that was available in the U.S. for Keynote and iLife together), and I can export my outlines to Keynote to become presentations. Now I make lesson plans with it and use it for all sorts of planning…I’m just starting to use styles with it to make the outlines look better. It’s simple, well-designed and powerful. The only downside is that I also use Omni Graffle which I registered at the same time, but the latest version of Outliner doesn’t work with Graffle…before I could drag and drop an outline onto Graffle and get a neat diagram…but I’ll have to upgrade to the latest version of Graffle to do that again. But Graffle is still great for creating all sorts of graphics, but the update adds a lot…

The most inspirational part of using Outliner is the user community… the application is filled with features that I keep learning about through what other people are doing. The column adding features have made me think of using Outliner to keep track of student marks. Some people use Outliner for project management or accounting and there is a whole page filled with samples that you can download from the extras page.

May 12, 2003 keynote, omnigraffle, omnioutliner, software

SBook5

I was recently reading an article on the O’Reilly Network about “Freeware Gems for Mac OS X” and found it interesting. One of the neat things about OS X is that it has spawned a whole new wave of development and applications. The great thing about OS X is that it combines the Mac with Unix in a pretty package. You can admire and use the system mainly on the surface or dive into development and manage stuff with the command line. The most interesting free app in the article is an address book called SBook. SBook was created by Simson Garfinkle in 1991 for NeXT (which OS X owes a lot to).

I’m actually quite happy with the built-in address book in OS X and I love how I can use iSync to keep my address book on the machines that I use and my Handspring Visor in sync. But I thought that I’d try out the program as I like Simson’s writing and if he went to the trouble of reviving a program I should try it out. What intrigued me is how he mentions in the description that the search algorithms are quite paoerful and that they are very fast and parts of them made their way into Mail.app and the OS X built-in address book. So I tried it and really like it. I love how it’s a free-form address book, so you don’t need to fill in certain fields. It figures out what is what… a name, a business, an email address, a phone number, etc. So you can type lots of notes explaining things and mix it all together however you like. Then you can go to a Web site, send an email, dial the phone, or print an envelope or label. It’s fast and searches almost instantly. You can even drag pictures into it! I think that this is going to be my address book of choice soon. I still miss a feature of Apple’s Address book such as being able to look up a map by clicking on an address, but I’m sure that it will show up soon.

May 8, 2003 contacts, handspring, isync, mac, mail, next, osx, sbook, simsongarfinkle, software, unix, visor

Graphic Converter 4.6

One of the applications that I have fallen in love with is Graphic Converter. I used it years ago and then I started using Photoshop and didn’t think that I’d use anything else. Then OS X came along and the Photoshop version took a long time to come out. Then I wasn’t able to upgrade to version 7, but I needed to do a lot of image processing as I was working on “When Voices Rise…” and I didn’t want to do a lot of work in Photoshop 6 in Classic as I was using Final Cut Pro 3 under OS X. I scanned hundreds of photos and documents and needed to resize and crop them to make them more manageable. I found Graphic Converter, tried it out, loved it, and bought it. Small, efficient and fast. I used the Browse feature to select images and resized and adjusted them for use. Then when I was authoring the DVD I had almost 100 images that I wanted to use in a slide show for the DVD, but I needed to rescale and resize the images in a non-proportional way and also to place them on a black background. GC’s Batch was able to save me a ton of time doing that. It’s what I use to resize and prepare images for the Web and iStockPhoto when I upload stuff there. It even takes a lot of Photoshop plugins!
There have been a few updates over the last year to GC and I dutifully download them, but I hadn’t been using it a lot. But for some reason I hadn’t poked around in it a lot. Then I had an image open I noticed that there was a new Stamp tool! That was the only thing that I really, really missed from previously using Photoshop as the colour-correction, levels, and other image adjustments work great in GC. The browser has also been updated (in an iPhoto-like way) and there is a neat catalogue HTML export that I may play with as well. I have to check out updates a bit more carefully!

April 30, 2003 graphicconverter, os x, photoshop, software

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