nutMac

This really is a bit of a fluff piece but us Mac users have to find something to cheer about in out tiny Mac-o-sphere. I don’t know much of it’s history or origin, but I stumbled upon a great mac app rating site today, CoolMacApps.com. All I could really get from it was this:

CoolMacApps.com was born out of frustration… and out of an addiction; An addiction to cool software, and a frustration with the current top-ten lists and file repositories out there.

This was little more than a fun way to waist a few minutes in the day, and only served to confirm my feelings about a great number of apps I was aware of. One thing that came as a surprise on this app voting site was RapidWeavers placement in the number 1 spot. Not that I ever doubted RapidWeavers strength and ability, but what shocked me is that it has beet out some of the more generic, globally used apps like FireFox or Adium.

Recent polls have shown that only 8% of North Americans have engaged in deep internet activities like building web sites. On the flip side, nearly everyone has used a web browser or IM client. I find it hard to imagine that RapidWeaver, a web building tool, would beat out such staples to mac computing as a web browser and an IM client. It’s just not in the numbers.

What’s really at play? Well… Web 2.0, meet Community 2.0! I happen to have a bit of an insiders knowledge of the whole RapidWeaver machine. If I was a betting man, I would always put my investment dollars on the company with the ravenous, blood thirsty, go-to-battle-and-die-for-your-app kind of community backing that RapidWeaver has behind it. If you want to see what I mean sometime, go to the RapidWeaver support forum and just arbitrarily flame the app in any old thread and watch the blood bath that ensues. You’ll want to change your mailing address before embarking on such suicidal endeavors, mind you (and let it be known that I don’t actually condone forum trolling).

This isn’t to say that the ratings are rigged in anyway; I really do believe that RapidWeaver is an excellent app. But I do think that RapidWeaver does have an unfair advantage when the owners simply need to put out a single call to the one gathering place that you will likely find 90% of all RapidWeaver users and the hordes will flock by the thousands to pledge their allegiance to their beloved RapidWeaver.

Who did I vote for? Here is just a few: RapidWeaver (of course), Quicksilver, Sticky Windows, Parallels, TextMate, iClip, Inquisitor and NewsFire.

---

Technorati Tags: CoolMacApps, Rapidweaver, FireFox, Adium, web 2.0

“The day… the music… died… and they’ll be singing, bye-bye miss American pie…” On July 15th, internet radio as we know it will end. That’s the new date (it was May 15th) that the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has set for internet radio broadcasters like Pandora Media to pay up on retro active royalty payments (increased from 0.0008 to 0.0019), which will see many web casters owing in the millions.

This is another example of how the RIAA and their fossilized business moedel is so flawed, they can’t even see how they are hurting themselves and those they represent. To effectively put an end to internet radio is to put another nail in the coffin of legitimate music trade. Internet radio already pays their dues, more so than terrestrial radio and I would be so bold as to state that the number of listeners to internet radio might even be on par with terrestrial radio.

I think the power of internet radio is greater than terrestrial radio. Here is my reason, plain and simple: people who listen to internet radio do so because they made a conscious decision to do so. They went online, sought out a suitable stream and started listening. That’s not always the case with terrestrial radio. How often do you get in your car and the radio is already on… background noise, right? You go to the store, radio is on… do you notice? At the office, the radio is pumped overhead… are you paying attention? But internet radio you are listening to because you chose to find it.

If the RIAA and the CRB want to hurt internet radio, let’s hurt the industry they are trying to protect. Symbolic of the original deadline issued by the CRB I urge all people worldwide to refrain from buying music on May 15th. Don’t buy from iTunes, don’t buy from Amazon, don’t buy from your local brick and mortar store… DON’T BUY MUSIC ON MAY 15th!

---

Technorati Tags: RIAA, Copyright Royalty Board, pandora, internet radio

Now I don’t mean to infer that because I am a web developer and because you are reading this blog that you must be a web developer yourself, but I bet that a fair number of you are (just a hunch). I realize that I don’t actually talk a great deal about web design and that’s because that is not the whole premise of this site. nutMac is more about speed of workflow and productivity and the tricks and tools that help. That being said, I can’t ignore my own industry anymore than I can own arm, so I want to speak to the web designers and developers out there for a moment.

It can be said that we, the web designers and developers of the world are the uncounted workforce. A recent article on A List Apart has recognized this fact stating that:

People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession.

Does this accurately reflect you? I know this article struck a cord in me. Not just because I care to know just how I rate and rank with the global community but because I think it’s important to be counted in a notoriously unregulated market. I find every time I bid on a new project or negotiate a new consultation contract, I am testing the waters with pricing all over again. There is far too much uncertainty in the market today.

One of the misconceptions I battle on an ongoing basis is this: most people looking to hire you for a web site think that a “web designer” can do it all. Now granted, a great many of us “designers” can cover more than a few fields, like adding a bit DOM scripting or embedding a flash file in a page but the reality is a “web designer” in the strictest sense will design the look and feel and basic functionality of your site.

How do we battle the uncertainty and misconception? I am not sure entirely, but one thing that is certainly going to help is the survey A List Apart is conducting. It’s an 18 page, online questionnaire designed to learn more about the web industry. If you work in the web industry in an manner, please take a moment to fill out this survey and help our industry become a better known, more standardized one. Click here to take part.

Technorati Tags: A List Apart, web survey, web design, web industry

Isn’t karma a bitch! How many of us are guilty of Microsoft bashing? How often did we poke fun at the long delays for the release of Vista? And now we eat humble pie? That’s the bast way to describe Apples latest official statement concerning the release of Leopard that is now slated for October.

What went wrong? For the first time since Jobs return to the throne, it looks as though the Apple has dropped the ball on it’s normally concrete marketing model; tease, rumor, fake-out, release on time (or release early)… This has been the way of things for so long, it almost hurts to see Apple fumble like this. More often then not, we are not even aware of a potentially earth moving product release until “Boom!”, it’s upon us like the Sunday chores.

Growing pains. Apple is becoming a big, big company with many devisions and many responsibilities; they are now a multi-media conglomerate with big ambitions. They have iTunes, they have hardware, they have software and they are pushing for the iPhone (blamed for this particular delay). They are certain to feel the same speed bumps that their counterparts in the industry have felt for so long. As the statement so eloquently remarks, “Life often presents tradeoffs…”, so we had better get used to seeing life-just-happen to Apple like it has been to the rest of the industry.

Technorati Tags: Apple Inc., Leopard, OS X 10.5, iPhone

If you love Macs and know nothing about Quicksilver, I won’t preach at you here but I will insist that you at least visit their site and read up a little bit on it because you are honestly missing out on the most powerful utility/app/interface to hit any software platform, ever. Even the Windows community talks about Quicksilver. If they’re talking about it, you should at least know what Quicksilver is. OK, I’m stepping off my box now… let’s get on with it.

What do I have to say about Quicksilver? If you are in any way serious about cranking up your speed and workflow, there are certain plateaus you need to achieve. At risk of getting all zen on yo’ass, it has to be said that you must become one with your computer. There, I said it; now how will you do it?

There is a saying that travels around a bit, “Act, don’t think.” If you are dragging a cursor around your screen with squinted eyes and a furled brow looking for something that is eluding you, then you have obviously never heard of this saying. If you have more hot-key combinations then you do keys on the keyboard, and they are all accessible with just your left hand, then you are fully aware of this mantra. This is, to me, what Quicksilver is all about. It’s all about doing what your brain wants and doing it from one place.

With Quicksilver I will contribute to a handful of blogs, upload images, launch apps, quite apps, work with apps, launch recently opened files, execute scripts, drill into folders without digging, find files without looking, email clients without opening an email client… all of this from one space, from one mindset… and it all starts with one hot-key combo.

The Quicksilver home page eloquently states,

“Quicksilver: A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.”

Think about that for a minute:

“unify - make or become united, uniform, or whole”

“extensible - an architectural property of a program that allows its capabilities to expand”

Whether you apply that to the app itself, you the operator or your workflow, it’s deep no matter what.

I know that familiarity with ones own computer environment is key to increased productivity and an intimate knowledge with ones own operating system and underlying foundation an important part of that. No single workflow should hang in the balance of any operators proficiency with one app, but one week with Quicksilver and you will undoubtedly become more productive at anything you do.

If this article has tweaked your interest at all about Quicksilver, then know there will be more from me.

Also, please take a moment to read articles from other Quicksilver advocates:

Merlin Mann | Dan Dickinson | The Apple Blog | Lifehacker

Technorati Tags: Quicksilver, Merlin Mann, workflow, productivity

Unlike the other slightly militant Apple users I tend to read an entire article that John writes and try to sift beyond the hit-baiting, Apple slagging that he tends to do from time to time and actually think hard about what he says. In this article, John tries his hand at a slightly inflammatory dig at Apple and the iPhone and Apples naive approach to the mobile market.

While I can see a great deal of merit behind what John is saying about the tough market that Apple wishes to tackle, I think he makes one gross oversight in regards to the pace at which the mobile fashion trends come and go. For starters, the Motorola RAZR today doesn’t look much different than last year or the year before. And the Blackberry? Hardly lighting fast model releases.

The second retort would be to suggest that perhaps, like the iPod, the iPhone has an esthetic that will stand for one or more years between model releases. It’s not like there is much that can be changed. Most other products in the market simply change their keypads. I am sure before long there will be iPhone GUI themes allowing users to change their iPhone esthetic 6 ways until Sunday on a whim and the touch of a screen.

Technorati Tags: Dvorak, iPhone, Apple, Blackberry

Well it all comes down to this. Don’t all categories lead to the same place anyhow? Well that’s my view anyhow. One of the biggest speed bumps in my day is digging. No not THAT DIGGING, I mean digging for files. I hate drilling down folder after folder, only to make it to the end of a branch that doesn’t contain what I am looking for.

Don’t get me wrong, I do have a file structure on my hard drive (that’s always in a state of flux), but when I am in need of a regular clip of text or snippet of code or launching an oft used app, I always use either Spotlight or Quicksilver.

So what’s my point? I have decided to forgo the usual “Category” link structure in leu of the BigBox; one of those giant, store everything boxes that contains the whole stinking load. Why? Two reasons:

1. It just where my mind is at right now.
2. The only Quicksilver script I could find to write post from my desktop only supports posts to the default folder.

How will you/I find anything? With the search field of course. Will this change? I could, but I doubt it.

Technorati Tags: Quicksilver, Spotlight, Digg, BigBox