Best Mac Tools

On holiday in Adelaide (that’s the capital of South Australia) I naturally had to keep my MacBook Pro and iPhone close by. Then, OmniFocus, one of the software demos I had installed early in the piece expired. As the developers would have hoped, I’ve already come to depend on OmniFocus to manage my daily workflow. It’s dead simple  to create quick reminders of things to do as a result of browsing and reading my daily emails.

Therefore, OmniFocus has become one of the first licenses I have purchased.
Continue reading »

Share

The very first thing that my wife noticed about the spanking new iPhone I bought her recently was the glassy touch screen. You might have thought that her comment would be along the lines of “amazing technology”, “beautifully elegant interface” … but no, it was more like “how will I keep it clean“!

A later observation related to the fact that she has had to develop a touch style which works with her beautifully manicured (long) fingernails. This was after discovering that several improvised “styli” did not work.

I, of course, informed her that her new iPhone’s glassy touch sensitive screen is only sensitive to human fingers. Why? Because it uses a technology called capacitive touch which I am told measures the flow of electrons through the skin. Problem is, even without the manicured nails, fingers are pretty rounded and not too precise at picking out tiny URLs in Safari.

Luckily the geniuses behind the Pogo iPhone Stylus have magically solved this problem by making a stylus that somehow tricks the iPhone into thinking it’s really a finger. What’s more, the tip of the stylus is a soft felt like material that has the added benefit of keeping your screen clean while you tap away. How do they do it? Frankly I have no idea, but hopefully it doesn’t involve grave-robbing. (Leave a comment if you know the answer).

Share

Two weeks ago I made the radical switch from Linux to Mac in the hope that I would achieve the advantages of a fully supported, integrated platform (Apple/OSX) without losing too much of the pure power, security and flexibility of Linux.

So far, my hopes have been hugely exceeded and I have already benefited from massive productivity improvements, had a great deal of fun, and achieved things in a few minutes which I have wasted hours upon hours trying to perfect on Linux.

The process of adding functionality to my MacBook Pro is still more akin to Linux than that other operating system. Still need to do some research (ie Google-ing) and often need to give the system a bit of a helping hand. Since OSX is Unix, this is straight forward to someone with my background… may be a bit foreign to someone moving from the “Dark Side”!

Continue reading »

Share