David Pitkin

I thought I would share a list of the programs and preferences that I loaded on my new intel MacBook laptop over the past week. This list is always changing as I try out new programs but here’s what I immediately needed. All are universal binaries except where noted:

Applications

• MarsEdit – blog posting application
• NetNewsWire – my favorite RSS/news reader
• Notational Velocity – PPC – a free form database of snippets or stickies
• PCalc – a scientific RPN calculator
• QuickSilver – software launcher on steroids, I tried Butler but came right back
• TextMate – What BBEdit used to be, a text editor PC users should dream of
• CoverFlow – PPC – an awesome music browsing program for iTunes
• Camino – slimmed down version of Firefox that is fast and small
• Firefox/DeerPark – Universal Binary build of the full Firefox
• Delicious Library – a personal package for keeping track of your books and DVDs
• DivX – so I can watch Top Gear
• iTerm – Open Source terminal application with bookmarks and tabs like Safari
• Microsoft Office 2004 – PPC – Excel and Word
• CandyBar – to change the system icons to just something different

Preferences

• Growl – nice Music Video style notifications
• MenuMeters – to see what is going on with my CPUs, and network traffic
• Textpander – auto keyword expansion of frequently typed text and images
• Witch – On a Mac if you press command-tab it will cycle through the open applications but not the open windows. Coming from a windows world I miss being able to tab between a specific browser window and an open application. Witch lets me do that.

The Windows software that I miss the most is Beyond Compare I hope I find something that is similar soon.

I am having some trouble with textile markup and MarsEdit

In typo now there are text filter macros to simplifiy things that you do often like linking to flickr pictures. This simple macro typo:lightbox img=”114711431” thumbsize=”thumbnail” displaysize=”medium” puts the image inline and that uses the fancy lightbox effect to display my flickr pictures.

Here is my first try If you click on the picture it overlays a larger version and does not take you away from the site. You can dismiss the picture with a single click. It took a little hacking of my typo theme to work with the new javascript and even fixing a simple bug in the typo code but its working now. Thanks Lance for the feature.

This morning I upgraded my blog to version r925 of typo . The first new feature I found is a new sidebar that shows my AIM presence. All I had to do was signup with AOL for the service and I got an HTML snippet I could paste anywhere and a key to load in programs that already knew how to consume the presence information. I had played around with the Skype presence before but their buttons were ugly.

For my new gig I was able to buy any laptop that I wanted. I jumped at the chance to get a new Intel MacBook Pro. It had everything I could want, a big display, great keyboard, and finally for an Apple speed.

I do suffer from a terrible whine from the computer but worst case I can always get it repaired from an Apple store. I did appreciate that Apple fans are typically fanatical, in the whine problem thread on the user to user forum there are defenders of the company when someone said they were going to write a bad review of their laptop, this is in a huge thread where almost everyone has gotten a clearly defective two thousand dollar computer.

This is an edited post.

Okay dangerous site ahead you have been warned, it will suck your attention: http://www.gamesforthebrain.com/

Every game so far is great, What did I search for is a cool new game I had never seen. It displays a Google results page with one word blanked out, you have to guess that word. WikiTriva is a similar one where you pick a category and a wikipedia result is shown with one word hidden and you have to guess that.

Enjoy.

Last weekend I did an animal tracking workshop at the Nashua River Watershed. It was a bit cold and the lack of snow made finding tracks hard but I learned more about noticing the clues left by the animals in the woods. Since Kristin has access to lots of birding knowledge I took a set of feathers from some animals dinner home to get identified. She found out that they were from a pheasant. Now the interesting part is that pheasants are not native to New England. They were imported fromAsia and can not survive our winter. The state grounds are stocked just for hunters by MassWildlife. A few years ago there were even state run farms to raise the birds but now it is cheaper to just buy them.

Ian just showed me the video of LED Throwies. I wonder where they found a magnetic building. It would be fun to decorate a bridge or other structure but the thought of being outside today in the arctic is not very motivating.

While waiting for Kristin at the Manchester airport last night I finished reading Joel on Software. I received it as a birthday gift and tore right through it ahead of my other reading. I read Joel’s blog but did not know he was responsible for much of the Excel that I know and love. The book was referred to as light bathroom reading to me and I think that is a commentary on the company that I have been keeping lately. It was fantastically easy to read. I liked that the painless software schedules was complete with 13 steps. Most of it seems like common sense to me but that might be because I have had the opportunity to work with such amazing people at Glassbook, Adobe, Kubi and BostonPost.

I especially enjoyed the rants against the .Net framework and subsequent essays admiring its brilliance and the corresponding performance boost. I have found .Net to have lots of the good parts of Java as well as a lot of the great parts of the Windows API. This comes with a burden the dreaded downloading of the 20MB framework but that only has to happen once.

My friend Travis who is thinking about switching to a Macintosh was amazed at how cool the Apple iCal application is. Windows Vista seems to have a very similar calendar feature. I have a few iCalendar subscriptions from upcoming.org and backpack but had never given it much thought.

The Calendar idea sparked up again with the launch of 30boxes I started to use it and was able to subscribe to some of my calendar feeds right in the web application. I completed the calendaring circle buy installing the open source RemoteCalendars .Net application to integrate my iCalendar feeds into Outlook 2003.