David Pitkin

Nokia Europe released a N-series Mac app to transfer music AND pictures from your phone to iTunes and iPhoto! Previously it was only for the N91 that could play music from iTunes. Your phone connected with bluetooth can show up as a camera in iPhoto to transfer pictures from and you can fill your phone any % you want of random songs from your iTunes library when connected.

This is a Macintosh week, as I am swapping my HP tablet and MacBook Pro on and off every work week so I can play with both operating systems. A new version of Twitterific and the Nokia app today were great Mac additions.

I installed Vista this weekend, it did not live up to the hype as all reports have said.

I had a return love affair with my Macintosh. I either found or used all these new applications and features the next day with very pleasing results:

BluePhoneElite Version 2 Beta ! Now with Symbian and great SMS and support. This app integrates my mobile phone with the laptop, for example I can type SMS messages on the keybaord and send via the phone (so replies are easy for the recipient), it pauses iTunes when the phone goes out of bluetooth range, and flashes the address book entry on the screen when someone calls resulting in a very pretty caller-id, more features I am sure are in there.

Timezone support in iCal: I am scheduling a meeting today with people in Melbourne, Australia and California without access to enterprise calendaring and scheduling. I found the check box in iCal preferences to turn on Timezone’s! This puts a drop down menu in the upper left corner to pick what time zone you are viewing the calendar. It is a great feeling when I want an application to do something smart and I go search and it is there and better than I could have imagined, the opposite is more often true.

Coda I help a friend put up pictures on his business website Kenney Land Care Coda a new Panic app is great for just that. Added bonus it imported my Transmit bookmark, nice because they are the same company. Small gripe the ssh client does not use my terminal ssh keys.

Twitterific There is a little check box to “update IM status” with your latest tweet, I use Adium and not iChat. I would have expected the dialog box to ask what IM client so that different ones would work with the feature, I checked it anyway. Nope it just works with both.

• FlickrMate Last I installed this TextMate bundle which lets me easily insert my flickr pictures a document without a switch to a web browser, very slick.

Now for some perspective, when I installed Vista ULTIMATE using the retail dvd the next thing I did was put in the Office 2007 ULTIMATE dvd. It was not recognized, I thought the dvd could be bad so I put it in my Mac and it read it just fine. I figured out that the dvd burner I used to install Vista is not supported/recognized. Wait you say, I installed from it? Somehow the installer has more or better drive support than the system itself, I don’t understand that at all, guess it is good I can reboot back into XP.

A very nice idle screen display for a mac.

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