by ·2 Comments

Since I’ve got a full-time job I tend to leave my former primary source of computing, my dear little black MacBook, at home more and more. Since my company will assign me to various different projects in the future I have to get used to working in different environments and on varying operating systems. My daily dose of communications consists of several different protocols/programs and just lately I guess I found a way to have each of them available on my laptop with a designated client as well as online, via web-based apps.
Here is a short breakdown:

Email
RoundcubeSince I solely rely on IMAP, there is no problem at all, keeping my email accessible wherever I am. There’s Apple Mail on my computer, the already quite awesome Roundcube Webmail that I’ve got running on my server. And for all those times, I can’t access any of both, I keep my good old friend Mutt close as well.

RSS
NewsgatorWell, that’s a completely different story. I really wished Google Reader would synchronize with various desktop RSS clients but it doesn’t seem like that could be any time soon. So in the meantime I’m gonna stick to NetNewsWire which, to me, serves the best interface on the Mac and, with the license I bought over a year ago, automatically syncs to Newsgator which features a semi decent web-based RSS reader.

IM
MeeboThat point is really pretty much settled. Nothing beats Adium as a desktop client on the Mac. And absolutely nothing even comes close to one of the most awesome web-apps: Meebo. With a single username/password combination I can log in to their website and I’m instantly online in AIM, Google Talk, ICQ and MSN.

Calendar
PlaxoI’m a heavy user of iCal on the Mac because it syncs perfectly to my two cellphones. And lazy as I am, I tend to forget a lot of appointments, so it’s absolutely necessary to always have this data with me. For a long time I was thinking about a way to sync my iCal to Google Calendar, since I already got a Google account anyway. But there didn’t seem to be any easy, cheap way to accomplish this. Just a few days ago I finaly found a remedy for my calendaring problems: Plaxo
Plaxo allows you to sync your whole AdressBook and iCal in one swoop and features a really nice calendar interface on their webpage, that also lets me add events via the web that get synced back to my laptop whenever I turn it on. I have to say I’m really satisfied with that solution and their whole service seems quite promising.

Contact Data
For quite a long time I kept exporting my Mac OS X AddressBook as a Vcard file and uploaded it to my GoogleMail account, so in case of emergency I could look up email addresses or other contact details while away from my laptop. The problem was that I didn’t do it regularly so the data was never up to date. Now Plaxo also cured this problem, by syncing automatically to a neat, very Web 2.0’isch, address book interface that I can always summon in any webbrowser. As an added bonus, I instantly found a few of my contacts to be already in Plaxo and received their updated contact data.

by ·3 Comments

First make sure you’re collaboratively editing the same document.
Preferably on different positions in a very long (and unbelievably ugly coded) file.
Let the fun begin:

  1. Open up a multi line comment and never close it.
  2. Repeatedly press Cmd+A to highlight _everything_ so the screen for all the others starts to flash in your editing color
  3. Simply paste in A LOT of blank lines so the functions, the others are currently working on, scroll out of their view
  4. Sneak in some nasty syntax errors and wait for someone to save the file to test their newest edits

Some more ideas? 🙂

by ·0 Comments

logo_plazes.jpgPlazes rolled out it’s new version yesterday for all it’s users. The update sports a great new UI and some new features, of which I particularly enjoy the groups function.

One downside was the automatic update of the Plazer, which is the program that sends your current location to the site. The new version kept crashing for me and many other Mac users as I found out in the “Mac” group. They fixed the bug now but unfortunately the old version crashes before it even gets to the point of auto update. So you have to download it manually if you want to continue an uninterrupted Plazes experience.

The new Plazer now even features Growl support, which is great because now you’ll get a notification whenever one of your friends chages plaze 🙂

by ·1 Comment

JustLooking - OS X image viewerI may have just found the first half-decent, quick and small image viewer that suits my expectations.
JustLooking

It can be configured as default viewer for all your image files and when you open an image it has a nice interface that lets you skip forward and back in the directory from where you opened the file. JustLooking also has a nice fullscreen option and can rotate images (90° only).

I think this app may have a good chance of replacing Preview as my default image viewer.