My favorite software.
I think everyone has a few pieces of software they can’t live without. Here’s my list.
- NewsGator’s NetNewsWire - NetNewsWire is probably the best designed, feature-complete software I know of. It somehow combines a rare level of polish with a crazy number of unobtrusive, useful features. The trifecta of features, polish, and usefulness is hard to come by and somehow NetNewsWire pulls it off. It errors out better than most software runs. A fine piece of software I’m sad I didn’t buy when it wasn’t free.
- Omni’s Omnigraffle - Makes using Visio seem like some kind of disgusting procedure a specialist gets paid way too much to do. It’s first class software which is eminently useful. If I need to draw something that even resembles a graph or just brainstorm an idea this is what I reach for. I’ve done state diagrams to iPhone UI mockups to seeing what my parents house would look like with different paint colors using Omnigraffle with very few complaints.
- IconFactory’s Xscope - Xscope is software serving a sort of niche market. Xscope is a little piece of software that sits in your menu bar and allows you to use several different tools to inspect what you’re looking at. It works using the framebuffer so it’s agnostic to what you’re trying to measure or inspect. It’s hard to describe, just download and try it.
- Apple’s Pages - Part of the iWork suite from Apple, Pages is the best word processor I’ve ever used. It takes a few documents to fully understand how amazing the attribute oriented document design Pages has used is but once you do it’s hard to go back. Pages can be a bit confusing when you’re trying to get certain parts of the page to adhere to the same layout but in general it does its job very well.
- IconFactory’s Twitterific - It’s pretty and simple. Twitterific is actually rough and the edges, it needs a polish pass, but in general it’s simple and twitter is simple. Don’t fuck with a good thing.
- Panic’s Coda - The best way to edit and manage websites that I’ve found. What I like about Coda is it makes sense within itself. When I’m in Coda it feels like it overwhelms my computer and nothing else is running. It’s a frame of mind the software creates, I like that. It also has an amazingly designed search and replace functionality, the best I’ve ever seen. When a piece of software solves an age-old problem in a novel way you should pay attention, it’s probably very good.
FYI: This is all Mac software, I use a Mac.
No commentsCloudgasm.
Updated my phone number to be in the 918 at the at&t store today and it was brilliant. Lady just talked to some ethereal person on the phone, I turned off my iPhone 2G, turned it back on, and within about 15 minutes my phone had figured out I had a new number. No SIM change, no wipe of the phone, nothing. Awesome experience, took about 30 minutes.
No commentsJust a thought.
With a population of 5.2 million people, Finland has 1.6 million firearms, making it an anomaly in Europe. It lags behind only the United States and Yemen in civilian gun ownership per capita, studies have shown.
Finland has had two fatal school shootings in less than a year and happens to have more guns per capita than the majority of countries in the world. There has been talk of implementing more gun control which would be a very interesting experiment. Their situation mirrors the U.S.’s in many ways. A history of loose gun control and several tragic multiple-murders happening in succession. If they do decide to aggressively tighten gun control it could take the wind out of (or reinforce) some arguments used against banning guns. Specifically it looks like they might decide to ban private handguns, and I hope they decide to. This presents the biggest opportunity for an experiment where we could learn a lot about how gun control actually affects crime.
It helps that gun ownership isn’t protected under Finland’s constitution. They could just pass a law.
Thought experiment: If you could write the constitution again today would you include gun control in there? Would you write that into Afghanistan’s constitution, or Iraq’s?
This person agrees with me.
No commentsAP Maplestory story.
I don’t understand why this story about a japanese woman killing her virtual husbands avatar in Maplestory got so much play. It was reported everywhere. Especially since it’s slightly confusing to anyone who’s actually played a game.
It’s OK to die. You will be transported to the nearest town with 50 HP and as much MP as you had when you died. After you make your first job advancement, however, every death will cost you a percentage of your experience, though you cannot be leveled down by this method. Characters with low LUK lose 10%, increasing LUK lowers the exp lost to a minimum of 5%.
source:wikiHow
Most news outlets just report that she “killed” his character, which in the context of the game isn’t a big deal. I figured that she probably deleted his character, which is what she actually did. The Guardian was one of the only sites to actually do a significant rewrite and catch the weird vernacular.
The 43-year-old became so angry about a sudden “divorce” from her online husband in the interactive Maple Story game that she logged on with his password and deleted his digital persona.
source: the guardian
Of course Kotaku got it right too, as I’m sure the other gaming sites did.
Doesn’t this happen all the time in WoW? Maybe it’s just weird she got caught at it. The first Digital Domestic (trademark pending).
No commentsOn the boring part of innovation.
Jacob Rabinow, an electrical engineer, uses an interesting mental technique to slow himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition: “When I have a job that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I’m in jail. If I’m in jail, time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it’ll take a week. What else have I got to do? I’m going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. Otherwise you say, ‘My God, it’s not working,’ and then you make mistakes. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence.”
Sometimes the source reads a bit like a horoscope to me, the descriptions are so broad almost anyone can apply at some point, but I really liked that quote.
No commentsiPhone!
I’m writing this from my iPhone with my laptop a foot away just because I can. It’s the future!
2 comments