Sticky Windows is a nifty little app. that allows you to create little tabs on the edges of your screen that are attached to windows. Click a tab and the window is brought to the front, click it again and the window disappears. It is simple and useful, especially for the many terminal windows I often have cluttering my desktop all day long.
I’ve written before on how Mac OS X has the ability to loosen my wallet. Synergy was a $5 app. that I had no problem buying. Now Sticky Windows is also useful and to my eyes is also a utility app. Certainly the coding behind it is more complicated than Synergy but that isn’t how we should price apps. Sadly Sticky Windows is too expensive. At $15.95 (come on guys, make it $16) I just can’t justify the expense.
I respect the path 37signals has forged in the path few years but I have to say they are really riding the beta hype cycle hard with their upcoming HighRise app. At this point 37signals could launch the app. at the local Bedouin Starbucks and there would be a 5 mile queue outside three days before.
Disk Inventory X is a handy app for Mac OS X that gives you a useful view of what is taking up space on your disk. I was running low on disk space and thought I’d use it to find out what was up. Turns out I had nearly 3gb of iGarage and iDVD files that I never, ever use. So those are gone. I also cleared up some other unused files and am thinking I need to host my Parallels VM partitions somewhere else. All in all I’ve managed to clear about 5gb of files I didn’t use, a nice saving.
Tom Raftery pointed out the new Parallels RC3 release which now has “Coherence” mode. It is strange but very useful seeing Microsoft Windows applications floating on my Mac OS X desktop. They are running in a Parallels VM but have been “detached” from that desktop and allowed onto the host desktop as separate windowed applications. It makes flipping between Internet Explorer 7 and Safari while doing web-development a breeze. The installation was painless and the speed is impressive.
Another interesting feature is that Parallels can now run your Bootcamp partition in a VM. Very useful. Now I can save on VM and partition space.
Tangerine is a fantastic side-car app to iTunes. Basically it creates a playlist based on the beats per minute of the songs in your iTunes library. So if you want a fast, dancy hour of music just tell Tangerine and it will create it.
Google Co-op allows you to create your own search engine. You specify a list of sites and are given a home-page which lets you use Google to search just that list or the whole web but with an emphasis on those sites.
This is really useful for specialists or groups of people who have a set of quality sources on a given topic. e.g. Ruby on Rails developers or horticulturalist. Google Co-op lets just one person or a group of invited people to contribute to the list.
I think it is even more useful as a personal search engine. Here I have created a search list that searches just my resources on the web. It includes my Flickr photos, my del.icio.us and Blinklist links and my blog. Other people can use it but it is more useful to me as a way to pull out past things I have written about, photographed or linked to.
Rollyo does much this but I found their interface a bit complicated and it wasn’t using the great Google search engine.
FeedDemon’s solution to a tough problem is elegant and simple. The problem is how does one find popular items within the feeds one cares about. Other systems are applying all sorts of voting systems, tagging pools, text analysis and “machine learning” which is all well and good but often doesn’t work quite the way one expects.
FeedDemon says “count the number of referrals and list from highest to lowest.” Simple. That it is applied just to the feeds you are subscribed to makes it so much more powerful. You have already gone to the trouble of selecting the feeds you care about so why throw that out in favour of some complex “blogosphere wide” analysis engine that gets it wrong a good deal of the time.
CrossOver Mac is an impressive and useful piece of software. It lets you run Windows applications on Mac OSX without the need for virtual machines (e.g. Parallels). The app runs in what looks like a native OSX window and even allows you to access your OSX files from within the Windows app.
I was most impressed with the installation process. CodeWeavers has a repository of applications on their server that you can select to install on your Mac. No need for your own CDs (obviously this doesn’t get around licensing, you still need to own these apps or they have to be free e.g. Internet Explorer.) The installation process is very slick and dead easy, I can see non-technical users using this without much hassle.
In the above image you can see Internet Explorer 6.0 runnin on my Mac OSX desktop. Brilliant for testing websites. I’ll give Visual Studio 2005 a try next, a challenge if there is one.
I must say that after ten years of “Please register” wait screens and dodgy hacks it is nice being able to open a ZIP file with WinZip without any of that. It has taken me far too long to buy a license and give back a little that the great and venerable WinZip has given to me.
If you want a photo site, you go to someone’s photo site and hit the “ah gotta git me wunna thayem!” button. Boom, you have a photo site. If you want a new feature, you hit “edit my app” and add it.
and then the kicker:
a Ning photo app is like a “group” on Flickr
So you can take any Ning app, clone it (much better than “Get Your Own” IMO, but then I am an ACMR) and modify it to your group’s needs.
The bit that still makes me shy away from Ning is that you can’t then say “take all the cloned photo apps and aggregate the photo data.” But that is apparently being worked on. That will make Ning work for me.
Couple other good points:
Premium features are things like … putting it in your own domain (instead of foo.ning.com)
and
what if I write a great app and Yahoo! wants to buy me? Their answer: go for it. Your app is your app. You can take [it] off their site.
Though in the later case it isn’t that easy as you then loose Ning’s “storage, tagging, and authentication modules” and have to write your own. I’d like to see Ning support S3 and other storage options through a Ning Storage Abstraction Layer.
Still, Ning is clearer in my mind thanks to that article and with a bit of that cloned-app-aggregation magic I think it could be something amazing.
