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Top OSX Applications
I'd like to talk about "must-have" applications for OSX. While some of them are specific to IT industry, most of them are actually extremely useful for all categories of users.
Adium. While Leopard comes with iChat, which supports Jabber accounts, I guess Adium is the best choice for instant-messanging. Support of multiple protocols, great user interface, rich functionality make it the best IM client out there. And its absolutely free.
Colloquy. If you know what IRC is and even pop into some rooms every now and then, then you absolutely have to check this client. mIRC for OSX, but a free one 
ForkLift. Ideas of captain Norton are still alive! If you prefer managing your files from a traditional two panel interface and copy files with F5, the this the program of choice.
Journler. I've always been looking for a small and clean tool for keeping track of my notes, ideas, drafts etc. Well, this tool does it all and much more. Among other things it supports categories, tags, dues dates, search folders. It integrates nicely with Mail and allows to attach pretty much any file or email, and even send emails based your notes.
Little Snitch. Many programs try to access various resources on the net. When a web browser does that, that's expected, but I don't want a text editor to contact the developers site! Little Snitch will monitor all network activity and interfere it unless you approve the connection, which you can do per address/port (or any combination) and keep the rule till end of session, forever and use it only once. So if you care which information is getting sent from your computer you should really use it.
MarsEdit. I don't do too much blogging, but even I prefer to write my posts from and desktop client rather than from blog's web interface. Will this is the tool just for this purpose. Supports all major blogging engines.
Money. One of the best tools out there to keep track of personal finances. Makes it extremely easy to record deposits/withdrawls and then view reports by date, category, payee. Really nice and clean.
Speed Download. Very powerful download manager, which integrates with your web browser. Supports queues, filters, categories, multithreaded downloads.
StuffIt Expander. OSX comes with a built-in zip archiver, which is quite limited, doesn't even support encrypted archives. This tool however can unpack pretty much anything!
SyncMate. If you are real Apple fan, chances are you are using iPhone. If, however, you're a "happy owner" of the Windows Mobile device then you should try this tool.
TextMate. Ok, this isn't exactly a must have thing, but if you do any kind of coding in any language (even just HTML) then this is THE editor. No description, just try it.
Transmission. Torrent client, clean and simple to use.
VLC. QuickTime, which comes with OSX is more of a jock. VLC however is the real player which supports almost any video format!
Perian & Flip4Mac. If you still prefer QuickTime to any other player, than you should really install the above codec packs to be able to play your favorite movies.
Google Gears is available for Firefox 3!
Finally, Google Gears - a powerful plugin that makes many web applications (Google Docs, Google Reader, RememberTheMilk etc) available even when you are offline is now available for Firefox 3!
Note to fellow ubuntu users - it doesn't seem to work with the beta version of FF availble now in official repos, so you'd have to update to RC2 or final version. Add this to your apt sources and upgrade:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fta/ubuntu hardy main
Use google docs to create your forms and polls.
Unlike many other companies (I am pointing at anyone he he) Google is known to add cool features silently.
Recently I found that use Google Spreadsheets you can easily collect information from people via Forms feature. Form can be anything from order request to a poll. The information entered to the form will be stored in your spreadsheet. All you have to do is to create new spreadsheet, go to Share tab and invite people "to fill out a form". Cool, yeah? And there even more to it, you can embed it in your html! Just like this...
Loading...
And you can see the results here
Virginia Water
Недавно меня один приятель просвятил, что совсем рядом с нашим универом есть чудесный парк Virginia Water, а в прошедшее воскресение не только расказал, но и показал! За что ему огрмоное человеческое спасибо!
Парк десйтвительно впечатляет! Если бы не аккуратные тропинки и высажаные в каком-то особом порядке кусты, можно было бы подумать, что это лес. Очень тяжело описать его. Лучше смотрите!
P.S. Надеюсь я туда поеду еще и сделаю куда больше фотографий.
Using Web 2.0 to its full power
Yohoo! Hello, my dear facebook friends!!!
When we talk about Web 2.0 first things that come to ones mind are tags, rss, blogs, wordpress, facebook... Well, let's use all of those!
I have quite a few not so technical friends who are unaware of how to subscribe to my blog and wouldn't visit it regularly. Yet there are on facebook (who isn't these days!). It turns out that I can share some of my posts with them very easily.
A standart Notes application has a feature to import extenal rss feeds. So I will mark the posts that I want to be on facebook with the 'facebook' tag and will add this feed.
P.S. Oh, and by the way, if you want to do the same with your blog, here is the guide on tech-recipes
My linux desktop
I want my desktop to look, yeah, perfect. I think it's approaching the desired state!
Vista fonts in ubuntu. Where is my antialiasing?!
If there is one thing M$ really knows how to do - that would be fonts. And as long as I have the license to use them (yes, my laptop came with Vista Home Basic) why not make use of them.
There is one strange thing though some fonts, like Calibri don't seem to be antialiased. What a hell? As it turns out, these fonts have embeded bitmaps in them. So we need to explicitly disallow this feature. Just add the following section your ~/.fonts.conf:
<?xml version="1.0"?><!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd"><fontconfig> <match target="font" > <edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign"> <bool>false</bool> </edit> </match></fontconfig>
del.icio.us releases new plugins (Firefox 3 and IE7)
Finally, Yahoo! releases new plugins for their wonderful social bookmarks service del.icio.us! They are now available for Firefox 3 and.. yep Internet Explorer (thought I couldn't care less for that).
Firefox extensions is pretty much the same as it used to be. Got polished in a few places plus for bug fixes. The main news in the support of FF3.
So, go and grab it right here http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2008/04/firefox-3-delicious-and-you.html
P.S. I am switching back to del.icio.us after trying foxmarks for a month or so.
Gedit grep plugin
When I first saw Gedit it was to Gnome as Notepad to Windows. Time passed and Notepad is still the same Gedit though became much more powerful. I'd say it's approaching TextMate. And it has a very powerful plugin system. I had couple of ideas of useful plugins, but decided to start with a simple one.
Objective: A plugin allows to search in all opened files (even unsaved) or files in a given directory. In the later case it allows to specify if subdirectories should also be scaned and has a way to specify which files to search in.
There are two similar plugins available at Gedit page, but they don't meet the above requirements fully. So I spent an evening studying how to write plugins in python and here is the result!
Download plugin: gedit-grep-v0.1
To install the plugin just unzip the contents of the archive into ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins/ and then enable the "Grep" plugin in Gedit preferences.
