MBW Picks of the Week

Episode 53

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 00:05:46 -0500

Scott Bourne starts with a hardware pick beyond the practical reach of most of us, the Bang and Olufsen Earset 2 bluetooth headset at $350. He says that it's not worth $350, but it makes you look like a Borg. So yeah.

Not happy with Firefox, Leo Laporte has been looking to Safari and ways to extend it a la Firefox extension. So, he picks Inquisitor, the really cool and free search plugin for the Safari search bar. Like Spotlight on your desktop, you start typing and search results start popping up immediately (from Google, Yahoo!, Amazon or other sites). It also feature auto-complete. Like most really cools apps, it's hard to describe and it's better to just check it out.

Andy Ihnatko gives Quicktime Pro props. He says you don't realize how much you'll use the full-featured version until you unlock it. He says it's great for editing audio and video as well as converting between formats.

Hey! At this point on the podcast Leo gives this site a shout out. Woo-hoo! He thanks yours truly (actually pronouncing m name correctly, I guess that's why he's a pro) and the fine folks at mbwpicks.com who are also cataloguing all the picks.

Alex Lindsay picks some vaporware that does look really cool (and isn't so steamy since Alex has been playing with it, we find out in a later episode). Pixelmator is an image editor that has all the robust popular features of Photoshop without any of the bloat. It uses the Core Image technologies Apple provides and looks very much the Cocoa app. Very beautiful looking. Here's hoping it delivers.

Justine Ezarik chooses MailPlane, which is a desktop interface for Gmail. It's not a regular mail application; it still uses the Gmail web interface we all know and love. However, it adds all sorts of functionality like the ability to have several accounts open in tabs, image drag and drop, notification, etc.

Quick Rathole

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 23:57:09 -0500

Hi folks! Thanks to all the folks who've subscribe to the RSS feed and who've visited this humble little site. I just wanted to take a couple lines to share with you my vision for this site. I don't intend this site to be an up-to-the-minute (week?) catalog of everything said on MBW. That is, it's not a site you can subscribe to in lieu of listening to the podcast and get the week's picks. Instead I see this as a repository. Something you can come to when you know you remember there was a pick that's useful to you now but the name of which you can't recall. Or, just plain Google bait: type in what you're looking for and hopefully the answer's here.

That said, don't expect this site to be update within minutes of the MBW podcast's release. Hopefully it will usually be within a week, but the value of this site will be as repository, not in immediacy. The other bit of value I'd like to add is in the conversational, annotated style of the site. It's not merely a list so it that should help with folks finding what they're looking for through search. Comments? Suggestions? Drop me a line at jerry at brito dot com.

Episode 52

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 23:48:04 -0500

This weeks brings us a deviation from the usual as our intrepid hosts bring us anti-picks: the apps baked into OS X they hate the most. The move was encouraged by the inimitable Merlin Mann who asked the others, "What's the crappiest application that ships on a Mac?" Andy Ihnatko shoots down NetInfo Manager, an app I didn't even know I had, and takes the nerdiest picker award. Leo Laporte doesn't like iPhoto because it's slow and doesn't have all the features he'd like to see. Scott Bourne reaches for Digital Color Meter because it's 8 bit, but I agree with Leo that it's very useful for web design. Alex Lindsay hates Stickies. Finally, Merlin declares his lovehate for iCal. I feel his pain. It's a rigid app and the fact that there's so much potential makes it doubly painful.

Episode 51

Thu, 02 Aug 2007 21:05:11 -0500

Scott Bourne starts us off with ibloglines.com, an RSS feed aggregator for the iPhone. Scott likes it better than Google Reader or the mac.com reader. He likes that it integrates nicely with the regular Bloglines. He can mark an item for later reading and when he gets back to the Mac, it's marked on Bloglines.

Next up Alex Lindsay tells us about Wirecast, a typical Alex way-over-my-head video production pick. But hey, he sounds like he knows what he's talking about. I couldn't tell what the app did from his description, but according to the Vara Software site, "Wirecast is the most advanced live webcasting product available for your Mac or PC. You can stream multiple live video cameras, while dynamically mixing in other media (movies, images etc)." Apparently it'll let him do a live broadcast of MacBreak.

Leo Laporte didn't have a pick. Instead he updated the gang on his MacHeist experience. Things turned out great and he got all the software he was promised.

Merlin Mann [Holy crap, they just mentioned, I think, this site. They said they wanted to get a page with all the picks on it and Alex said there's someone already doing it. Est moi!] talks about RooSwitch, which I'm glad he's explaining, because I don't get. What it lets you do is safely test new versions and beta versions of a program you already have without risking your existing data or preferences. It backs up everything related to the app and if the new version screws everything up, you just restore.

Episode 50

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 12:55:40 -0500

Guest Brett Larson, tech and environment reporter for Fox 5 in NYC, starts with Megaseg, DJ and radio automation software. Larson recommends it to improve the crossfade between songs in iTunes. Using the app you can decide at what point in each song the next one will begin. It's also great for weddings. I guess.

Alex Lindsay has a pick from mbwideas on del.icio.us, and it's Jing, a cross-platform audio and video screengrab app. Kinda like Skitch and ImageWell, once you capture something, it's very easy to upload it or send it in an e-mail. Alex says it's great for showing someone what you're working on.

Leo Laporte talks about another cross-platform product. ArtRage comes in free and paid versions and it's a drawing app designed for artists. It's got a unique user interface with a palette and paint metaphor. Leo loves it on his tablet PC and thinks it's great for kids.

Chagrined by the lack of to-do list functionality on his iPhone, Scott Bourne picks Ta-Da Lists from 37Signals. There's an iPhone-optimized version of the great and simple Ajax to-do list app. Basically it's everything you ever wanted from a to-do app, but it lives on the web. The down side is you have to be connected to access your lists and it doesn't sync with other apps.

Merlin Mann talks about OmniGraffle, the diagramming, charting, and visualization app for the Mac. More specifically, Merlin recommends graffletopia.com, an independent website where users can share their OmniGraffle stencils. They've got everything, from floorplan shapes to network topography doodads. And it's free.

Episode 48

Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:59:00 -0500

Leo Laporte starts us off with Nisus Writer Pro, the long-awaited alternative to Microsoft Word. The app has Perl macros, searching by attribute, and lots of other powerful features. It reads and writes Word format, so compatibility is assured.

Very special guest The Macelope plugs Aurora, a fantastic app that I myself often depend on. Basically it's a little alarm clock app. It has a tasteful menubar icon that gives you easy access to it. Click on it and you can set as many alarms as you'd like. You can choose any iTunes playlist to play when the alarm goes off. You can have it slowly raise the volume over a user-definable time period (which is great for waking you up without startling you) and it haas a snooze button as well. Best of all, it will wake up your computer from sleep when it's time to sound an alarm. Amazingly, this thing's free!

Merlin Mann's pick is Flygesture from Gus Mueller's Flying Meat Software. Basically it allows you to use mouse gestures to make your Mac do different things. It's kind of like triggers on Quicksilver but without touching the keyboard. Want to close the current window? Move your mouse right then diagonally (or anything other gesture you choose). It's sort of a difficult thing to explain and is best understood by trying it out. And, again, this one's also free!

With a bit of a techie pick is Andy Inhatko who recommends Photomatix. It's a high dynamic range photography tool. The technique helps with poor lighting by allowing you to take many pictures of the same subject at different exposures and then combine them all into one photo using the best parts of each differently lit photo you took. Make sense? No? Call Andy. Photomatix does the heavy lifting for you and takes the different crappy pics you took and spits out one amazing one. Check out the flickr "hdr" tag for some pretty cool examples. Sadly, this one's not free, though it is free to try.

Episode 47

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 20:23:25 -0500

Scott Bourne starts off the picks with Shiira, the eye-candy heavy alternative to Safari. Scott likes it because it's a fast and lightweight. This browser is free and based on Webkit.

For his pick Alex Lindsay plugs the Sony 17-in-1 Memory Card Reader. The appeal of this little device is that it plugs into your laptop's USB and reads many different kinds of cards, including several flavors of Memory Stick, SD Memory Card, miniSD Card, MultiMedia Card, RS-MMC, CompactFlash, Microdrive, SmartMedia, and xD-Picture Card. If you travel a lot it can help you avoid carrying around many separate readers. Alex likes it because it works with the Mac seamlessly and lets you mount several cards at a time.

Leo Laporte plugs Plaxo, the online contact list manager. The way Plaxo works is that you sign up for an account and import your contact list. Your list is then updated with the contact info of any friends that might already be on the Plaxo network, and your friends' contact info for you is updated with your up-to-date info. The application is a bit spammy because it entices you to send a message to everyone on your contact list not already on Plaxo to get them to join and enter their info. That said, the new version 3 of Plaxo is especially cool because it syncs iCal and Address Book with your contact list and calendar on many online services such as Yahoo, Google Calendar, LinkedIn, etc. This is a great free alternative to the very good, but ridiculously priced, Spanning Sync. It will also sync up with Outlook, so it can help with your cross-platform needs.

Finally, Merlin Mann tells us about Mozy, a great online backup service. Basically, you can backup your data to an external drive all you want, but if there's a fire or other calamity in your office, you can say goodbye to both copies of your data. What you need is a remote copy of your data, and that's where Mozy comes in. After installing Mozy you tell it what folders or types of files on your Mac you want it to back up. Mozy encrypts the data locally and then sends it to a secure remote server (in Minnesota, I believe). Depending on how much data you back up, the initial sync can take days, but once it's done it runs continuously or at specific times. You can get up to 2 GB of storage for free or you can sign up for unlimited storage for just $4.95 a month.

I use this service and the feature that sold me is that if you ever need to restore your data, you won't have to spend days downloading it back to your computer. You can instead have Mozy FedEx you a DVD. Brilliant.

Episode 46

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 22:16:04 -0500

I hope it's not a pattern, but this is the second week in a month that the MBW boys made no picks. Like last time (Episode 44 right after WWDC), the show was a bit of a special edition and so it was more impromptu conversation about the day's happening (the iPhone launch) rather than converge of the week's Mac news.

That said, the iPhoneless Merlin Mann did offer one hot tip. My one complaint about the otherwise awesome iPhone is a lack of to-dos. How this basic handheld function escaped Apple is unfathomable. Like John Gruber I'm assuming that this will be remedied once Leopard ships with its new system-wide notes and to-dos feature. Well, Merlin pointed out that OmniGroup has implemented a web-based interface to OmniFocus, the wonderful GTD app I've been using for quite a while. This is even better than iCal to-dos as far as I'm concerned.

The way it works is that you browse to the machine you're running OmniFocus on on a special port. That brings up a password-protected web interface for your contexts and next actions. Very awesome. I've gotten it to work on my MacBook using Safari, but no dice using the iPhone. I'm sure it's just a sharing setting I'm not configuring right. So, if you've got your hands on OmniFocus, enjoy. If not, here's even more to look forward to.

Episode 45

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 10:45:00 -0500

Merlin Mann begins with a Quicksilver tip. It's hard to describe what Quicksilver is, but I like to say that it lets you do just about anything on your Mac without using a mouse and usually in under four keystrokes. Merlin talks about "triggers," which let you associate a certain key command with an action. But he says there's also a little-known feature called Mouse Drag Triggers that let you associate a certain part of your screen with an action. So, for example, you can drag some text to an area and have it create an email with it, or drag a file to an area and have it upload to a specific server. There's nothing Quicksilver can't do, even if this tip make use of a mouse.

Leo Laporte recommends EagleFiler, a scrapbook/notebook app like Yojimbo. It lets you tag your notes and store and sort PDFs and other files. Unlike Yojimbo, however, it allows user-created folders and uses Core Data. The contents of the database are also browseable as folders and files in the Finder. <personal screed>I like Yojimbo and it's what I use, but how hard would it be for them to implement smart folders that draw from "any" of a list of tags and not just "all"? It's been over a year since they said they'd add it.</personal screed>

Scott Bourne brings is back down to ground level with Cache Out X, a utility that clears out your cache files, prefs, and other nasty bits that stay behind when you delete an app by just dragging it to the trash. Sounds a bit like AppZapper, except it's free.

Alex Lindsay is back with project management app Merlin. It lets you plan out a project, use Gantt charts, set dependencies, and the rest. You can also track the productivity of each team member working on a project. He also plugs OmniPlan, which he thinks needs more development. Knowing Omni, though, it'll get there.

Episode 44

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 10:43:44 -0500

This was a special WWDC dissection episode, so no picks were made. Steve Jobs just loves to disrupt everything.

Episode 43

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 16:02:06 -0500

Guest "The Macalope" picks PandoraJam, an app that takes the songs played for you by the Pandora music service and dumps them tagged into your iTunes. It will also stream music from pandora to an Airport Express and submit them to last.fm.

Merlin Mann brings to our attention the new 3.0 release of NetNewsWire, the popular RSS reader. Merlin says one feature he likes is the clipping service that lets him mark items as he read and, when he's ready, they're all ready in a clippings section to be blogged. Another new feature Merlin mentions is that the app displays a thumbnail of the site you're reading. Leo mentions MarsEdit, which used to be coded by NNW's Brent Simmons and is now maintained by Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software.

Scott Bourne says the Camino browser has a new 1.5 release. Scott says the reason he like it is that Camino will open sites Safari won't open, especially Windows-centric site.

Leo Laporte's pick is ShoZu, an app for your cameraphone that makes it easy to send pictures you've just taken to photo hosting sites like flickr. It also makes it easy to upload videos to YouTube. Other unrelated features include contacts backup and videocasting.

Episode 42

Wed, 30 May 2007 12:47:51 -0500

Merlin Mann recommends 1Passwd, a better password manager than what comes with most browsers. It installs a new button in your browsers (Safari, Camino, OmniWeb, whatever) and whenever you fill out a password, it asks you if you want to store it. If you do, that username and password will then be available in every browser. You can have multiple name/password combinations for the same site. The app also has a great profile feature. You can have multiple profiles (name, address, credit card number, etc.) and whenever you get to a page with a bunch of fields to fill out, you just pick which profile to use and blam-o, they all get filled. 1Passwd stores its info in the OSX Keychain, it generates strong passwords, syncs using .Mac, and juliennes fries.

Merlin also plugs Doodle.ch, a scheduling app on the web. Basically it lets you send emails to a group with several options for a meeting time. Each group member replies with their availability and preference, and Doodle picks the time everyone can meet. Merlin wrote about Doodle on 43 Folders.

Leo Laporte plugs Flock, the does-it-all browser. It integrates your bookmarks with del.cio.us, makes it easy to post and view pictures from flickr, has an RSS reader, lets you post to your blog, and many other things.

Scott Bourne picks Soundtrack Pro 2, which only comes bundled with Final Cut Studio. The app has mutlitrack, you can do 6 tracks running simultaneously, each with different inputs, and it even does Dolby 5.1 surround. I have no idea what any of this means, but Scott sounded very excited about it.

Guest Justine Ezarik recommends the new Facebook apps. Facebook is a popular social networking site and it recently opened up an API for third parties. Apps you can add to your Facebook account include uploadable tagged videos, Twitter, and your Last.fm recent tracks.

Episode 41

Wed, 23 May 2007 15:39:31 -0500

Merlin Mann plugs ~~Matt Jones's~~ Matt Webb's Textmate bundle that creates a wiki within Textmate using a bunch of text files inside a folder. This is something of an alternative to VoodooPad. You get all the wiki goodness and plain 'ol text files to boot. Merlin especially likes that anything you can do with Quicksilver to text, you can do to the files in your Textmate wiki (generate new files, append text, etc.).

Guest Craig Syverson picks iStat Pro, which has been updated to version 4. This app gives you a one-glance look at everything that's going on with your computer: memory use, CPU use, hard drive use, network, temperature, battery cycling, etc. It's got a great customizable UI. The app has a companion widget and can also be accessed from the menubar.

Scott Bourne tells us about Photoshop CS3 because of Bridge, Adobe's version of Apple's Aperture media organization app. Scott likes the new metadata features and its speed. He says it's a dream when teamed up with Adobe's Camera RAW Converter.

Leo Laporte picks Armegatron, a free, open source, and very cool looking Tron light cycle game. It's multiplayer and cross-platform, so you can play against your Windows buddies.

Episode 40

Thu, 10 May 2007 16:26:33 -0500

Leo Laporte picks Platypus, a wrapper for shell scripts. Take your Python, Perl, or whatever script, and turn it into an application you can launch from the Finder. It'll do custom icons and makes it easy for you to distribute. Automator and Xcode will also do this, but this app is very simple. Merlin chimes in with SelfService, an app that will turn scripts into Service Menu items.

Scott Bourne tells us about EarthDesk, a cool screensaver/desktop image (really, Scott?). You can zoom in and out and see satellite imagery. It's sort of like Google Earth except it costs $19.95.

Andy Inahtko picks iBatt 2, a very extensive monitor for your Mac laptop's battery. Especially useful, Andy says, is it tells you how much charge your battery is holding.

Merlin Mann tells us about TubeTV, an app that makes it easy to move clips from YouTube and Google Video to your Apple TV.

Finally, Leo also plugs Method Music, a website based on Pete Townsend's Lifehouse project (must read), that will write you your own personalized theme music. Kinda like Peter had in this clip from Family Guy.