Tools of My Trade: Software & Services

(back to hardware or things I'm messing with)

Last updated November 8, 2007

In need of an instant messaging client that could connect to more than just .Mac and AIM users, I came across Adium and it has served me brilliantly ever since. I can contact people on old versions of AIM that Apple's iChat AV doesn't support plus Yahoo Messenger and MSN. It also keeps a searchable log of all my chats -- invaluable in a work context. It doesn't support iChat's video conferencing feature using my iSight camera, so I still need Apple's software for that.

Grade: B+

For everyday web browsing, I now rely almost exclusively on Firefox 2.0. It's a bit quicker than Apple's Safari, especially once you open a few tabs. The feature to find a word on a page has a vastly better implementaion, too. I've added a few search plug-ins, which let me quickly find things in Dictionary.com, Wikipedia and SeekingAlpha, for example. And, perhaps best of all, Google's browser sync and notebook features fit right in like they were made by the same company. The only time I revert to Safari is when I'm on a VPN. Firefox doesn't seem to be able to go with the flow.

Reading blogs, just keeping up with the torrent of blog entries relevant to my work and interests actually, has become increasingly difficult. I've experimented with several programs and services in search of the holy grail - a blog reader that works online and offline from multiple locations and stays in synch. For a while, I tried Shrook which has a great offline reader with good filing capabilities but the accompanying web site never got off the ground. So I'm currently using Bloglines for online and then NetNewsWire (with Bloglines synch enabled) as a best-of-breed hybrid solution. It's not perfect as I have to add and delete feeds in NetNewsWire manually to have everything stay in synch properly and I can only backup the whole reading list from Bloglines, alas.

Spam Karma 2.2

Grade: A

I used to use Lifli Software's iBlog to write my blog, GravitationalPull, but I switched to Wordpress because it has so many more features and better integrates with the tagged world at large. WordPress is a delight, with a simple feature set that can be extended with dozens and dozens of home brew extensions (I eliminated a nasty wave of comment spam by installing the Spam Karma plug in, for example). In a browser, Wordpress offers a handy tool bar of common code inserts. It used to be a bit tricky to back up my entries, though, since the whole set up is actually an SQL database. But recently I found a plug-in for that, too. And I'm using the Mandigo theme to make it all look pretty.

In the way old days, I used to save my static web pages as HTML files in Microsoft Word, but after I looked at the source code that resulted from that tactic the spaghetti mess convinced me to stop. I switched to Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX and recently, sort of accidentally, upgraded to Dreamweaver 8. I'm just doing simple, straight-ahead text stuff so it's is probably overkill but it does a great job managing my sites, updating them etc. And the various editing views and previews are extremely helpful. If only I used the spell checker more.

Grade: A-

Grade: C

Grade: B+

Back-ups...we all dread doing them, we all hate doing them, we all have to do them. My favorite program for basic daily backing up is La Cie's free Silverkeeper, which supports all manner of external, removable and network destinations. I still do my once or twice a year "everything including the kitchen sink" back up to DVDs with Apple's .Mac aptly named Backup program. But how can a back-up program not do incremental back ups? Ugh. For off-site backup, upstart Mozy finally released a Mac-compatible client and I signed up in April, 2007. Over 110 gigs stored and encrypted offsite. Performance and cost are great and Mozy has steadily enhanced its feature set.

Grade: A

After I bought my Intel-based iMac, I finally had the capability to try the latest Windows emulation software so I downloaded the free beta versions of VMware's Fusion. Now it's out of beta and I'm officially hooked. Running Windows 2000 Pro SP4 under Fusion is speedy and lets me use Microsoft Outlook 2003 and Sony's icky software accompanying their ICD-P320 digital recorder without any glitches. I'd like to be able to save multiple snapshots of the same virtual machine, but that's a pretty minor issue.

Grade: B+ Grade: B+

Note taking is a critical need. I've tried zillions of programs and techniques and strategies but I've never been completely satisified, so nothing gets a grade above B+. Right now, I am using Google Notebook integrated into my Firefox browser as a sort of online filing cabinet. I use Andrew Kozlov's simple myNotes program for offline notes, interview transcripts and other snippets. It's lightweight and intuitive but I'd like to be able to sync my notes across several computers. Some day, maybe...

Grade: B+

For many years, I used Kodak's online service (which started life as Ofoto) to share photos and order prints. But it was never totally satisfactory and friends had to buy prints from Kodak -- no file downloads allowed. So I switched over to Google's Picassa Web Albums service. It's free for the first gig of photos and lets me create public or private galleries with captions and comments from visitors. Take a peek at my public gallery.

Social networking site Facebook has become a multiple-times-a-day destination for me to check in on the doings of a global village worth of former co-workers, friends from school and distant relatives. There's a need for more sophisticated yet easy to use filtering tools to let you share only some parts of your datastream with some people, but it's still pretty fun. And I really enjoy the integration with other services and applications like Yelp and GoodReads.

Grade: C+

In 2006, I just had to run out and grab the update to Apple's iLife suite for the third year in a row. It didn't happen in 2007 as I've switched photo management to Adobe's Lightroom, iTunes is free, the new iMovie seemed like a step back and I don't use Garageband.

Now that I take most pictures with my Canon Rebel XT and save shots in the RAW format, iPhoto doesn't cut it anymore. Luckily, both Apple and Adobe recogonized there was a need for a high-end photo management and development tool. After a 30-day free trial shoot-out between Lightroom and Apple's Aperture, I picked Lightroom. Overall, it was easier to work with and had more features to ease the task of importing, tagging, sorting and developing my pictures. I wrote a lengthy blog review of Lightroom on May 8, 2007.

Well, at least so far, I've found no way to exist in the world of professional writing and journalism without Microsoft Office, if for no other reason than the fact that everyone else is using it (especially on Windows). I'm running the standard edition of Office 2008 and it has all of the same features of prior incarnations including auto spell checking and a constantly visible word count that tells not just total words but also how many words are behind and ahead of the cursor -- a real life saver when you're trying to hack a story down to size on a deadline. I'll also never be able to stop saying good things about Excel, the program that made me look like a computer genius back in 1989 and still sets the bar both for ease of use and super-powered features, in my opinion, and that's pretty rare. Entourage allows me to access my work email on an Outlook Exchange server and is far easier to use and more full-featured than the Windows version of Outlook, amazingly. I almost never use Power Point.

I would never be able to remember all the ridiculous sign-in names and passwords in my life without some password helper, really just a program to manage an encrypted database with all the big secrets. I used to use Web Confidential but I switched to Waterfall Software's excellent Wallet program in December, 2006. It's more flexible allowing me to set up categories and fields as I see fit. Thank the lord and don't forget to back up your encrypted database in at least 55 locations.

Here's a program that you might not need but it's critical to organizing one part of my digital life. I keep a folder on my computer called "article stash" and it's just that -- my own personal collection of all manner of articles and essays on topics that interest me. I try to give each item a name that will help me find it by topic but that doesn't always work. I wanted to have the files sort by the date of publication but the file creation date didn't match if I downloaded the article at a later date and the file modification date was always changing for no apparent reason. Along comes X-ray. It lets you edit the creation and last modified dates of any OS X file. Now if I find a 1994 essay about behavioral economics that I want to save, I x-ray it and turn back the clock on the file's creation date. Ha! Like when Superman turned back time by reversing the earth's rotation but less annoying.

Grade: B+

Grade: Incomplete

My main work environment is Apple's snappy, full-featured and elegant operating system, OS X. I'm running the prior Tiger incarnation, 10.4.11 Macbook Pro and the newer 10.5.2 Leopard incarnation on my 24" iMac and the old Mac mini. I waited for the dot-2 upgrade before putting Tiger on my previous Powerbook and it seems to have paid off -- all my programs worked fine. I'll probably have to wait for at least a couple of upgrade of Leopard and upgrades to a few other programs and hardware drivers before adding it to my most critical computer.