Applications

In 2007, surveys and bloggers declared the impending demise of the desktop feed reader. My switch from Endo to the online reader service Rojo over a year ago seems to put me in with the shifting mob. But I've wanted to try out NetNewsWire for some time now, and now there's nothing to stop me.

It's amazing how reliant I've become on key strokes, especially when it comes to graphics editing. A few months back I noticed that holding down the shift key in Adobe Illustrator no longer constrained items to 45, 90, or 180 when moving and that spacebar + command didn't bring up the magnify option. My initial search yielded nothing, probably because my brain was mush and incapable of putting together logical search phrases. I haven't needed to do much work in Illustrator until recently so I tried the search again and low and behold, a solution!

You know, it's all about the little things in life. I recently installed and began using one of those great little things. Growl is a global notification application for Mac OS X. Here's the basic jist of what Growl does...

Ever since giving up last year and jumping into the social network fray I've been looking for a good status update viewer and aggregator. I'm trying to keep up with updates from a growing list of family, friends, and peers on Twitter, Facebook, and occasionally Flickr. I'm using Ping.fm to cross post status updates. I've tried the dedicated clients and plugins, but none worked for me quite as well as EventBox.

I just finished poking around in the blogging client ecto and liked it so much that I purchased a license. It's interface is uncluttered, relatively intuitive, and the clincher was the price--just $17.95 vs. MarsEdit's price tag of $24.95. Those windows users reading this can consider Ecto as your blogging client too.