Rui CarmoI must be Scott Adams' soul mate or something - this is exactly how I feel lately:
Five things that held my interest during this particularly stressful week:
- The Backpack Widget for Dashboard, which was a great help to quickly jot down stuff. Like many people, I have a free Backpack account, but never got any use from it. Somehow, the widget actually made it vastly more useful (I used it to organize portions of my upcoming vacation and to set reminders for things I had to do at the office the next day), even though I am still skeptical of web-centric services where it regards constant availability.
- Onlife, Edison Thomaz's nice little app that I've been running in the background for a couple of days. It could use Adium support, a horizontal scrollbar, a movable splitter (it gets real crowded on my 12" iBook) and "live" searching (maybe adding events to Spotlight is doable, haven't the faintest), but it shows a lot of promise as is. Of course, time will tell if it I will find it useful to keep this sort of log on my Mac (I used Outlook Journal for a couple of years, but found that I never looked at it as a timeframe reference and that it ate up my mailbox quota like something crazy) - but Edison deserves credit for a very neat, polished application indeed.
- Flock and its surrounding hype held my interest for a bit, but I soon started wondering what I actually might need yet another browser for, especially one that appears to be designed to reduce my attention span even further (Incidentally, Camino was recently updated, but for that I have a use - it is far faster and more polished than Firefox for casual browsing).
- Want open file formats? You could do worse than check out the iWork XML specs (via Gruber). It's not OpenOffice, but most people will agree that it's far more usable, and the Keynote bits may be of interest for anyone wanting a quick way to generate XML format presentations from raw data.
- OmniGraffle 4 may well be the version I've been waiting for. I've been downloading trials and playing with them a few days at a time for the last couple of years, but the fact that I'm once again intent on getting a Mac at work and the new features (such as better Visio XML support and SVG export) more than justify the expense. I'll be giving it a whirl during the next couple of weeks and trying it out with some of our insanely complex diagrams to see how it handles.
And now, for some truly well earned R&R.