At Work On a Mac

If you live, well, on earth I guess you are probably aware that January the 20th is inauguration day for Barack Obama. A new President who, if anything, is well aware of the power of social networking (or at least someone on his team is) and likes his Blackberry a lot. Barack’s use of Twitter and Facebook over the past year was impressive but as he takes his oath on Tuesday afternoon, the impressive use of technology won’t come from him nor his team but from the good people over at UStream.

UStream.tv is a site that allows you to broadcast live video on the Web for free. That’s impressive, but it’s been available for a while (competitors Qik and Stickam do similar). What’s cool though is that UStream has just launched today their first iPhone/iPod Touch app. This free application is a video viewer and streams the video over WiFi (only) and let’s you watch any video content on UStream on your iPhone. The app comes just in time since the site will have a number of live streams all day on Tuesday for Obama’s inauguration.

I know what you’re thinking. No, the app doesn’t allow you to record video. Unfortunately, Apple has not yet allowed anyone to record video with the iPhone. QIK, a similar service that allows anyone to broadcast from their phone (works great with an N95 for example) has the application ready and is awaiting Apple’s GO.

Apple keeps impressing me. As you may know, iWork 09, just like the 08 version used to, has a 30 days demo available online from apple.com. When you download this version, you get a popup when launching the applications reminding you of the trial and offering you to buy it online. When you buy it, you can either select to get a S/N right away and activate your demo and simply buy the boxed version of the software and have it shipped to you.

While I did download the demo (hey, I’m impatient!), I had already ordered my copy the minute the store came back up after the keynote so I was suprised to see that my iWork 09 box had no serial numbers anywhere. Both the 07 and 08 had serial numbers and my trial was asking me for one, so I figured there was a error with my copy and that I would have to ask Apple to fix it.

But that’s when I got the idea of deleting the trial and installing the boxed copy. The installer never asked for a serial number and when I launched the applications, they were fully registered. A quick search on Google revealed that indeed the retail copy doesn’t need a serial at all. It’s the best of both world, you can get instant satisfaction with a downloadable copy or a no-hassle solution with a retail copy.

It’s little details like this that makes all the difference. Adobe and Microsoft should perhaps pay attention.

Well today the WordPress application for the iPhone and iPod Touch was finally released and I’m currently writing this from my phone to test it out. The whole thing seems to work pretty well so far although of course you get to use the standard iPhone interface to write so that means no formatting or anything like this.

That being said, I think it’s great to see an app like this free one for the iPhone. There’s also a free one for Typepad that’s out there but since I haven’t used Typepad in a few years, I haven’t checked it out yet.

Of course, there’s also the free Facebook application that now allows you to write on your friends’ wall. If you got that one right after launch make sure you grab the update since the first version didn’t allow you to write on walls.

Here’s a picture if for no other reason than to see if it works.

Over at the Montreal Mac User Group, I get to do a presentation every month and somehow I’ve become the “software” guy among presenters and I gotta say I love me some good software. The OS is important, and certainly I’m glad I’m on Leopard and not on Vista, but the Mac shareware scene is incredibly good and I thought I’d do 2 posts outlining some of the best software I’ve found. First one is about freewares, next one will be about paid shareware.

ImageWell

If you have to often resize or convert images, ImageWell is a small freeware that will make your life much simpler. A great piece of software, it does exactly what it needs to do, it does it well and doesn’t get in the way. It also starts quickly and doesn’t take a lot of resources. There’s a paid update to it, but the base freeware does everything.

WriteRoom

Do you often have to write long text? If so, you might have my problem where I get distracted by a lot of things on my Mac. New emails come in all the time, RSS feeds are updated, iChat invitations, etc. There’s a lot going on at all time and this is where WriteRoom comes in. This is an extremely simple text editor that has a full screen mode that blocks out everything else. The new version is a paid shareware, but the old 1.0.4 is free. Given the nature of the application, I find that this version does what I need it to do.

Audacity

This one is pretty well known but I thought I’d include it here anyway. Audacity is cross platform audio editor that does a lot of what the bigger (and more expensive) softwares do. It works great on Mac and once you learn how it works, you can use it again on Windows or Linux if you ever need it. There’s a ton a plugins and filters, the audio editor works great and it supports a bunch of file formats.

Paparazzi!

This gem is one of my favorite shareware on Mac but it’ll be especially good if you design or work on websites for a living. Paparazzi! is a small freeware that takes a ‘screenshot’ of a website as seen by Safari and saves it in a PNG image. You get the whole page, not just a screenful of it so it’s extremely useful. There’s also a little bookmarklet to make it even more useful. Make sure to drag this link to your link bar if you use the software, it’ll make your life even easier.

Caffeine

Caffeine is a small utility that is especially useful for those of us on laptops. What it does is that it adds a menulet (a little icon to the right of the menu bar) and when you click on it, your Mac will never go to sleep. Your screen won’t dim, it will just keep going until you run out of battery. I use it all the time because I hate it when the screen dims or worse still, goes blank. Small. Useful. Free. That’s good for me.

TextWrangler

This one’s a puzzle to me. First, if you’re a developer, you’ll like TextWrangler. It’s a free text editor from the makers of BBEdit. BBEdit is a great piece of software, but it’s expensive and for some reason I never got around to buying it. One thing that didn’t help was TextWrangler, a free software that does pretty much everything I need. I’ve since switched to TextMate, but there’s no question TextWrangler is quality software.

NeoOffice

OpenOffice is a well known, cross-platform MS Office replacement that works well. NeoOffice is based on Open Office but is done for Mac users. It looks like a Mac application and acts (mostly) like one. With Microsoft Office 2008 getting very mixed reviews, this can be a great alternative if you’re on a budget.