The only big drawback as far as I’m concerned is the fact that you need to create an account on their site to use it. It does come with a benefit: you can host your screenshots for free on their (beta) service. Still, making it optional would have been nice.

In any case, this app is hard to describe. A screenshot app doesn’t quite sound exciting but their video makes a good job of explaining it all.

There is however a few things you can do. First, open the Spotlight preferences in System Preferences and disable everything you don’t care about. I never search for fonts for example, so I always disable that. The key here however is to make sure Applications are at the top of the list.

While you certainly knew about this first tip, you might not know about the second one. Other than filename and content, Spotlight also searches each file’s metadata and one that always exists and is accessible through the Finder is the “Spotlight Comments” field where you can type anything you want.

For the apps you use the most, find their icons in the Finder and type CMD-I to open the Get Info panel. There, you’ll find the Spotlight Comments field. The key here, is to add something unique to make the search fast. I suggest adding “aa” in front for application followed by a few letter. Firefox for example could be aaf. You can then “Cmd-Space” to open spotlight followed by your 3-4 letters abbreviations (“aaf”) followed by enter. The search is almost instant!

This unfortunately doesn’t work with system apps in 10.6 since those are locked when using the Finder. If you have PathFinder, you can actually change them from there.

Of course, Google’s service is not the only one. You can also try the well-known OpenDNS or the quite fast UltraDNS to see which one is better but it can be hard to determine which one is really faster.

The answer is surprisingly easy to find thanks to a free, open source tool from a Google employee (Gotta love those “20% projects”). NameBench is a little tool that will run tests on a random set of sites using public DNS servers and local servers (your ISP, others nearby etc.). It takes about 5 minutes to run and will tell you what DNS servers you should be using.

Quick, Easy and Free. That’s my kind of solution!

In my case, I’ve been a Mobile Me/.Mac member since 2003 but the service has 1 big issue : it really is an Apple-centric solution (and thus, not great on a non-Apple device) and while it can sync your bookmarks, it still doesn’t support tags to organize them. If you surf even half as much as I do, it’s easy to get hundreds of bookmarks in a few months, most of them unorganized. Who doesn’t have a “Cool Stuff” bookmark folder? Because of this, I’ve decided to split my bookmarks in two. My Safari bookmark bar is being used for those sites I visit everyday and those bookmarks are being synched through Mobile Me but everything else is going to Delicious.

Now Delicious is great, but I love having a native OS X client to manage those web services. For a while I was using the very simple (and quite cheap) “Delish” but it wasn’t all that great. It’s a nice application, but nothing to write home about. For one thing, why would you write home about a Delicious application?

I was very happy lately when I found Delibar, a very nice, well-working, incredibly slick-looking and yes, nice-smelling native OS X client for Delicious. At 18$, it’s not exactly cheap but if you use Delicious in any capacity you owe it to yourself to try this out. There’s a free version that has limited functionalities if you want to try it before buying. That version never expires.

The app has bookmarklets to let you easily add a page to your delicious account and supports a system wide shortcut key to bring up the search panel. You can also see the latest bookmarks from members of your Delicious network.

Greatly recommended.