Ennui Blog

Welcome back!

I’m testing something new out, to help encourage participation on my blog posts. This blog is now a do-follow blog.

I blogged the other day about what it means to be a do-follow blog.

Basically if you leave a comment on the blog, linking to your website or blog, it will count as a backlink to the search engines. I have a Google pagerank of 2 on this blog, so it will be a decent backlink to have.

This is not a free for all. Please, do not abuse this privilege. I will be on the lookout for blatant spammers. The goal is to encourage participation.

Also, it would be nice if readers would return the link love and link back to my blog from theirs.

Have fun!

It can be difficult finding an Apple app for a specific task. Especially if you’re in the middle of a project and need a program quickly to do one thing and do it simply. So, I’ve put together a list of the 10 Mac Apps that you may not have heard of in the hopes that some people find these programs as useful as I have.

Adium

All iMacs come with iChat but it’s not fully featured enough, especially if you use Yahoo or MSN Messenger. Adium is a multi-protocol instant messenging app. It combines all the major IM protocols into one app. You can use AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Bonjour, Jabber, iChat and much much more. Best of all it’s completely free.

Cost: Free
Website: Adium

Evernote

Evernote is an incredible application. It’s a multi-platform notetaking program. It has a standalone program for taking notes, an iPhone program and a web based client. You can edit a note on any medium and they will all stay synced with each other. It’s revolutionized the way I write. A really cool feature in the iPhone program is that you can take photo snapshots and sync them. The program and the service are free (but there is a usage quota - I have never hit it).

Cost: Free
Website: Evernote

Livequartz

Everyone knows that photoshop is the mother of all image editing applications. The problem is that I have no freaking idea how to use it. Simple tasks elude me and I don’t have the time to learn it. Livequartz is a simple application sort of like MS Paint, you can edit images quickly, resize, save in a multitude of formats and do more advanced things. It’s open source and free. Great little program, it’s light and quick. You’ll have an image resized before Photoshop even opens.

Cost: Free
Website: LiveQuartz

Filezilla

Transmit is the best FTP client for Mac, in my opnion, but FileZilla is a good, free full featured alternative. It intergrates well with OS X and is very stable. It’s free and open source as well.

Cost: Free
Website: FileZilla

NeoOffice

Don’t want to gouge your eyeballs out installing MS Office for Mac? NeoOffice is a good alternative. It’s free and works with all the Office formats. It’s pretty fast and is now native to OS X.

Cost: Free
Website: NeoOffice

Scrivener

Scrivener is a fantastic writing program. It’s designed to help you brainstorm your ideas, outline them, put in notes and images and then finally write your book. Once your book is written, it will compile it for you in a Word Doc. It also has full screen writing mode, which takes away all distractions. You can do all of this in one program, it’s fantastic.

Cost: $39.95
Website: Scrivener

iStat

Not really an application. It’s a free dashboard widget that tells you everything you could possibly want to know about your computer. It tell you how much hard drive space you have, how much ram is being used, CPU temp, etc. It has it all. Excellent widget to have to keep tabs on your Mac.

Cost: Free
Website: iStat Widget

Journaler

This is a great little program if you want to keep a daily journal. It has all the requisite text editing features needed, it’s laid out like Apple Mail and other similar program. What sold me was that you can choose to blog your journal entries or you can export them easily to another format. Great for if you ever want to turn it into bookform.

Cost: $34.95
Website: Journaler

MarsEdit

I manage about seven blogs right now and it got increasingly annoying to login to all their respective web interfaces. This consolidates all your blogs and puts them into one program. You can write and update blogs on most platforms directly from the program. You can also enter your own HTML and upload images. It’s great. It has saved me a lot of time.

Cost: $29.95
Website: MarsEdit

Papers

Paper is a pretty cool app. It searches your hard drive and indexes all or your PDF files. You can rate them, tag them and organize them like you would in Mail or iPhoto. Pretty slick application. Useful for me because I save PDF’s when I come across an interesting story that I want to keep, for ideas and research.

Cost: $42.00
Website: Papers