MenuBar Apps – iStat menus

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Continuing my tour of favorite MenuBar applications, I thought I’d write a bit about iSlayer’s excellent iStat menus. This application creates a preference pane that allows you to put a variety of tools in your menubar. It allows you to keep on top of memory, drive space, processors, fans, and other geeky details.

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As you can see, iStat is loaded with options and can quickly hog up your Menubar. For giggles I turned them all on and filled half of the Menubar on my 17″ widescreen MacBook Pro. Oops.
Trying to bring order back to chaos I reset the key stats to give vertical bars and I am good to go. It takes a minimum of space but provides all the information I need.

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Setting up a New Mac on a College Budget

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It’s funny how buying Macs becomes contagious. Since I bought mine, several friends and family have come into the fold. A few months ago, my sister told me she intended to buy a MacBook for each of her college age children. She enlisted me to help her. I was tasked with purchasing and setting them up so they could hit the ground running on Christmas morning. Now the pressure was on with this assignment because my brother in law is a PC wizard. There aren’t many things that can go wrong with a PC that Dr. Tom can’t sort out. Here is a guy that take’s PC’s apart when he is bored. So here I am with my sister “corrupting” his own children on Macs. It would be like General Lee’s kids going off to fight for General Sherman.
Anyway, I braved the crowd and went to the Apple store the day after Thanksgiving and took advantage of Apple’s one day $100 off deal for the MacBooks. I also bought a family pack of iWork (Reviews – Pages, Numbers, Keynote) and the AppleCare warranty for both machines. Finally I bought a Microsoft Office Student pack. This last bit wasn’t really that necessary but Microsoft had an incredible deal on Black Friday allowing me to get the program for $50 with a free upgrade to Office 2008. If it had not been for that deal, I would set them up with iWork and NeoOffice.
So I got these shiny white machines home and had a great deal of fun setting them up. In addition to iWork and Office I installed several programs built around the college budget … meaning free or darn near free.

Web Browsing and RSS

For web browsing I set them up with Safari and Firefox. Safari got Inquisitor. Safari without Inquisitor is like a Ferrari with no gas. I also installed Vienna, a great RSS reader but lately I’ve been liking Google Reader so much that I set that up for them as well.

Mail

For Mail I set them up with mail.app and the Mail Act-On plugin. Read the Review Here.

Jumpcut


This is my favorite free MenuBar application. Easy to use and really helpful to anyone that writes. Read the review.

OmniOutliner


I got them student licenses for OmniOutliner which only cost $25. I really wish Omni had been around back when I was in college.

HandBrake

They both have big DVD collections and iPods. This was a no brainer. On the subject of video support, Flip4Mac and Perian are almost mandatory for anybody that wants to watch web video.

ImageWell


This is a great little app for making quick adjustments or watermarks on graphics files

CarbonCopyCloner


Bootable backup on a budget.

1Password


This is another application on my Mac that I just couldn’t live without. If you haven’t heard of it, 1Password allows you to track all sorts of passwords, web logins, and other data you want to keep secret. Read the review here.

Adium

A great, free all purpose instant message client.

iGTD


I actually prefer OmniFocus for task management but we were on a budget and iGTD has more then enough horsepower for college. Read the review here.

Tech Support Tools

It is inevitable that I will be doing tech support on these machines so I installed Disk Inventory X, iStat, and MainMenu. I’ll be installing Onyx when they get the Leopard compatibility sorted out.
In addition to the above applications, I also set up their iLife applications by loading the address book with my nice relatives and a few crazy ones. I left the fruitcake relatives out. I set up a few iPhoto events and even set up their iCal calendars.
I also put a folder in their dock with some choice screencasts from MacSparky and a few from Don McAllister to get them started. If they show enough interest, I’ll probably end up buying them memberships from Don’s website for their birthdays.
I also picked widgets and wallpapers specific to their personalities. If you haven’t already, check out interfacelift.com for just about any type wallpaper you can think of. It was a blast setting the computers up for them so when they unwrapped them Christmas morning they simply opened the lid and found them ready to go. I’m happy to report that less than one week after Christmas, they are both already confirmed switchers. I’ve already had a few iChat screensharing sessions with them to fix a few hiccups and just love how easy it is to help them out.
So what are you “Must Have” applications on a new Mac?

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On Switching to Google Reader

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I have been using NewsGator for about a year. It syncs with NetNewsWire and it has an excellent iPhone application. About a month ago I started using Google Reader to figure it out if I was missing out on anything. After a month, I’m sticking with Google Reader.
There are a few reasons for this decision. As nice as NetNewsWire is, I wasn’t really using its additional features. Having a native news reading application really wasn’t making that much of a difference for me. Furthermore, the NewsGator iPhone interface doesn’t allow you to go back and read “clipped” articles unless you leave them “unread” which then makes you reader list cluttery.
Google Reader solves these problems and works well with the way I do things. I usually find myself going through and tagging articles on my iPhone and actually reading interesting ones on my Mac. What is your favorite reader?

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Merry Christmas Friends

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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays friends. I hope all the MacSparky readers have a happy and safe holiday and Santa places plenty of Apple toys under your tree. Above was our family Christmas card this year which was actually my wife’s idea (no, really!). I’ll do a post soon explaining how I did it but for now go back to your eggnog and loved ones.

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Review – BeeDocs Timeline

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This week I’m reviewing a timeline program. Now I know right now a lot of people are rolling their eyes but I love timelines. I actually get excited about them. I think I like timelines because they are visual and a lot of times you see relationships and ideas on a timeline that don’t jump out at you any other way. Until recently I always made timelines using brute force and even on occasion (Dare I say it?) graph paper and a pencil! This changed when a reader and friend turned me onto an excellent application for OS X called, Timeline published by Bee Docs.
Timeline is a simple little application that does nothing but make quick, jaw-dropping timelines. My review is of version 2.0 that just recently was released. When you first load up Timeline, it presents a simple interface that allows you to pick a theme (I like gradient style “Pleather” theme) and a data source which can be any one of several applications or your own custom data set. Setting up a new Timeline is that simple.

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Choosing the custom option allows you set up your own timeline that can cover the past 10,000 years or the past 10 minutes. Each entry is made by simply hitting the little “plus” sign and filling in your data. The data can include much more than the obligatory name and date fields. It also supports date ranges, description, photos, and links. This gives you the ability to easily create rich timelines with little work. One of my favorite parts of this is how the program makes room for every entry. Before Timeline, I always found it tedious when I decided to add an event to a timeline and ended up having to scooch everything over to to make it fit.

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As an example I prepared a timeline for a client on a dispute I’m involved with where I included images of key contracts and letters throughout a transaction. It took me all of about ten minutes to prepare and looked very professional. Even more importantly, it was critical in conveying important information. Following the meeting I emailed a PDF of the timeline (accomplished with one click in Timeline) and the client and I still refer to it in our phone conversations.
If you don’t want to make a custom data set, Timeline will pull its data out of your iLife applications as well as a few others. Timeline even found Skitch on my machine as a source of timeline data. Using the iLife integration I made a timeline of my most recently played iTunes songs, birthdays from my address book, and photos from iPhoto. I was able to incorporate photographs and links with almost no effort.

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The software developer, Adam Behringer, is a fellow Mac enthusiast with whom I’ve been trading email. Adam explained he turned software developer when Apple released OS X. He has now released version 2.0 which adds all the picture and link goodness I descried above. Adam explained the vision for Timeline has always been to create an application where the Timeline can be generated as fast as the entries are discussed and he has succeeded brilliantly.

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This application would be useful for more people than geeky lawyers though. I can see this being used in education, business, marketing, and anything else that requires either future planning or summarizing past events. You can download a trial of Timeline at www.beedocuments.com. There is also a very nice (and short) video demonstration. A full license will cost you $40. However, the developer has generously given a discount code for MacSparky readers. If you type the code MACSPARKY at checkout, you will get 15% off. This discount is good through the end of January 2008.
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You can listen to the above review on The Mac ReviewCast Episode 139.

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