Mac software

I've recently been acquiring a bunch of cool Mac software. No, I don't mean the new version of iTunes; I intend to download that, but haven't yet done so. These are some way-cool third-party apps. Unfortunately, most of them don't have Windows versions; y'all Windows users probably won't find anything in this entry of interest (except the bit about Finale NotePad).

  • DEVONthink (thanks, Toby!) is changing the way I work. For years now, I've been taking notes in non-addressed email messages in Eudora; I eventually figured out a few months ago that I do that because I can create a new document, type in it, and press Command+S to save without having to choose a filename or a location on disk for it. Also, Eudora has a very fast search function, so I can easily find my notes later. But they get mixed in with outgoing email, and it's not a very elegant approach to taking notes, and things do get lost. DEVONthink is a note-taking application with all sorts of cool advanced features; it's got an integrated web browser (based on Safari), it lets you create folders and sub-folders of notes, it lets you create pointers to notes in other folders (rather than copies). I gather it has advanced search capabilities and can organize notes for you, though I haven't used either of those features yet. It costs $40 for the full version, or only $15 for the scaled-down version, DEVONnote (which has almost all the features I want). You can download a trial version that expires after some number of days, but be warned that if you decide to buy it, it may take up to two days for them to send you a license key, during which time you're locked out of the app. So if you decide to buy it, pay for it a couple days before the trial version expires.
  • Finale NotePad 2004 is finally out: a free OS X native music-notation app. (Also available for Windows, btw.) I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. I may eventually upgrade to the more full-featured version (which costs money). I do wish it imported and exported abc files, though. (Maybe it does, for all I know; I've barely opened it so far.)
  • Chronopath Library looks mighty cool: it's a library-cataloguing app. It used to be that you could get a handheld barcode-scanning device for about $150 that you could use to enter books into the database, but I hear they're working on a new version that will identify barcodes when you hold the book up to a digital camera (like an iSight) attached to your computer. I would love to have a catalog of all my books, but I have no interest in entering the data by hand; this app would be totally cool.
  • Music Recommendation System for iTunes is yet another collaborative-filtering project, but this time you don't have to enter your ratings into the system by hand; you just tell it to upload all the ratings on your iTunes songs directly into their system, and it churns for a while and then gives you some recommendations. The problem at the moment is that they're very slow (due to limited resources); they gave me an estimate of 2.1 days for the amount of time it would take to process my ratings, but it ended up being more like 4 or 5 days. The other problem at the moment is that they've only had about 3600 people submit their ratings, so their recommendations may not be great at this point; and in fact, I wasn't particularly impressed with anything they recommended to me. But I'll probably submit my ratings again at some point and see if the increased number of users improves their recommendations.
  • SubEthaEdit (the application formerly known as Hydra) is a collaborative text editor: it lets multiple people (via a network) edit the same document at the same time. I gather it's extremely useful for taking notes on presentations at conferences; I'd love to try it out at a con sometime, with several people in the audience taking collaborative notes on a panel. Any of y'all Mac types want to try this at WisCon?
  • Holding Pattern is a freeware screensaver that turns your Mac into the view out an airplane window. I haven't tried it yet, but it sounds like at least temporary fun.
  • Last but definitely not least useful: AutoPairs is a free piece of software that automatically closes any parenthesis, bracket, or quotation-mark pair that you open. You type an open-paren, it adds a close-paren and then places the insertion point between the two. It appears to work seamlessly in almost every OS X application. It includes a System Preferences panel that lets you set prefs. I've had it for less than 24 hours and it's already changing my life. The only problem with it is that it's a very simple and straightforward algorithm—if you want to add quotation marks around a phrase you've already typed, for example, you'll get a pair of quotation marks at each end of the phrase, so you need to delete one from each pair. But so far, anyway, the convenience far outweighs the inconvenience, and you never have to worry about forgetting to close a parenthesis.

3 Responses to “Mac software”

  1. Shmuel

    “It used to be that you could get a handheld barcode-scanning device for about $150”

    You can also find CueCats on eBay for a few bucks. They apparently work just fine with ReaderWare, and imagine you’d be able to get it to work with other software. (Try poking around the Web for lots of stuff on hacking CueCats.)

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  2. Gordon Vaughan

    So, after 3 years, are you still using DevonThink (or DevonNote?), and do you have any comments about it?

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  3. Jed

    That’s a remarkably timely question; I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fact that although I still use DEVONThink all the time, I don’t use it nearly to its full potential. Somehow, taking notes there still feels a little more heavyweight/high-overhead than taking notes in a blank new Eudora email message. I can’t figure out why.

    But I’ve been dissatisfied with most of my most-used software lately. Vaguely pondering an entry about that sometime soonish, but not sure when/if that’ll happen.

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