I’ve long been looking for a Windows-based Twitter client that can delight me as much as its native Mac counterparts. Too many clients for Windows depend on Adobe AIR, something which isn’t an ideal arrangement, in my opinion. TweetDeck and Seesmic are both powerful tools, but why can’t someone make a Windows-native app that works just as well?
Seesmic apparently saw the wisdom in that idea, because it recently revealed a new Windows-only Twitter client that doesn’t require AIR to run. I jumped at the chance to take the software, which is currently only available as a preview edition, for a test run. Read the rest of this entry »
e-tipi sounds like a weird name for a web-based service, and when you find out it stands for “Espresso Thinking Platform,” things don’t become much clearer. But once you find out what the app’s developers think “Espresso Thinking” is, then you start to get the idea:
“We believe that sharing an espresso in a nice café creates a particular atmosphere that frees minds and promotes promising ideas to expressly appear. This is what we call Espresso Thinking.”
It’s a nice thought, but is that really something that can be captured in a web-based environment? I recently talked about the same kind of collaboration (lack of coffee products notwithstanding) in an article about my beloved sketchbook, so I was eager to find out if I could recreate the experience digitally using e-tipi. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m very happy in my choice of Twitter clients at the moment. Tweetie is my weapon of choice for the Mac desktop, and it has served faithfully since its release. Doesn’t hurt that it’s free, either (though ad-supported). But I’m always glad to try out new contenders to the throne, and that’s why Twitt caught my eye today.
Twitt is a new, lightweight Mac Twitter client that has some interesting features I haven’t yet found elsewhere. Can it compete with perennial favorites Tweetie and TweetDeck, though? Using both those programs regularly has set my expectations fairly high, but Twitt definitely counts some surprising twists among its repertoire. Read the rest of this entry »
Filemaker’s Bento software for the Mac is meant to be a database management program for users who aren’t much interested in keeping databases. At least, as someone who shudders at the very term, that’s how I see it. The program receives its third major iterative upgrade today, and there’s a lot for web workers to get excited about with this latest version.
I haven’t used Bento since it was first released, so a lot is new to me. For the purposes of this review, I won’t be detailing what’s changed so much as what strikes me as most useful about the program from a web working angle, since I imagine many of you will be new to the software as well. Read the rest of this entry »
Like many web workers, one of my challenges is keeping my data in sync between the various devices and apps that I use. I stopped using my Palm handheld over a year ago, but I’ve continued to use the Palm Desktop application, because it’s one of the easiest-to-use and most mobile-friendly applications ever, even though I now have a BlackBerry. Finding a solution that can keep my data in sync between Palm Desktop, my BlackBerry and the other apps that I use has been difficult.
For a while, I’d sync Outlook and Palm Desktop, and then Outlook would update the BlackBerry (I didn’t actually use Outlook at all, it just acted as the middleman). It worked great. But then my dependence on Google Calendar grew, because I could access it from any computer as well as my BlackBerry, and it wouldn’t work with my sync setup. Read the rest of this entry »
I like my orange juice freshly squeezed, but there are some good things that come from Concentrate. From the new app, that is, not the distilled juice essence. Concentrate is a new program that seems perfectly designed for aspiring singletaskers. It aims to reduce distraction and boost productivity by doing the work of various other separate applications, united under one well-designed roof. While the smart-looking launch page might have you thinking this is a web app, it’s actually a downloadable native OS X app program; Windows users will have to look elsewhere for help silencing the static.
What Concentrate provides is different than most apps, though, in that it takes as its core philosophy reduction, rather than addition or enhancement. It’s basically like a task scheduler that works similarly to Automator actions in order to provide you with efficiency-boosting shortcuts to setup programs, block web sites, and run and kill apps, all of which lets you focus on the task at hand. Read the rest of this entry »
Do you often repeat the same tasks over and over on a Windows machine? You can avoid many of the steps and save time if you save your actions for later replay using WinAutomation. The application is ideal for power users and can even take care of complex remote tasks.
If you’d like to automate computer activities when you’re not near the desktop you’ll find many options in WinAutomation to help you. It can handle jobs ranging from running command line tasks to managing FTP activities and executing SQL statements. Read the rest of this entry »
I still take it as a personal affront that Mac users have had to wait so long for a usable build of Google Chrome. Since I haven’t done any Windows-related work in a good while now, running Chrome was really my only reason for using any kind of OS virtualization. I barely even have cause to open MS Word anymore.
Finally, as Simon mentioned last week, we Apple fans have got a Chrome build near enough completion to get worked up about. It isn’t anywhere near a proper final build, but it does work well enough that I felt comfortable using it to compose this piece. It’s good enough for most web work that doesn’t involve using Flash (which is almost all of it, in my case, I’m realizing). Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
