Circle Six Favorites: Spring 2007

I need a break from the Subversion series, so I’m taking a moment to list some of the most exciting OS X software and a few of my current favorite websites/apps. I don’t know how long or short the list will end up, so I refuse to either limit myself to 10 or set such high expectations ;).

Productive

First on my list, and it’s certainly not the first time I’ve mentioned it, is iGTD. It’s gone through so many revisions and upgrades lately it’s going to be tough to list all of the new features. Thankfully, the author has finally set up a blog with an RSS feed so I can stop trying to keep up! There’s also a forum and a wiki (in the works). To sum up, iGTD is an extremely flexible GTD-like app that lets you conform as much or as little as you like to the GTD method. It has features like great keyboard shortcuts, tagging and smart folders, linking and creating tasks from email messages, urls and files, and much more. It’s donationware, and is definitely worth a few of your pennies!

Yojimbo has continued to be my pdf and note organization tool of choice. I’ve gone through a few others, and they’ve had some great features, but Yojimbo has simplicity, great design and some powerful tools on its side. I’ve kept coming back to it and have ultimately found myself very happy with its feature set.

I covered FreeMind recently, which is still my favorite desktop app for mind-mapping, but mindmeister.com is my new favorite place to let ideas take flight. It can import from FreeMind, has a very similar feature set (completely navigable by keyboard) and you can share and work simultaneously with friends and co-workers. It can export back to FreeMind and has other export options. It’s in private beta right now, but signing up for the newsletter will usually get you an invitation. I have a few invites left if you’re interested.

Useful

Skype has released an updated mac client. It was enough to get some money out of me. Now I talk to my long distance friends and relatives through my MacBook Pro, and I love it. I had my dad call me from my computer while he was visiting and just using the built in mic the sound quality was quite good.

Service Scrubber for OS X is a huge boon for those of us who try out everything we can get our hands on and in the process have a Services menu that’s chock full of items we’ll probably never use. Well, some we’ll definitely never use. Scrubber lets you select and remove those items, leaving you with a Services menu that won’t make your head explode when you open it up. For the first time in a long time, I’m actually using the Services menu again!

Fun

One of my favorite new apps is MusicIP Mixer. It creates mixes from your music library automatically. It imported all of my tunes from iTunes and analyzed them using some secret formula. Now I can click any genre, artist or song and click the mix button and get a pretty wicked mix based on aspects of that style or song. It’s like Pandora, but with music you already know you like ;). You can set preferences for how often artists repeat, how long a playlist is and set how much the selections should vary from the seed, among other things. You can send your playlist to a player and there’s a server function I haven’t quite figured out yet.

I’m going to quit there for now. I’m trying to stick with what’s relatively new and not rehash the same old “I love TextMate, Quicksilver, CSSEdit…” list again. So check out some new software and let me know what your recommendations are!