What I’ve been up to: Favorite new apps.
Ah well, real life intrudes on art. I had big plans for recording in 2007, but it never quite happened. Excuses and circumstances included the mundane (the theft of mics, hard drives and software from my studio) and the tragic (the untimely death of my good friend and frequent collaborator, James Sabin).
I have been throwing myself into web design lately. Like music, it provides a certain amount of creative satisfaction. Unlike music, it provides a steady paycheck.
In November, I bought a new MacBook, which allows me to run Windows (for the necessary website proofing in IE7) and Ubuntu along with OSX. I have been exploring the burgeoning Mac open source software community, and here are some of my current favorites. While I have been enjoying the obvious choices on every Mac open source list (Firefox, VLC, Handbrake, Transmission, Cyberduck), I’ll focus on some you may not have heard of.
Cog: the anti iTunes
Cog doesn’t have an online store, track ratings, CoverFlow, or most of iTunes other slick touches. So why do I keep coming back to Cog? Simple things. First of all, it plays nearly every audio format, including ogg and flac files, which are increasingly a part of my music collection. Second, it doesn’t try to manage my music collection or hijack my optical drive. It just plays the tracks I ask it to play. Third, it Audio Scrobbles, and I’m enjoying tracking my listens on Last.FM.
Bean: the Anti Word Processor
Bean doesn’t merge your mailing labels, sync with your spreadsheets and calendar, or manage your footnotes and bibliography. It just does what I want a word processor to do about 90% of the time when I open one. It just takes dictation from my fingers, and allows me to apply simple formatting, then save it in a tiny, standardized file format. Was that really so hard?
Disk Inventory X: Find that Cruft that’s filling up your hard drive
Apparently there is no such thing as too much hard drive space. While I made do with a couple of floppy disks in high school, now I have terabytes of drives around the house, and they always seem to be full. Disk Inventory X scans your drive, and gives you a visual representation of the acreage each folder and file takes up on your disk drive. Genius.
