Growl (free) and OmniGrowl (free)

Growl (free) gives you notifications on your screen when something notable happens. It’s able to notify you of events that originate in other apps, like Firefox and with OmniGrowl (free) you can extend that functionality to notifying you of the weather, birthdays, flights arriving, etc.

Perian (free) and VLC (free, also for Windows/Linux/etc)

Perian is the Swiss army knife of video codecs. After you install, QuickTime Player will be able to playback almost any type of video. Simple. If what you’re trying to watch still doesn’t work, try VLC (free).

Dashboard Widgets (free)

If you don’t use the Dashboard you’re missing out on a lot. Simply by pressing a button on the keyboard you can view lots of information, make calculations, check cinema times, view weather info, snow reports and even tweet. Personally I use iStat Pro (free, shows you statistics on your computer like CPU and memory info), Twidget (free, allows you to tweet and view the tweets of people you follow), Currency Converter (free) and a handful of built in widgets Apple provide such as the calendar.

Adium (free)

iChat is great but with Adium you can send instant messages to users of: AIM, MobileMe (formerly known as .Mac), ICQ, XMPP (formerly known as Jabber), Google Talk, LiveJournal, MSN/Windows Live, Yahoo! Messenger, Bonjour, MySpaceIM, Gadu-Gadu, Novell GroupWise, Lotus Sametime, Tencent QQ, Facebook Chat and a whole host more with plugins.

AppFresh (free)

Some apps tell you when they have software updates available but AppFresh will search your hard drive for applications and then check to see if you have the latest version. If there is an update it will even direct you to the correct page to download it.

AppTrap (free)

Trying out software on the Mac is great. To install you drag it to the Applications folder and to delete you simply drag it to the Trash. What isn’t as widely known is that programs leave behind preferences and other files. That’s where AppTrap comes in handy; drag the app to delete to the trash and it searches your hard drive for associated files then present a list where you can choose what to get rid of.

Cocktail (from USD $14.95)

Computers can be a bit like cars; from time to time you need to have them serviced to keep them in perfect working order. With Cocktail you can easily perform otherwise complex maintenance tasks outside of the remit of Apples otherwise excellent Disk Utility. Cocktail also allows you to customize look the look and feel of you computer and alter system settings.

BetterZip (USD $19.95)

With the advent of Mac OS X you could expand and compress files without the need of other software such as the classic Stuffit. The operating system can’t decompress everything though and occasionally you will still come across something a little more exotic than your standard Zip file. BetterZip has inherited StuffIt’s crown in my book with it’s easy to use interface and ability to handle zip, tar, gzip, bzip2, rar, 7-zip, cpio, sit and hqx archives.

I recently checked the progress on Ecommo, a business set up by an ex-colleague and friend Alex Barton. The idea behind Ecommo is to allow people to sell online but without the usual hassle, problems and expense this can cause.

Many people, myself included, might look for an open source (free) content management system (i.e. osCommerce), but that’s not exactly the easiest system to use and I’d probably find setting it up a bit of a pain. I’ve seen a few sites using osCommerce and it’s a reasonable solution but it doesn’t eliminate the need for some geeks to install and set it up.

Ecommo aims to make selling online a lot easier. You don’t have to download and install it, you don’t have to pay a designer to build a template for it to look good, you don’t need to worry about servers going offline and taking your shop with it and it doesn’t take weeks to get it online. What it does do is provide is an easy to use solution which allows the owner to get on with the actual selling.

I’m really impressed with the progress Ecommo has made and it’s good to see they’re already attracting customers. If you’re after a professional online shop solution, Ecommo is definitely worth a look.

Update: Since writing this, Ecommo has shifted focus towards holiday accommodation providers. Good luck in your new direction guys!

Whilst this is all very interesting it doesn’t explain Haiku. The goal of the project is to recreate BeOS and extend it, bringing it up to date whilst still being compatible with BeOS and it’s existing suite of software. I really don’t see any benefit to Haiku, other than a curiosity of a system kept alive by loyal fans, but with it being freely available to try I thought I’d see what it was like.

Not only is it easy to try Haiku it’s also completely free. I downloaded my favourite virtual machine programme – VirtualBox, the latest Haiku test image (VMware images work in VirtualBox), created a new virtual machine gave it at least 128MB of RAM told it to use the VMware disk image as the hard disk and pressed Start.

Haiku booting

Haiku desktop

Haiku comes with a few recognizable applications such as Firefox and with the developers releasing an up to date compiler, they’re making it as easy as they can to encourage common open source applications. It does all smack of being rather pointless though. BeOS failed back in the day when it was cutting edge technology and now Haiku is playing catchup. People have moved on and other than being just a curiosity, it probably only has some education value if you want to branch out of Linux programming and try something different. The Haiku project is after programmers and there is a lot to do but some cool stuff to work on.

How many girls can say their Valentines card runs at 14 MHz?

The end result looks pretty good and didn’t take much time or effort. Sure, it’s just the unlock screen but I don’t want to give my idea away!

What I’ve found to be helpful to getting my head around Objective-C quickly (making use of the OO languages I already know) is a series of screencasts and a book called Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. I watched the screencasts first to see if I could get interested in it enough to stick with it and found that they were created in such a way that you can get stuck straight into the code. They’re US$5 a time but I found the first 2 very helpful (at the time of writing there was only 2 of the series). Apple also has a number of resources available for free (requires registration) on the Developer site. From my perhaps limited experience of development environments I’d have to say XCode is one of the best I’ve used and makes coding a very logical and easy process. XCode, various other applications and even an iPhone simulator are available to play with through your free developer membership.

I’m still working my way through the book but I hope to be making my own apps for the iPhone soon. All that remains is to actually by one!

I haven’t really used Windows Vista (they’re current operating system) much and find it very different from Windows XP (and not in a good way). Large companies such as Intel are refusing to upgrade their computers to Vista and along with a number of users want to hold out till the next OS update in the hope it will fix the many reported problems.

Windows 7 is still in Beta, which for the uninitiated means in the final stages of development but still containing bugs (try telling that to Google). Beta software isn’t meant for the end user and is normally restricted to members of a developers network who want to either use the beta to ensure their applications work in Windows 7 or to help find and fix bugs. Microsoft seems to be using this as a marketing offensive to prove that they have a capable new OS in the pipeline and allay peoples fears that this is going to be as bad as Vista. It certainly has to be the smoothest Beta experience I’ve ever had, with still no crashes or other glitches. Microsoft have a lot to prove and they seem to be doing an all right job at it so far.

Windows 7 is an evolution of Vista, it always was going to be. It took Microsoft 7 years to bring out Vista and they weren’t going to completely rewrite windows again. For better or for worse 7 is an incremental step from Vista attempting to fix its problems whilst adding features such as touch; so it can be used to power future devices.

Speed from what I can tell is very close to Vista and in appearance it’s almost the same too. The first thing you’ll probably notice about the OS is the redesigned task bar at the bottom of the screen. I immediately thought that it looks like it was designed for kids with its large and colourful icons. It’s not to my taste but then again nor is the frills of the Vista interface.

The OS comes with a beta of Internet Explorer 8 pre-installed amongst a selection of other applications, the beta being the top of the line Ultimate version with all the bells and whistles the play with. The old favourite; Paint also gets some much needed love (although the free Paint.NET is still in a whole different league).

A screenshot of Windows 7 beta

Overall I’m very impressed with Windows 7 beta. Microsoft is still to announce the bulk of the new features and with any pre-release software things are bound to change but they seem to have a very capable new OS waiting in the wings. We can only hope its good enough.

How to go about trying out Windows 7 Beta on a mac for free (providing you have a legal copy of Vista):

1.    You first need to get a copy of the Windows 7 Beta from the Microsoft website (at the time of writing this was still possible but they did say that only the first 2.5 million people could get a copy)
2.    I don’t have any virtualization software so I downloaded the free and very capable Sun VirtualBox only to discover that you can’t use the Mac OS version since they don’t allow 64 bit OS’s to run even on 64bit capable hardware. Thankfully Sun VirtualBox on Vista 32bit  and 64bit does work. You can download the 32bit beta to get around this problem. If you do this you can skip to step 5 below.
3.    You then have to use Boot Camp (instructions for this are here) to set up Vista on your computer (as a companion to Mac OS X). Remember to set up at least 30GB for Vista to live in. Windows XP may or may not work. It is possible to Upgrade and existing Vista install, in which case you can ignore the remaining steps
4.    Install VirtualBox
5.    Microsoft suggest you burn the disc image of Windows 7 to a DVD but VirtualBox is able to accept .iso files. If you do want to burn the disk image however you can do it using Disk Utility (in you macs Applications->Utilities folder).
6.    In VirtualBox select New
•    Give it a name (i.e. Win7b) and the OS Type: “Windows Vista”
•    Accept the memory size it suggests
•    Create a new virtual hard disk with the Image Type set as the default “Dynamically expanding image”
7.    Click on the blue title of “CD/DVD-ROM”
8.    Tick “Mount CD/DVD Drive” and either insert the DVD or find the ISO image file
9.    Finally click “Start” and you should be on your way to the Windows 7 beta install

Windows 7 beta running inside Sun VirtualBox

How to go about trying out Windows 7 Beta on a mac for free:

It is possible to install Windows 7 beta directly instead of Vista and forgetting steps 4 onwards above. This is in my view slight more risky and requires the user to either delete an existing Windows installation (Boot Camp can only handle one OS at a time by default) or another partitioning of the Windows area of your hard disk so Windows 7 can fit and not interfere with what you already have (possibly complicated in itself). If you go down this route of installing Windows 7 beta directly you should download the device drivers (set to Vista compatibility mode) to allow it to work with the hardware.

Remember this is beta software, you should expect it to go wrong and is definitely not for day to day use and especially with mission critical data. The beta will expire on August  1st 2009 but make sure you have automatic updates set up so you can get the latest fixes up to that point.