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Fun with menubar.
2
Andy from the BOL forums posted this link to Super OS X Menubar Items. So, I thought I’d post what I’ve got, and ask what you guys can’t live without in your menubar.
1. Gizmo Project – Keep those cell phone bills down! Better than Skype, imho.
2. Adium – Since I use both Yahoo! Messenger (for work) and AIM/iChat for personal, it helps to have them combined into one happy program. Trust me, you’ll want to go with the default iChat options for sound… not the Adium sounds. Seriously.
3. WoW Status – This is an unlimited trial version that lets you know how crowded your favorite WoW server is. For a small fee, you can watch as many servers as you want, and also have it tell you when the wait time is low, or if the server is down, etc. Very nerdy (and useful!).
4. SMARTReporter – Make sure your hard drive is running all happy-like.
5. Gmail Notifier – Probably my favorite and most used item.
6. Synergy – I love this. Control iTunes from the menubar, so you never have to switch around applications to change tracks. Also displays what artist/track/album is playing as the songs change, in a semi-transparent window that pops up in the lower left of the screen. Worth the $15.
Of course, the little VPN icon is there for those days when I’ve got to phone it in. Missing from the group shot is the iScrobbler icon for Last.fm.
Flock has landed.
3Pardon the pun, but it was absolutely necessary. I’m posting right now from within Flock, the new browser that is an offshoot of the Mozilla browser code. Right off the bat, I can say a few things about it in the 5 minutes I’ve been using it:
1. I really like the blog integration. In fact, I like it better than the actual Blogger interface. Plus, all my Flickr pictures load at the top of the screen when I change a little button called “Topbar” to Flickr. Then I can simply drag them into my post! Fabulous.
2. The use of del.icio.us in place of a favorites list. Who doesn’t like social networking services?? Now everyone can see the bookmarks that you create and want to share. And if you’re not at home, you can log into your account to show someone your favorite page (which, assumably, you can’t remember the address for…).
3. The interface is cute, and I haven’t yet gone around looking for alternate skins. I’m guessing they exist, although it’s probably too early in the game for people to develop their own. Well, it has been a full day… must be some somewhere.
4. Firefox crashes my Mac. I’m not sure why, or how, but I’m not the only one this happens to. Even though it’s based on the same code, maybe I’ll have better luck using something other than Safari at home.
5. There are easy RSS reader capabilites built right in, but I already use Bloglines. I’ve been happy with that web based reader, and have no desire to change as of yet, but maybe I’m missing something.
Overall, as Tom said on the podcast today, there’s nothing here that you can’t already get somewhere else. But it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
UPDATE! After I wrote all that, the Publish tool didn’t work. Soooo… thats to be expected. They’ll work the bugs out soon enough, I’m sure. Still happy with it!
Kill off your enemies.
3A few years ago, I downloaded an old-skool Apple emulator so I could play Oregon Trail. It was especially fun, because we made our travel party out of people who we HATED. So then the game would validate my feelings by saying such things as “Dan* has died of dysentery!”
Well, today I came across a great t-shirt. And now I think I need to own it.
*name has been changed to protect my popularity.
Make Google Talk sing.
0At work today, Tim did something really clever. He figured out how to make Google Talk become your own streaming internet radio station. We tried it out, and it worked pretty damn well! Here’s the link to Alpha blog, where he wrote out the instructions:
- Purchase a male-to-male speaker/headphone cable. It should have a 1/8-inch mini headphone jack on each end.
- Plug one end into the mic-in port on your computer.
- Plug the other end into your computer’s headphone port. If you want to listen to music as you play it for your listeners (recommended), use a headphone splitter. Jack your headphones into one port of the headphone splitter, the male-to-male cable into the other port, and plug the splitter into your headphone port.
- Launch iTunes (or any other audio player) and start playing songs.
- Call up your friends over Google Talk. They’ll hear whatever you’re playing with surprisingly good sound quality.
Spectacular! Oh, and then we played a really great game, where you stream a rap song and try to type the lyrics as they come. It’s a good way to test out the lag factor as well.