These are a few of my favourite Mac utilities, that are almost always running when I’m on my laptop. They fall into a few categories; some are for social networking & email, a few for entertainment, and a there are a bunch of useful tools for a variety of things. So, from left to right, they are:

1. last.fm

Although I actually prefer using the iScrobbler plugin, since upgrading to Snow Leopard I’ve just had way too many problems with it & have had to fall back to using the official last.fm plugin, which is a little bulky for my liking. I love ‘scrobbling‘ my music to last.fm though – it helps me realise what music in my library I’m not listening to as much as anything, when I feel like I need a change. If anyone has any recommendations for a lightweight last.fm app that syncs iPhone play counts as well as iTunes, please let me know!

2. ByteController

Another app that runs whenever iTunes does, Byte Controller is a super lightweight way to control your iTunes music from the status bar. A number of different skins are available in the prefs, and it is great for pausing or skipping tracks quickly. It only takes up space whenever iTunes is open, which I love – last.fm doesn’t go away when I quit iTunes and I wish it did!

3. Adium

Adium is the instant messaging app for the mac. There is just no real competition, I’ve found. It is lightweight and can connect up to pretty much any chat network there is. I use it for gtalk¹, facebook chat², yahoo, aim & windows live. This is what happens when you have different friends and family using different networks! Although it does tend to mean that people assume that I am on facebook.com just because I am logged into their chat system. Adium is wonderfully customisable – you can change every aspect of the visuals, and there are some beautiful themes, icons & so on out there for it. I’m currently using a menubar icon from Vibealicious.

4. Skitch

This app is brilliant for super quick image capture, annotation & sharing. You can ’snap’ images from your screen, or from your iSight. It includes a fairly standard set of basic annotation/editing options, including resizing, various shapes, arrows, text, freehand pencil & fill. With a built-in history feature & great sharing options, it’s a fast and easy way to get your images edited and up on the net asap. A nifty feature I use a lot is the ‘drag me’ button which makes it a piece of cake to drop an image into a new tweet, email, or just onto the desktop.

5. JustNotes

I love this notes app, because it is simple, unobtrusive and fast. I raved about Simplenote a few weeks ago, and this is the menubar app I use to view & edit my notes on my mac. The syncing to the Simplenote (powered by Google) service is flawless, and the style is beautiful. There are a few customisation options, so I am happily using Helvetica! I love having my notes available to me wherever I am, whether it’s on my laptop, my iPhone, or at any internet enabled computer!

6. Notify

After trying several different options for accessing & managing my gmail account, I settled with using the web interface in Chrome, which is now my default browser of choice. However, this doesn’t help if you want to keep a track of your unread emails! I use Notify Pro, which includes the capability to ‘quick look’ and reply to emails right from the app, and also to mark them as read or delete them. This speeds up the process of dealing with my email quite a bit! It supports gmail, google apps email, mobile me & any IMAP enabled account. And it’s very pretty!

7. Pastebot Sync

This is a companion app to its iPhone conterpart, Pastebot. These two apps combined allow you to transfer information from your clipboard on your iPhone to your mac, and visa versa – very very useful! The iPhone app also allows you to save items so you can retrieve them again later, organise them & even edit them (including some basic image editing with more on its way).

8. ShoveBox

This app is exactly what it sounds like – a place to shove all the debris and random information you pick up around the internet and seem to accumulate while you are using your computer. I use it for storing random images, files, snippets of text & links I want to remember. I hate to have a cluttered desktop so a place to hide all this randomness is great! What’s great about this one is that there is now a matching iPhone app so that you can sync your random collection of information over wifi to your iPhone and carry it about with you. I also find this a great way to keep useful files on my iPhone, rather than having to email them to myself all the time.

9. Tweetie

My all time favourite twitter app for both iPhone and Mac is Tweetie, without a doubt. Unfortunately this is getting a little out of date now, so I am eagerly awaiting the release of Tweetie 2! This app is intuitive, fast and has a brilliant multiple accounts setup. The fact it’s not an Adobe Air app wins it big points too! Again, I’m currently using a menubar icon & custom app icon from Vibealicious.

10. Facebook Notifications

Facebook Notifications does exactly what it says on the tin.. it notifies you.. about stuff that happens on facebook. It is actually surprisingly useful, with a list of your recent facebook notifications and another of your recent messages. There are also quick links to the news feed, your profile, to compose a new message, as well as a built in status update function (the latest update includes link & photo updates too). It plugs into growl to display new notifications³, which is always a nice touch. This app has definitely reduced my wasted time on the facebook homepage!

And a bonus! 11. Eject Applet

The eject applet is actually built into Mac OS X – you just have to know where to look. I find this incredibly useful, especially since I spilt water on my keyboard and my physical eject button no longer works! It’s also great if a disc is playing up and refusing to eject – quite often this method works when nothing else does, short of a reboot.

Also, if you’re interested, the wallpaper I am using is Bokeh by Sparcy86, and the desktop icons are ColorStroked Freehand Icons by mfayaz. I love them!

1. jabber [↩]
2. also now jabber [↩]
3. last.fm, ByteController, Notify, Shovebox, Adium & Tweetie are also all growl enabled [↩]

James & I headed out to the cinema this evening to go & watch this year’s V-day rom com: the appropriately named Valentine’s Day.

This film is everything it is billed to be: a romantic comedy packed full of big names, with plenty of scenes to make you laugh, and even one or two to make you cry. Thankfully they don’t overdo the gooeyness though – it manages a great balance between comedy and romance! With some of my favourite stars in the cast, I had looked forward to watching it since I first saw the trailer a while a go.

It has McDreamy AND McSteamy¹! Julia Roberts! Taylor times two²! Topher Grace! Jennifer Garner! Bradley Cooper! Queen Latifah! Anne Hathaway! The list goes on…

From the director of Pretty Woman, Valentine’s Day uses a Love Actually / He’s Just Not That Into You type concept; with many characters’ stories and relationships intertwined with one another. The biggest difference to these films is that the stories are told over just one day – February 14th. I actually thought that the whole film had a similar ‘vibe’ to Love Actually, by telling the story of love & its many forms.

There were relationships between friends, the blooming of first love between teenagers, strangers on an aeroplane, and so on – beautiful stuff! I really enjoyed the characters that were in this, so many of them actually seemed to be realistic, which is one area where Love Actually falls a little flat – some of the characters in that are a little far-fetched (since when does England get such a fun Prime Minister)!

I won’t give away any of the storylines, but I do recommend that you go and see it, especially if you’re a fan of rom coms (and Love Actually or Pretty Woman in particular). I am a self-confessed chick flick/lit fan, and I loved it. This will definitely be one for the DVD/Blu-Ray collection – it’s going to work fantastically as a feel good film for cheering me up when I’m having a bad day.

Go watch it³!

Official Website

1. this is a Grey’s Anatomy reference for those of you who are confused [↩]
2. Taylor times two = Lautner (mmmm you’re sort of beautiful) & Swift (love her music) [↩]
3. and hang around for the first part of the credits – especially if you’re a Pretty Woman fan [↩]

I started using Simplenote a month or so ago, and it has rapidly become my most used app on my iPhone. It’s a great notes app, which looks a million times better than the built in notes app¹, and it is really easy & intuitive to use. The biggest improvement over the built in notes app is the over the air syncing, which is incredibly well executed.

I use Simplenote for all manner of things – draft blog posts, lists, random titbits of information I need to remember, which songs I want from the SingStore, etc.

I have tried a lot of notes apps from the app store, but this is easily my favourite from all of the ones I have tried. A lot of the other apps that I tried were overcomplicated, difficult to use & had annoying methods of syncing/backing up your notes. Simplenote syncs with their own servers which means you can access your notes in various different ways.

In their own words…

Why Simplenote?
Simplenote is a free replacement for the Notes app on your iPhone or iPod touch. It has a great interface, awesome web syncing, and it works with a growing number of desktop apps.

Everything you need, nothing you don’t
Don’t let unnecessary features get between you and your notes. Simplenote’s interface is designed specifically for text notes. It gives you fast, clean, synchronized access to your thoughts, dreams, musings, and masterpieces.

Syncing without thinking
The Simplenote app works together with our free web app and a variety of third-party apps to keep your notes in perpetual sync. No cables, no hassles, no fiddling. Automatic, over-the-air, and fast.

As well as being a super easy app to use, there are some really great extras for you to download. My particular favourite is JustNotes which allows you to read, add & edit notes from your OS X taskbar.

There is also a fantasic webapp to allow to access your notes from your browser – this is great if you just need to check something while at work, or if you don’t have your iPhone with you while you are at a friend’s house, etc.

If you are like me, and get frustrated with the looks & inconvinient syncing of the built in notes app, then this is the perfect app for you.

ITunes Link

1. Yay, helvetica! No more Marker Felt [↩]

If you haven’t seen it already, then I have to tell you, you simply must go & see Avatar. In 3D, if possible!

James & I went to see it with a few friends on Saturday night, and we both loved it. In fact everyone but Victor really enjoyed it.. and Victor doesn’t ‘get’ a lot of things so it’s not that surprising! The man collects stamps for goodness sake, he can’t be expected to understand a science fiction love story like Avatar!

I won’t repeat what many of the ‘great critics’ have said, or try and deconstruct the film for you. I just wanted to tell you I loved it. The characters are fantastic, and the imagination it took to create this film is amazing… let alone the technology behind those special effects. Go see it. If you like science fiction, or if you like love stories, or even if you just like a great battle scene, then just go see it.

I want to go see it again, soon!

There is no doubt about it, the iPhone is of the most popular cameras used by flickr members, and it’s not hard to guess why. It is far & away the most popular cameraphone, and for a brief period this summer actually topped the charts as the most popular camera overall.

Despite the improvements to the camera in the 3GS, it still doesn’t match up our point ‘n’ shoot camera, the Sony Cybershot T77 – but I take far more pictures with my iPhone 3GS than I used to when I had a seperate phone & camera.

When something happens – if Homily is being extra cute or James is doing something silly, my first reaction is to pull my iPhone out of my pocket and capture the moment. Simply because it’s there. I don’t have to root in my bag for a camera, and I can upload the photo straight to my flickr account straight away – no need to find cables and plug it into my laptop.

Flickr & the iPhone are a great match, especially with the apps that are now avaliable on the App Store. I have been using Flickr on & off for several years, but it is only since I got my iPhone that I’ve been uploading photos on a regular basis. I take far more photos than I used to, and the Flickr apps I have on my iPhone make it really easy to upload & share these photos within minutes of taking them.

I recommended my favourite photography apps for the iPhone some months ago, but Yahoo have now released a Flickr app & there have been some welcome updates to my absolute favourite (and free!) Flickr app, Flickit.

The official app is gorgeous – the UI is far nicer than my Mobile Fotos, which used to be my no. 1 pick for browsing Flickr photos. It feels polished & is very easy to use – all of my favourite iPhone apps are intuitive, and this one is no different. When you load it up, there is a slideshow of your contacts photos with a ken burns effect – this is a nice little touch.

I haven’t removed Mobile Fotos from my phone, because it still has more functionality than the official app – but my first choice to show someone one of my own Flickr photos has definitely changed.

Flickit has recently been updated to include twitter support, using the Flickr & Twitter APIs. I prefer to use Flickr rather than TwitPic if I want to put a photo on my blog or keep it in my photostream as well as showing it to my twitter followers. Flickit now makes this easy as pie. Another welcome addition is the ability to upload 3GS photos at their full resolution, which is something I’ve been hankering for since I got my 3GS.

If you like taking everyday photos & sharing them with your friends – then I can’t recommend the iPhone enough. The camera in the 3GS is a lot better than it used to be, and I’ve taken some gorgeous photos with mine. The autofocus is intelligent and easy to use, and the video capability is great.