Adobe Lightroom
va a la caza del Aperture
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/

Google SketchUp
http://sketchup.google.com/download.html

Temperature Monitor
Software par monitorizar la temperatura de trabajo de la CPU y unidades de disco de tu Mac, en los modelos que incorporan sensores de temperatura.
http://www.bresink.de/osx/TemperatureMonitor.html

Temperature Monitor Widget Edition
http://www.bresink.de/osx/TemperatureMonitorWE.html

Renamer4Mac
Utilidad para renombrar varios archivos a la vez siguiendo un patrón común
http://www.power4mac.com/renamer/

OnyX
Software para mantenimiento, optimización y personalización del sistema.
http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs2/english/download.html

Adobe Flash Player
Visualizador de archivos Flash en tus navegadores: Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera y AOL
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/

LiquidCD
Aplicación para grabar CD y DVD
http://www.maconnect.ch/index.php?page=liquidcd&lang=fr

CoverFlow
Catálogo visual de aquellos discos que tenemos en la librería de iTunes
http://www.steelskies.com/coverflow/

iStat pro
Widget de monitorización del sistema
http://www.islayer.net/index.php?op=item&id=7

Journler
http://journler.phildow.net/

httpmail plugin
http://www.automagic-software.com/downloads.php

Xbench
Utilidad para hacer Benchmarks del ordenador (medida estandarizada del rendimiento)
http://xbench.com/

Gdisk
Utilidad para usar tu cuenta de Gmail como Disco virtual
http://gdisk.sourceforge.net/

My key requirements are simple (granted, I am sure there are more, we'll find out as we go through the process:

• a general "bucket" for facts and data, preferably with some arbitrary structure imposed by me on demand;
• easy to put things in
• leave my files where they are instead of sucking them in
• handle various funky media, not just text
• store my data where I can extract it if (when!) things go horribly wrong

Ok, what's out there?

Note: these are my personal opinions for my private perusal. I am not a professional reviewer. Your needs are different, so this is just a data point, at best.

WikityWidget - I already wrote about it once here. This is a real wiki turned into a Dashboard widget. This is the app that started my mind going about having some sort of a "data bucket" on my computer. For many people this will be an excellent tool for storing amiriad of facts and snippets picked while surfing the web. Personally, I want more features (like attaching files and such), but many thinks still go to WikityWidget for getting me going.

VoodooPad is a full-blown editor and a local wiki by the creator of the excellent (and unfairly underappreciated) Acorn image editor. It is fast, it is intuitive. My main gripe was that I wanted a bit more structure...

And this got me thinking... Maybe what I really needed was not one solution but two: a text snipet/fact bucket, and a tagging system for my files (ideally the tags will cross over to the text bucket and allow for some comprehencive searches).

Turns out, the state of tagging on Mac is... confusing, to say the least. Spotlight supports something known as "keywords" (it extracts them from PDFs, for example), but most tagginng appplications ignore (cannot use?) this feature and innstead stick their tags into Spotlight coment field. Diffferent apps use different tag prefixes and delimeters, leading to further lack of compatibility.

Punakea is a nice little tagginng app that does nto try to be all things to all people. It just adds the basic tagging features so common on the web in a clean and simple UI. Unfortunately, it uses a proprietary tag format making it incompatible with everything else. The development slowed down lately, so check out the forums for news before committing to it.

I am aware that there is a Tagging Plugin for Quicksilver, but I have not had courage to embark on the grand adventure of taming the Qucksilver beast (it's too powerful for me not to want to learn it inside out and I do not have time right now). So no comments there.

At the high end of the tag management/search there is Leap. It is probably extremely powerful, but personally I found it a bit too confusing and a bit under-compelling for my needs. Leap is great if you have lots and lots of data and not a clue. A sort of "clean slate" search. I tend to be slightly more organized than that. I was probably just afraid to admit to myself that I might actually need such a tool. Oh well. My problem.

Ok, so text Wikis are not enough, and file tagging is not it. Now what?A friend pointed me at Yojimbo and the whole PIM/GTD category category.

I do refuse to have one application run my life, so while some GTD apps may be both a calendar and a data store, such an approach is out of the question for me. I have already completed my task manager search. That leaves the Personal Information Managers - there are literally dozens of them! Oops.

Yojimbo is probably the best known member of the category. It is simple and straightforward and has a really cool icon. It has a global hotkey for instant data entry, prefills fields nicely, supports applescript and bookmarklets. Generally, it makes it increadibly easy to put the data in. However, all the data goes into a database (I really like my files stand-alone), and there are not nested folders. A look at the forums shows that the development has slown down lately and this once flagship app begins to fall behind. Still, check it out! It takes minutes to learn, and causes no trouble. Definitely worth your attention.

Together is "Yojimbo on steroids". Everything youhimbo does and more (which could be a bit too much for some). It got hierarchical folders, highly flexible user interface, a nice sidebar "shelf", tags and views, smart folders... Everything. Oh, and it leaves your files in place. I almost stopped right there, but decided to check out a couple of other highly recomended apps.

DEVONthink is highly regarded by information management professionals, but felt like a bit of an overkill, especially taking into account its proclaimed desire to stick everything into its vast database. Probably a great solution for the office. Me, I am just happy the guys have found a minute to write something sas elegant as PhotoStickies, as I blogged here.

EagleFiler turned out to be a strange disapointment. I just cannot put my finger on it: all the features are there, and yet I did not like it. It felt sort of like Together that has not been fed for a while. Weird. Maybe I had eaten something wrong before looking at it?

Journler - I am glad I kept looking because this is the winner for me. Hierarchical folders, tagging, attaching files to data notes while leaving them in place, smart drag and drop, everything (Ok, almost everything) I wanted. There is no iCal integratin (although there are user-created applescripts), but it is coming bythe end of the year. The two things that really attracted me:

• It is preconfigured with three buttons on the toolbar for you to take a snapshot, add an audio comment, or even a video using yur built-in webcam. Usually these are horribly inefficient ways of entering data, but... it is sooooo futuristic!
• The latest version of Journler has actually dropped some features. The author was ruthless enough to stop the bloating, and cut out the pieces that could be accomplished fine by some other specialized software. And so Journler is no longer a blog editor, but it would work with Ecto and others to post to a blog. It takes an unusual clarity of thought to focus on the core features - this is a piece of software that will go places!

Bottom line: if you  want a personal wiki - get WikityWidget or VoodooPad, if you want a simple app - get Yojimbo, if you want a data silo - DEVONthink is your best friend. For sophisticated personal use check out Journler (my choice) and Together.

Sorry if I misssed something - my search is over. But you can add a comment for the benefit of others. Good karma awaits!.

I have also synchronised my Journler application. It has worked flawlessly again, even though I have the application open on 2 machines simultaneously (although I am only modifying one at a time obviously).

Papers has not been so smooth. I still need to investigate whether it is syncing properly or whether I am just imagining that some things are not updated. It could be that the application doesn't write some data until it is quit, that would certainly cause problems I guess. More experimentation required.

I have also moved my folder of perl scripts to the dropbox folder. Not only does this sync between home and work but includes a versioning protocol. So if I modify a file I can go back and examine previous versions of that file and revert to one if I have messed things up. I know that svn etc do something similar but this has been idiot proof and has not required all the messing around to install that subversion seems to take.

Parses is “drag and drop text parsing and data mining”. The app is designed to help you preprocesses data so that you’re left with only the information you need in a format you can easily apply elswhere. In a visual environment you create and test re-usable, rules based documents for parsing well formatted text.

For example, let’s say you want to download your local weather information from an online feed. The temperature, conditions and forecast change by the hour but the html in which that information is contained otherwise stays the same. That is, the relevant information or variables change but the format remains constant. Parsers helps you extract the temperature, conditions and forecast from the feed so that you can use the information elsewhere, in a widget, your own webpage or a spreadsheet for example.

I haven't had much chance to play with it yet, but it looks interesting for small repetitive tasks.

Now, let's take a look at Together.  If you remember my comparative review of web information collection applications, you know I liked a lot Together.  Now that it's been significantly upgraded in its new incarnation stamped Version 2.1, let's see how our landscape of options evolved in the context of the comparative review.

• Overall, with a global average score of 2.8, Together is more than ever a solid competitor to all the other 8 applications I’ve tested. Prior to its version 2.1, it only scored 2.4.  On many aspects, Together is now much more usable and mature.
• Together's interaction with you when you collect items has been revamped.  From 15, its score for Collection - Interaction bumped to 23, making Together part of the top 3 applications on that aspect.  This improvement was achieved by adding an option to ask you to file and tag each new item as soon as you collect it (using the shelf, with a really great and natural-feeling workflow!), adding much welcome bookmarklets in your browsers, and allowing you to set up a global keyboard shortcut.
• Together also became more consistent in its collected items vital assets.  Its score for Collection - Consistency is now 9, from a previous 7.  That's because annotating a web page collected now no more makes you loose its link.  Previously, after annotating a web archive, you couldn't find anymore where it was collected on the web (apart using google)!  Together's new score also means that it shares the second place with EagleFiler, although both lag behind Evernote (which scored 16).
• Together's search features also made a big jump forward, leaping from 25 to 40, joining Journler and Evernote in the front line.  That's the best score yet, although if I updated my benchmark, Evernote (>35) would lead clearly.  In any case, a score of 40 means leading-edge overall search capabilities.
  • Again, I know we could argue on DevonThink’s specific search capabilities which I have probably undervalued, but here I’m speaking of the overall search features.  DevonThink, with its score of 20, was one of the poorest contenders overall and although some specifics of its search features are exceedingly great, you might nonetheless be disappointed by the rest.

While running Together through my benchmark of tests, I felt a few rough edges that made it feel more like a beta version than a gold release.  These rough edges (which I can't remember because I didn't write them down) weren't crashes or anything serious, though; they were more like small glitches with the ways the interface has been updated.  Nothing here serious enough for me to advise you to wait for the patch releases.

Well, that's it.  Together has now taken its place in the leading pack of web information collection applications.  On top of that, you could add that it makes a great file collection application, and you'd get a really serious competitor on that front to EagleFiler (and some other apps).  All of this having been said, I want to congratulate Reinvented Software for such progress on such a great application.

I will try another angle to blog using Journler as my main application to put my thoughts and ecto to put on the blog. The process and cost is not great but Journler dropped its free version and no longer does direct publishing to blogging, so I am trying the two with each other as they suggest. We’ll see.

To make this more worthwhile I’ll add some pictures

Update (2008-05): The beta version was updated to 1.1, bringing support for PDF documents and some other minor goodies.  I've updated this post accordingly.  It also reflects the updated scores of Together 2.1.

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In March, I was able to snag myself a TechCrunch invitation to try the upcoming Mac version of Evernote.  When I first discovered it in 2004 (for Windows), I soon became an advocate of Evernote for its organizational capabilities.  Evernote wasn't perfect, but it was already a leader in the market and since then, it's kept progressing at a steady pace.  Now that it's starting to breathe on OS X, it's time for a new testing round.

Today, I took a few hours to run Evernote against my web information collection test benchmark.  I'm now ready to share with you how Evernote, in its actual pre-release form, competes with the pack.

As this is pre-release software, please understand that Evernote will probably fare even better than now when it'll reach Release Day.  Until then, here's what I found.

Before jumping in the results, I feel the need to remind you two things:

Now, to the results:

All in all, Evernote for Mac brings incredible competition into the domain of web information collection applications.  I see myself using Evernote over anything else for this purpose soon, although I will probably continue using some of its competitors for other specific needs.  Writing in Scrivener is something Evernote won't compete with, for example.  Moreover, since the application itself will be free, Evernote will bring quite a new challenge to some of its general-purpose competitors.  Evernote will change the face of the market as we know it today.  I hope it will be both for the best interest of itself and its competitors; if it is, then we'll also benefit greatly from that as a result.

Update 2 (2008-03): Evernote is the new wolf that's coming in the pack, and it already redefines most of what's best.  Read this review to know how.

Update 1 (2008-03): EagleFiler's new version 1.3 makes it fare much better.  Read this review to know what changes regarding the following comparative review, as I haven't updated this post in any other way than this mention.
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Although computers are great to work with information, in the last 10 years using a Windows PC, I never found any software solution that would work well for my information collecting and management needs, although OneNote and EverNote came close to it.  But now that I use a Mac, I wanted to see if I'd be able to find something really great.

Our Problem

I believe what makes it hard to find the good application for our needs is that we all have our own very personal ways of dealing with the information that comes before our eyes every day; but most importantly, I believe we still haven’t seen our software in general become mature. Software still behaves like a baby who won’t share his toys. Software will grow someday, but Software just isn’t there yet. Say, Software, what will you do when you’ll have grown up?

Our Need

Until Software becomes an adult, there’s many applications available, and some of them might solve most of our information collecting needs. How would we define the best proposition?

I believe what we need in any application is that it:

• supports the features needed,
• interacts comfortably with us, and
• keeps doing the previous two criteria in a consistent manner.

This definition is most probably critical in the case of information collection software. When I speak of consistency for information collection purposes, I mean, for example, that whatever the web browser I use and the method I use to collect something, it will always produce the same kind of rich text entry, accompanied by its link.

The Contenders

Now, since this is all about reviewing different applications to see which one of them is closing the most towards maturity, here’s what I tested:

• DEVONthink Personal 1.9.12
• EagleFiler 1.2.7
• Journler 2.5.4b15
• Circus Ponies NoteBook 2.1.262
• Scrivener 1.11
• SOHO Notes 6.5.3
• Together 2.0.4.967
• Yojimbo 1.5.62

I also tried VoodooPad, but I felt it wasn’t really designed for information collection purposes.

The Tests

I wanted to do a thorough test to see how much each one of these applications has to offer on what I believe are the most important features and interactions, so I reviewed the features each one proposes and put most of them in a spreadsheet.

Then, I went through each one of these features, trying them in each application, to see how they compared to the crowd and even sometimes to what I believe might be better still.

Finally, I gave them scores based on a 5-star scale.

The Results

Here’s the summary of my tests.

The first thing you need to know is that I’m not going to draw all the conclusions that can easily be drawn when you look at this big table. We would loose time writing and reading what can be so easily be seen in the table. I’ve highlighted some results to show who leads the pack, who follows the leaders, and finally, who miserably crawls behind everyone else. Also, I would have liked the table to be better designed, but what you see is what I could do in the amount of time I had.

As you might remark:

• I didn’t test some features you might find exceedingly important, like, say, printing support, file importing support, and exporting to different file formats. I almost never print; I no more dream of the ideal application to manage all my files; and I could feel some guilt for not evaluating the rest, but I’m confident you’ll be able to find your answers by your own means while still deriving some value out of my tests.
• I tested more thoroughly the collection features than the rest. Their results are broken down under the three criteria I defined previously.
• Conversely, I evaluated the rest of the features without breaking down their scores, because I believe they didn’t need that much digging.
• Some features, which I found exceedingly useful, like, say, wiki or split editor, tend to improve the score of only one application. I hope you’re as okay with that as I am.
• You might be surprised that your favorite application performs better than you thought on some criteria. It’s probably because I dug deeper than you in its preference settings or in its interface. I wanted to evaluate it to its full potential.
• On the opposite, you might find that I overlooked some possibilities. I proof-tested almost everything, but errors happen all the time. Feel free to tell me about it.

The Details

Now, you might sometimes wonder why I rated something the way I did it. If you really want to find the answer and you don’t find it in the sections I wrote to detail each application, you will need to have a look at the following table that contains my notes along the ratings. I suggest you open it in a new window and keep switching between this page and the table to understand it, using the following key, ordered left to right then down:

• (i): Inconsistent in its behavior; will be rated down in the Consistency section, not in the current section
• WA: Web Archive
• Ways: The number of different ways you can do something
• FP: Full Page
• Running: Only while the application is already running
• (N)R: For (not) running, means that it works even when the application isn’t running
• Windw Area: A little dedicated window
• Predefined: There’s no preference setting to change it
• Indirect: You need to click somewhere before doing it
• Not 100%: Almost 100%!
• Until annotated: Works until you annotate the collected element
• Tabs as bookmarks: You create bookmarks so you can see tabs
• Suggests: Suggests completions of what you started to type
• DragFmHUD: Drag from the HUD window
• List: An alphabetically-sorted list
• Intersection: The ability to see what is tagged with all the selected tabs. If intersections aren’t supported, selecting some tags will yield you all collected elements that are tagged with at least anyone of the selected tags, which is almost useless
• Converted WA: Before you can do it, it needs to be converted to another format (usually RTF)
• WA extractions: You can’t anotate the WA or anything inside it, but you can copy/paste something out of it and into the enclosing entry, that you will then be able to annotate
• Use underline: Because there’s no standard yellow highlighter
• C WA: Converted WA
• Obtrusively: A dialog pops up and you’ll need to dismiss it soon or late
• Virtual Folders: You may file something in multiple different folders
• Folders: You may file something in one and only one folder
• Where are copies?: When something is filed in more than one virtual folder, you don’t know about it
• Tag:name1 tag:nam2: You need to type this kind of query to see tag intersections
• Create your SC: Smart Collection
• Inheritance: Well, let’s say it’s an advanced feature that you might want to read the help file about if you’re no programmer
• 2%: Constant CPU usage observed
• Database fragile?: I read that some people have lost their entire database just after a system crash, which would be really bad
• Really bad reports: I saw many people on different web sites telling how the company wasn’t taking seriously their clients by releasing broken software and taking months to fix it

My Reviews

DEVONthink Personal

DEVONthink is very capable in some areas where all the other applications would bite the dust. It features an automatic Wiki system, assists you in classifying the information you collect, and probably best of all, it allows you to browse your entire database in incredible ways by giving you an index that sums up all your collected entries and by providing you with a very potent see also feature. If you need that kind of stuff, look no further.

Otherwise, you might get put off by its dinosaur-looking interface and lack of a great system to organize your information so you can quickly dig and filter through it your own way.

Oh, and don’t forget to install its bookmarklet in all the browsers you use so you can collect those full-page web archives quickly and easily.

These remarks having been said, I believe DEVONthink might have a very bright future… starting at version 2.0. Competitors, watch and learn from DEVON now, or get buried later!

EagleFiler

EagleFiler was a bit of a good surprise to me.

Probably because of its name and its marketing, I was very reluctant to even consider testing it. But as I disciplined myself to at least read its whole web page describing it, my interest was sparked, and not for nothing.

EagleFiler is simply, out of the box with no customization, the best package if you’re constantly in need of collecting full-page web archives out of many different browsers. You can do so in much quicker ways than all the other applications (except DEVONthink, if you install its bookmarklet in all your browsers). And it features one of the best tags support.

At the same time, it’s not so great if you consider how crippled it is from sharing features and small, but useful, navigational features like, say, browser-like back and forward buttons.

Let me tell you I seriously considered making it my tool of choice.

Journler

Although targeting journaling or blogging needs, Journler is a really serious and capable contender regarding our discussed needs.

Its overal value is really great and it really outperforms most of the competition when it’s time to integrate with iLife, to search through your library, to make sure you won’t search too much in the future when you’ll need to find the same kind of information, and to share something with a friend or the community.

Some of the things that keep it from being near perfect is that it’s really not so great at the tags game and at keeping links to what you grabbed on the web. Don’t forget to experiment a lot with its preference settings, as it might dramatically change the quality of your experience with Journler.

All in all, I believe this application is the most serious contender for your hard drive space and daily use, although it’s much more of a jack-of-all-trades that lacks some essential skills that feel too important for some people to live without them. In the future, I believe Journler will learn from its errors and become incredibly hard to ignore.

NoteBook

I often wondered if I should remove NoteBook from this evaluation. I thought I would go to the end with its testing, because it’s presented as a contender to this category on its web site. Well, I now believe I shouldn’t have bothered too much with it, although I must tell you it’s not without having any value or not being interesting at all.

Let’s just say that I believe it’s not good to use for that kind of information collecting needs. I like to think it’s targeted towards some other kind of collecting needs that I haven’t evaluated at all here and that it might just be a really superior contender on that front.

Scrivener

Scrivener was a hell of a surprise.

Since there’s a writer somewhere within me, I’ve been watching this application from afar for some time now, but the thought of evaluating it here with the other applications never crossed my mind until I had narrowed my own decision to three applications and browsed their respective web sites one more time. One of them mentioned Scrivener as a competitor, so I religiously went on to read its web page again, just to eliminate it right off. And then, what happened for Scrivener is the same that happened for EagleFiler. I was impressed and decided to give it a whirl. Like EagleFiler, it seemed good at this, on top of being good at that. And man, oh man, what a whirl it was! You’ll find out why later.

For now, let me praise its ability to play well with tags, its split editor, its full screen mode and, more precisely, its feature that allows you to see and/or edit many entries at the same time, as if they were only one file (with visual indicators that let you know what you’re doing).

It’s not that great at collecting information, but if you’re willing to forgive its little lack of flexibility on that regard, it will do as great as most other contenders. Oh, and forget about 1-click access to sharing something, too.

All of this having been said, let me tell you Scrivener is definitely underpriced, if you consider how much innovation and quality it incorporates.

SOHO Notes

I really didn’t want to loose time testing SOHO Notes, but I did it for the sake of exhaustivity. I wanted to know if it innovates in some way that would benefit to the other applications.

Why am I so hard on SOHO Notes? Because I’ve read too much bad comments about it. How this company’s products in general would be released with plenty of serious bugs and wouldn’t work well until several months after that. How email enquiries wouldn’t at all trigger replies or would trigger them after unusually long delays and with unsatisfactory answers. How people decided to migrate to this or that. How people were telling everyone that this application isn’t even worth considering. So yes, I confess I’ve been influenced by all these comments. I think I have never seen that much bad comments about something I would have considered trying for my own use.

If you still want to know, it’s really flexible when time comes to collecting information, and it’s great at sharing it later on.

But, it’s not that great at organizing the information you collected.

In any case, the version I tested worked well, despite one crash. To be fair, I wouldn’t discriminate anyone who chooses it over the others.

Together

I fell in love with Together as soon as I saw it. It sports the most polished interface. Although Journler kept scoring higher for my needs than Together, I kept planning on journeying together with this lovely application.

Notwithstanding its wonderful interface, Together offers some really strong propositions. On top of all of them is its ability to collect selections of web pages as web archives, while all the other applications can only collect full-page web archives. It’s also the closest to offer consistency in the collection process, regarding the links every application should keep when it collects something out of the web. And don’t forget that it’s better than most competitors at dealing with tags.

Now, while some aspects of Together are really polished, it doesn’t mean it’s perfect. For example, it lacks some browser-like back and forward buttons. Also, like most of the contenders, easy sharing isn’t part of the program.

I really wonder how much quality the developer is going to continue putting in this application. It’s gonna rock!

Yojimbo

Yojimbo looks like another jack-of-all-trades.

It’s great at collecting information in general, although it doesn’t stand out on any particular side.

Other than that, don’t forget to consider its interface’s lacks of navigational features and the fact it’s not so great at organizing, searching and sharing your information.

And that’s it. Yojimbo simply doesn’t stand out of the pack, and although it’s a great product with just a few missing features, that won’t hinder some people’s love for it because they don’t need what it lacks.

My Choice(s)

You might wonder which application I chose over all the others. I wrote all of this using Scrivener, and that’s my answer. Although my choice is made, I plan on using Scrivener’s trial period instead of rushing with my credit card as I would do in the past. I made some errors I still regret today when I think about them.

Scrivener has so much for itself and it’s a great feeling to use an application that excels at writing while it’s also really great as an information collector.

Again, I believe it’s better to use an application that excels at something useful while being great at the rest, than using another one that is great overall but doesn’t bring anything new to the crowd. And on that regard, I would also really have liked to have DEVONthink as a serious alternative because of its advanced text analysis features, but it wasn’t there for me.

Next, my choice would have been Together or Journler, although EagleFiler wasn’t far behind.

Your Mileage May Vary

In fact, your mileage will vary. I’m telling you that because even mine does!

The results I showed you are what I would call generic, although I’m far from believing they are completely exhaustive or 100% objective. So they are generic to the extent of what I wanted to test and how I evaluated it. Now, if I wanted to tailor them precisely to what’s really important to me, here’s what I’d obtain:

• Journler: 3
• Scrivener: 2.9
• Together: 2.6
• SOHO Notes: 2.6 but lacks two things essential to me
• EagleFiler: 2.4 but lacks one…
• DEVONthink: 2.4 but lacks three…
• Yojimbo: 2.2 but lacks one…
• NoteBook: 2.0 but lacks four…

The order almost doesn’t change, but Scrivener closes nearer to Journler, and Together goes ahead of SOHO Notes.

So it may mean, on one hand, that I did a really good generic evaluation or, on the other hand, that what I thought of as a generic evaluation is already so much targeted towards my own needs that it’s not worth calling generic at all. I believe the second hand is the one that’s right, since I didn’t include some features like printing support and such and such…

So if you want your own results, you will need to ponderate my evaluations according to your own needs and add your evaluation of the things that are missing. That’s a first way how your mileage will vary.

One important thing to note is that only the top three applications are viable options for me, and that’s a second way how your mileage will vary.

What Developers Need to Do

To improve the primary value of their offers, I believe developers should concentrate on:

• Making sure that under all circumstances (consistency), anything grabbed from the web comes in only one rich format and carries its link (support). If it’s not possible due to OS integration problems, try making a good set of bookmarklets or some other potent tool, and encourage your users to only use this solution because it will work the same great way for them in every possible context.
• Providing quality support of organization features like tags and annotations. I believe these features should feel in your applications like they’re first class citizens of their ecosystem. Concerning tags, my experience tells me they’re much more important than if they’d only be some temporary hype.
• Developing an exceedingly rich experience towards some precise verticals, like Scrivener does for writers.

On a more general note, keep up the good work!

What I Learned

Through doing all this testing and measuring, I grasped a better understanding of a few things:

• It’s hard to integrate software into an operating system. None of the applications managed to do it on some specific aspects.
• It’s exceedingly hard to properly ponderate the value of each thing that we test so that it yields the correct impact on the global results. Consequently, anyone writing or reading a review should give much more importance to the details than to a global score. It’s so easy to mess up a global score and so easy to overlook something important. (That’s why I gave you so much details and I didn’t even try to ponderate anything for you.)
• Software is much more personal than I thought. It’s another reason why global scores can’t mean much to somebody unless they’re precisely tailored to his needs.

Antes de mais, quero agradecer. Qual não é o meu espanto e felicidade quanto reparo que temos, não um, mas dois comentários nos últimos posts! E como tenho quase a certeza que a minha mãe ainda não decorou o nome do blog, fico mesmo orgulhoso! Então, para provar que estou mesmo tocado, decidi fazer um post acerca de ter recebido comentário nos anteriores! Estou a brincar, isso era a facada no que resta de dignidade neste blog.

Neste blog é suposto falar-se um bocado de assuntos relacionados com a Apple, o que não tem sido feito, e eu não tenho conseguido viver com as dores de consciência, por isso cá vai, review de aplicação, quentinha!

E a aplicação escolhida foi: Journler.

Journler é um processador de texto, muito simples e muito poderoso também. Posso dizer que o utilizo praticamente todos os dias, para tomar notas em aulas, notas pessoais e para escrever aqui para o blog. Para começar é visualmente decente, é bom não ter de usar um programa feio, é fácil de usar e tem integração com iLife, Mail, Adress Book, etc! Podem contar com um programa rápido, com uma pesquisa eficiente, e com uma boa organização. Os textos são organizados por categorias, tags, folders ou smart folders, por data, e ainda dispomos de um calendário (isto é só extras)
O que se pode pensar antes de utilizar um editor de texto sem ser o Word, Bloco de Notas, Text Edit ou por aí é “E compatibilidades?” O journler contorna esse ponto muito bem, tem uma prática opção de exportar os textos para os formatos mais conhecidos (Word Document, Rich Text, PDF ou Plain Text), por isso assunto arrumado.
O ponto não tão positivo (para não dizer negativo...ok, tenho uma simpatia pelo Journler, que é que querem? acho que é pelo ícone, com o caderno tão sóbrio...) é quando precisamos de passar os dados para outro disco. Para este caso o processo de gravação e recuperação dos dados não é lá muito bem explicado e só com umas tentativas é que fui lá!

Melhor de tudo: é grátis! Apetecia-me esfregar isto na cara da Rita Blanco e do outro actor que faz a publicidade do Pingo Doce, ai isso é barato? Isto é grátis! Então eles tão fartos de descontinhos, de talões, de promoções, e eu tou a arrancar cabelos de os ouvir dizer que tão fartos, sempre com a mesma entoação e convicção! "Basta! Pum! Basta!"? O vosso basta seria sincero se ouvissem umas quantas vezes seguidas o anúncio. Aposto que nem vão ao Pingo Doces aqueles falsos....

Ah já agora, para lerem mais sobre o Journler e fazerem download, o site é este.

Carbono

Le problème, c'est que j'aimais bien cette fonction et qu'après avoir acheté Ecto, je l'ai rarement utilisé pour mes besoins qui sont bien simples.

Que reste-t-il à Journler? Beaucoup :

• les "familles intelligentes" : des"dossiers intelligents" (smart folders) qui peuvent contenir des dossiers intelligents qui héritent des critères de tri de leurs parents, etc...
• Une excellente intégration avec la suite iLife (audio, vidéo, photo) ainsi qu'avec iWeb, Mail, le carnet d'adresses ;
• D'excellentes capacités d'importation de fichiers ;
• Une très bonne capacité de recherche et d'indexation ;

Oui, mais moi, ce que je veux, c'est un logiciel pour tenir à jour des notes quotidiennes et, éventuellement, exporter vers un blog ...

MacJournal ("Localisé" en français) ? Memoires?

I am testing mac blog client software ecto now. Which is convenient, journler or ecto?

You can put an Amazon.com link on a blog with ecto easily. I want to buy this Halberstam's last book but I think the Japanese editon will sell soon!?

"The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War" (David Halberstam)

and you can attach a picture from iphoto directly. This a pizza I ate at a pizzeria in Ravenna, Italy. It taste good.

Onyx: This little system maintenance tool for OSX is free and allows you to customise some really basic things within OSX, some UNIX ones and some hidden features. E.g. you can change what format the screenshots you take are saved to. It actually allows you to do an awful lot. A couple of bad things about it are the general loading of it can get painful (especially if you do a S.M.A.R.T scan!) and that the cleaner doesn't do anything to Firefox or other browsers apart from Safari. Laid out really well. 7.5 / 10

AppFresh: I didn't use this program for very long mainly because it caused a severe slowdown on my computer. Although when that stopped, I liked the results it came up with. It found out that there was an X11 update about 4 days before the Apple software update decided to point that out to me. If it didn't slowdown my computer, it would be a much nicer program. Laid out really well though. 6 / 10

SnapNDrag: An alternative to the built in screenshot command and Grab application. Really nice but causes some pretty intense slowdowns when doing a full screen cap. Also, the lack of autosave is a bit annoying but it has some redeeming features like JPEG quality and the option to resize (but you have to pay for that). 5 / 10

Vienna: I love this program. RSS Feed reader with a built in browser. Laid out perfectly. Blogging option. Skin customisation. 9 / 10

1001: I'm relatively new to Flickr (less than a week) and I have been using the official Flickr Uploadr to upload my pictures. I thought it was a bit bland and so got a different one. 1001 looks promising but its rather hard to get it to do what you want it to. The upload side of it is good but the other part of it that make it special, made it rather bad and clunky. The option to see a specific Flickr feed or a group feed sounds like a good idea, it just doesn't seem to work. 4 / 10

Journler: This looked really promising. Its a blog client/note taker. Its laid out really well with a couple of exceptions. I didn't like this one purely because of a personal reason. It just didn't look 'right' to me. It has a ton of features that make it nice but I just couldn't use it very well. It would be nice if it had more of an iTunes integration, e.g. ability to insert current play track. Seems to have a very intense Livejournal integration though. 6 / 10

Qumana: Oh god, I saw this program on a list of top 5 blog clients. It looked okay but the reviewer said the source view was pitiful. I didn't think it could be that bad. It was. Integration with Wordpress was rather good. Just the actual writing in both source and layout mode is horrible. Source mode doesn't stay aligned and so if you keep going back and forth between those two modes, you spend ages cleaning up code. 5/ 10

QTM: I didn't really try this one for long but it seems to be a barebones blog client. Fairly easy to set up a connection with a blog. Laid out fairly well. Its a very boring program to use. Wiht a better GUI (its open-source), this could be a rather top notch program. I can't wait to see how it becomes past its current version of 0.5.5. 6.5 / 10

Xjournal: For those who use Livejournal like I do (my personal blog) and who use Mac OSX, this is one program you should get. It does everything you could want it to. In fact, its pretty much the Livejournal editor with some cool automation (like getting the current iTunes track), a couple of features that exist on LJ but a slightly harder to find and the ability to save everything as an offline draft. One little problem with it though is that you can't enter your current location. 9.5 / 10

GIMP: An open-source image editing program coded in X11. Think Photoshop at around CS1 and then add some slower speeds to it and a slightly confusing interface. Thats GIMP for Mac OSX. Still, its free and does Photoshop's job really well. A tad clunky and the keyboard shortcuts need to be learnt (not the same as every other Mac program.) 7 / 10

Journler ist so eine Art Notizbuch/Sammelmappe für alle möglichen Arten von Informationen und ist wirklich hilfreich, Struktur in seine Daten zu bringen, also:

• in einer Besprechung die wesentlichen Gedanken festhalten
• verschiedene "Zu erledigen-Listen" (neudeutsch ToDo) verwalten
• Datein zu Projekten zusammenfassen (Mail-Anhänge lassen sich wunderbar einfügen)
• Bookmarks verwalten (bis jetzt habe ich dafür del.icio.us verwendet)
• Tagebuch führen (OK, dafür gibts ja den Blog...)
• Geisteblitze festhalten
• ...

Eine ausführliche Beschreibung gibts unter anderem hier.

Ich nutze das Programm neuerdings gern in Meetings, um an meinem Blog mir Notizen zu machen.

Allerdings war es nicht trivial, Journler das Bloggen bei Wordpress beizubringen. Die entsprechenden Infos waren recht weit im Netz verstreut, weshalb ich sie hier nochmal zusammenfasse:

Im Fenster "Einstellungen" geht man auf "Netz" und trägt dort ein

Der markierte Eintrag hat mir die größte Mühe verursacht.
Anschließen kann man seinen Beitrag an sein Blog senden mit "Eintrag | Als Blog veröffentlichen". Das typische Woosch signalisiert dann den erfolgreichen Upload.

Vielen Dank an
Steve Bass

Journler is a daily notebook and entry based information manager. Scholars, teachers, students, professors, scientists, thinkers, the business minded and writers of every persuasion use it on a daily basis to connect the written word with the media most important to them.

factsnfigures
jalenack
Holger mit seiner gut gestalteten Seite

Update
Leider werden von Journler keine Bilder mit hochgeladen obwohl sie im Text verankert sind :-(
Wird hoffentlich mit der nächsten Version möglich sein.

I have become obsessed with tagging. Well, maybe not obsessed, but it's becoming important to consistently tag across my applications and services. Which is why this article grabbed my attention.

List of Apps/Services I use tags:
- Yojimbo
- My Wordpress Blog
- My Typeface Blog
- My Ning
- MarsEdit
- Pathfinder
- Backpack/Packrat
- Highrise
- Facebook
- del.icio.us
- Gmail
- Journler
- Mail.app (MailTags)
- DevonThink Pro
- etc.

So I'm starting to develop a list of tags (and the consistent format) that I'll use across formats. While I refuse to keep a Sticky Note(s) - I'll figure out a easily accessible file that I can open quickly (sounds like a QuickSilver trigger!).

(Via 43Folders.)

Jetzt aber zu den Tipps ...
1. Auf dem Blog von Desiring God hab ich vor einiger Zeit paar gute Tipps aus christlicher Perspektive zum Umgang mit Blogs gelesen (Englisch). Klingt vielleicht anfänglich ein bisschen platt hat aber auch ein paar praktische Tipps ... vor allem für Blogleser.

2. Nicht so "fromm" aber dafür witzig ... und auch hilfreich (wenn mans versteht ;)) ... ham die Damen und Herren bei Spreeblick zum Thema "Kommentieren" geschrieben bzw. gefilmt.

However, I discovered rather quickly that besides a general password-protect option, there was no way to encrypt or protect the privacy of entries. This would not do.

Developer Phil Dow has stated numerous times that Journler is not a privacy program, and that those requiring to secure their information look elsewhere. However, I discovered this nifty Automator hack while searching the Journler Forum.

The risks of encryption are high (total data loss is conceivable in any number of scenarios), and as of yet no one has discovered a way to encrypt or password-protect only some Journler entries and not others. But if you are familiar with the Mac 10.4+ encrypted disk option, this is a handy way to put it to good use and protect the information in your journal at the same time.

How to make Journler private using the OS X encrypted disk:

1. If you haven't already done so, create an encrypted disk on OS X.
2. Place your entire Journler application file on the encrypted disk. Delete it elsewhere.
3. Highlight your new disk image and open Automator.
4. Drag "Get Selected Finder Item" into the Automator workspace.
5. Drag "Mount Disk Image" into Automator workspace.
6. Drag "Launch Application" into Automator workspace.
7. Save workflow as an application.
8. Put new application wherever you would like to launch Journler (I use the Desktop). Replace icon if desired.
9. Double-click new application. The disk image should mount and ask for your password. Once password is typed, Journler will launch.
10. Don't forget to move your disk image to the Trash after quitting Journler!

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Yojimbo collects and organizes all of my documents, serial numbers, PDFs, web archives and passwords. It takes pretty much anything I want to put in it.

Yojimbo features (from website)
* Effortless to install, learn and use
* Reliable and secure—it’s built using core Mac OS X technologies
* Store almost anything in Yojimbo—text, rich text, images, PDFs, even serial numbers and passwords
* Location independent access—use .Mac Sync Services and enjoy the same Yojimbo satori at home and at the office
* Organize your information any way that suits your style, from “everything in one spot” to “organized to the extreme”
* Instant Spotlight search
* Sync notes via The Missing Sync 3.0 for Windows Mobile

I've switched back for a number of reasons. One - I love the ease and the interface (the different entry points: the easy input field, bookmarklet and the Drop Desk). It's a real Mac look and feel app. Two - it has an active forum community. Three - the ease of encription - you see nothing I don't want you too.

I can organize, tag and create smart folders - all about GTD!

I just feel very much at home.

then, a year and a half ago, i stumbled upon a free (but accepting donations) website that offered a program called journler. if you have a mac, then you should consider checking this out. this organizational powerhouse integrates well with all of the mac programs that you would use on a day to day basis, and also allows you to record audio and video directly into your entries. with one click you can send an entry to mail...

the current version (2.5) is still free (but accepting donations), but the word on the street is that when 2.6 comes out, there will be a fee. i will be happy to pay the fee, but i would recommend that you give it a spin while its free and decide if you like it.