Adobe Icons

I final got Adobe Creative Suite 3, so now I am fully Intel Mac-ed with my most important and most used applications. They are very nice and very fast - but man, what god-awful icons they came up with!!

This is a company whose main focus for years is making the top creative apps in the biz, every graphics pro uses these apps, and this is the best they can do for their own icons? Sheesh!

Fortunately, all is not lost for people are coming up with new ones to replace them with - Adobe Icons.

None of these are great but great isn't needed to be better than Adobe's icons. Actually, just being awful would be an improvement. The Adam Betts ones are my favorite.

Journler

Just found a great application called Journler, click on the picture for a larger view. I recently heard it had undergone some changes so I downloaded it and started playing around. It's good for a daily journal or diary but even more than that is it can sort things into various Smart Folders as well as preserve links to files, images and web sites. You can really organize ideas with this thing. I'm writing this in it and in the resources panel to the right I put both images and the web site link, and it will also take audio and video files. This would be great it you are doing research.

My needs are simple, I just want to keep track of things. Like when I first use a new contact lens. They're supposed to last 30 days but after a week (I think) I completely lose track and have no idea when to expect it to go bad or if I'm getting more or less wear out of it. Same for flea stuff on the cats. Darcy just told me it has been over a month since I put it on, supposed to be once a month but I'm sure I only do it every three months. But I can write it in Journler when I do something then do a search for it and have an exact and reliable record.

It actually is much more powerful than that but since it's free I can use it anyway. Maybe I'll think of new ways to use it later. For notes I already have Yojimbo, which is great, so I don't need that. Writing blogs? Supposed to be able to publish a blog right from the app but I haven't found a program yet that can do that as well as Blogger itself. Hard to believe it's free, it's almost as powerful and feature filled as Yojimbo and I paid $40 for that one.

One serious limitation is it doesn't sync through .mac like Yojimbo does to keep work and home computers the same, but it does have an alternative. I copied its data folder out of Library/Application Support to my external hard drive, which is portable and I take back and forth to work every day. I then opened Journler and it asked me to locate the database and I selected it on the external. So I just arrived at work and copied the app over to the Applications Folder and the preference to Preferences Folder, started up Journler and everything I did over the weekend was right there. Which is very cool, maybe even better than .mac syncing. I just have to make sure I never forget the external.

Tidbits #2

If I was a joiner I'd join up with the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) because I've read Dan Barker's book and because of the commercials for it on Air America with Janeane Garofalo. I love how she ends the commercial: "Proud to be an atheist - Janeane Garofalo." I like how she makes extra effort to make her atheism clear and known to all. Way to go, girl!
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Macenstein is an interesting web site I just found that is all about Macs.

Well, not ALL about Macs, they do have Mac Chick of the Month:
"This month we present you with the lovely Andrea Grant, a fashion model and Camel Cigarette girl who also happens to be a comic book author, in addition to being an Apple fan." A model who smokes and likes Mac's and comic books - fantastic!
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Ally stories: She's 6.5 now and a definite - and odd - personality is beginning to emerge. But if there is anyone who appreciates odd it's me. Both grandkids were staying over last weekend. At night we sent them into the bedroom to watch TV while Darcy and I watched the good TV in the living room. When we were ready for bed we would move them back to the couch for the night. Ally, holding her pillow, blanket and stuffed rabbit, walks up to Darcy and says: "GrandDarcy, if I'm asleep when you move me I need my head on the pillow, my rabbit in my arms and my blanket over me." She was very intense and somber when she said it, showing the degree of importance she put on these detailed instructions. Later in the week she is driving around with her mom, who is SuperMom and always has them doing something, when she suddenly says: "Mom, why don't we go home and be lazy? We never get to be lazy."
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What an amazing week for news. I'm so glad for Keith Olbermann and DVR. I've got the timer to record Countdown and watch him when I get home an hour or two later. He's the only one on TV actually doing real news. This week we had Alberto Gonzales blatantly lie to the Senate and they are talking about perjury charges against him, then they issued a subpoena for Karl Rove, as well as contempt of congress charges against Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten, the current Chief of Staff to Bush. But Bush has ordered the Justice department to do nothing about these things. I would see this as a showdown but we know congress will cave and it will all be for nothing because they are so spineless.
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I've talked about Transmit before but I just learned something new about it - droplets. I knew they could be done but didn't really appreciate what it was. But now that I have my own domain with lots of disk space I'm using a folder just for my blog pictures so I don't link to someone's site and cause problems and so I'm not filling up my limited Blogger disk space. So I made a droplet for it, I just drag and drop each picture to the droplet and Transmit immediately connects to the right folder on my site and drops off the image then quits. Just takes seconds.

Transmit

Transmit is an FTP client similar to Fetch, but with many added features. For one thing it also supports WebDAV which means you can use it for your .mac account or any other WebDAV account, very handy. I've tested using Transmit and using the Finder for WebDAV services and Transmit is literally twice as fast and much less prone to interruptions. And the interface is very cool, very Mac-like. Extremely easy to connect and to save favorites, and to transfer file it's Drag and Drop, couldn't be simpler.

I had been looking for an app to sync some of my folders between my hard drive and my external drive when I realized Transmit does syncing but is there a way to connect the FTP side to my external? I sent an email to Panic about it and within 2 days they sent back a solution, it's actually very simple, I was quite please.

Panic also does CandyBar so it is clearly a good company.

Capture Me

This is not a program I use a lot, but it's very handy when I need it. It does screen capture but is very accurate because you have a window to drag around and position and size just right, then you can save instantly in any format you want. But best of all is the window floats above all other windows so I can snap a picture in one app, switch to another, and still have the image from the first app for a reference. The main reason I'm mentioning this is I just visited their new site and they quote me! What a thrill!

Capture Me

ShadowClipboard

One of my favorite Mac Apps is ShadowClipboard, and it's probably the one I use most after Path Finder. It's a multiple clipboard app, it not only keeps the last 20 or 30 copies to the clipboard it also allows you to set up clipboard sets. I have one just for web related stuff, another for working stuff, such as the DC legal line that must go on all DC Comics tee shirts, to a personal one.

Ever need to sign on to an FTP account for a download with info you got in an email? They always give you URL, Username and Password and each of these is on a separate line. To copy and paste with just the standard OSX clipboard you'd have to copy one from your email, switch over to your FTP app and paste it, then back to email to copy the next one and back to the FTP app, then do it a third time. Whew, I'm tired just writing about it. With ShadowClipboard you simply copy each item one at a time from email, then switch to your FTP app and paste them in one at a time, easy and simple.

I have to admit a special fondness for this one because I was a beta tester for the latest version. In fact, the latest update of the latest version was done because I was having major problems. I sent him many crash reports and he discovered a memory leak he didn't know was there, patched it up and did the latest version, worked great ever since. For my efforts I got a free upgrade to 3, which saved me, I think, $10. So this is the one app I actually have a financial stake in! I'm also fond of the company name which you will see if you click on the name at the top which links to the web site.

CandyBar

One of the things I wanted to do on this blog was talk about the OSX applications I like but I've fallen down on the job. CandyBar is a favorite, it allows me to change all the system icons to anything I want, I've also downloaded a ton of premade icons from the web and made a few myself with some other nifty applications and I just found the perfect folder icon which is why I'm thinking of it.

This is a screenshot of my external hard drive. The brown, round Japanese boxes are my default folder icons, much better than those ugly light blue things. Then I've put individual icons on certain folders so they stand out. One very cool trick is I have specific icons for each of my client's folders so I can find them instantly. My comic book guy gets superhero heads, Flash, Superman, Martian Manhunter, Batman and Wonder Woman. I did use a full figure of Green Lantern just for variety, other clients just get a single icon for all their folders. All my zip and dmg files are a cool black and unknown documents are cool blue orb instead of a blank sheet of paper. Other images are my defaults for Illustrator, InDesign and Preview apps.

Now, applications that mess with your system can be dangerous but the beauty of CandyBar is it merely replaces the icons at the system level then it's turned off, so it isn't running all the time to cause problems. It doesn't have to maintain the icons just put them in once and it's done. There are times I don't even open the app for months at a time, so I've had zero problems with it. It can be downloaded for free and used up to 25 times, after which you can no longer make changes but all changes will remain if you want them. So if you get all your icons set up just right within 25 uses you never have to pay for it, but I did because I'm always changing things around.

Procrastination

Blogging is a great way to put off work when you want to procrastinate. Here it is, Sunday, I'm at my home computer ready to work, football on my little TV, and what do I do? Post on my blog, of course.

One thing I want to do on my blog is talk about OSX applications I like, I have about a dozen good ones for making life easier for a Mac. Apple makes their basic system then third party people come in and develop all kinds of apps to do all kinds of things so OSX becomes as customizable as it's possible to be. Today I'm going to mention my number one app - PATH FINDER, that's the screenshot above. It's a Finder replacement, I didn't even realize how inadequate Apple's Finder was until I started using Path Finder. On the left I have a shelf for all the folders I use all the time, just to the right of that is all my hard drives and below that are folders of my current works in progress. In the middle is my usual Icon View, at the bottom right is my Preview, it will show a preview of pretty much any image file including Illustrator files (that's my granddaughter Ally in the preview). Above that I have all open apps which I can quit from PF one at a time or all at once, but I usually have that set for Info. It would be impossible to describe all of Path Finder's features except to say I can no longer work without it, and with version 4.6.1 they seem to have gotten all the bugs out and it's fast and never crashes. Check it out for yourself at Cocoatech, you can download it for free and test it for 21 days, must have Tiger. That's just long enough to find out you can't live without it and the $32.95 price is very reasonable and includes a full version of Stuffit 11.

Now, time to get to work. . .