It’s 1:00 am, I’m working on that crazy web design that’s kicking my creative butt and I get this IM:

Of course, I’m always game for a list of cool OS X Apps so, of course, I had to ask permission to repost on here. Chris is such a cool guy he loving complied. So enjoy…

(maybe if we’re lucky, I can get some of “the iBAM crew” to write reviews on a few of these? or even … better yet *YOU* can write your reviews in the comments here … iBAM RULES! I love you guys!)

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Apple this week released Mobile-Me, a replacement for those of us that use .Mac. There were a lot of promises, and some have worked well, others are (supposedly) on the way.  I have been using .Mac for about a year, I subscribed in order to utilize all of the functionality provided through iLife. The use of the galleries for video, and photos worked very well. The email, while being like just about any other client, .Mac is easily configureable, and fairly intuitive. Mobile-Me’s debut start was less then auspicious, looked more like an after thought. Apple was touting Mobile-Me as “Exchange for the rest of us…”, so they may have rushed it to get it live, prior to the iPhone 2.0 launch.

Some of the functionality is finally there, by that I mean the web pages, for Email, Contacts, and Calendar. They are still a bit slow, but they should pick up is speed in the next few weeks. The integration between the iPhone 2.0 and mobile me works well. 

In my testing, the push mail, contacts, and calendar work extremely well, (once I configured the iPhone correctly.) In addition to the push features, the space for iDisk has doubled to 20 GB, and download bandwidth has been increased from 100 GB per month, to 200 GB per month. 

Now for the question of compatibility. Mobile-Me works with FireFox 2 and 3 as well as Safari 3. Internet Explorer 7 is listed as supported, however some of the web applications do not function correctly in IE 7.

The best part of this is there is no additional charge to upgrade. The same $99.00 US gets you the Mobile-Me enhancements. If you have an iPhone, or are a heavy user of iLife, I recommend at least checking out Mobile-Me for 60 days for free, and I think you will move to becoming a full time Mobile-Me subscriber. 

Update: Just as I was about to post this I received an update from Apple for the local Mobile-Me software. I will add another update if anything is a surprise. 

Evernote has just come out of BETA. For those of you that don’t know, Evernote is a great idea, as well as a great application. Once you sign up for a free account, you can download the client. There is a client, for Mac, smart phone, (and yes) Windows. The client, will allow synchronization between the remote clients and “the cloud”. Not only can you sync reminders, notes, and pictures, but the software will even index the pictures and can read and create tags for easy searching. 

Evernote is easy to configure and use. Notes can be created on an iPhone (or most Internet enabled smartphone), then when your desktop connects the notes are copied there. I have tried many reminder type programs, but none have functioned as well. Additionally, anyone who is a follower of the David Allen, Getting Things Done, also know as GTD, This application is great for creating brain dumps. 

If you think you have a need to create reminders and have them anywhere, give Evernote a shot. 

Do you have a need to have this type of reminder system? Are you using anything like this? If so, what are you using? 

I spent some of my long weekend doing some maintenance on all my computers.  When it came to my Mac, there wasn’t much to do, although I noticed the hard drive space was slowly filling up.  Going through all my folders I deleted quite a bit of useless files that I didn’t need anymore, and proceeded to make backups of my important files.  That helped, but certainly there was something else I could do to regain some space.

That is when I remembered a tool I used when I first installed Leopard to remove all the unwanted language files from the system.  That application is called Monolingual.  This application will go through the operating system and remove language resources that you direct it to.  I set it to remove everything except for English, and I got back a whopping 3.9GB of space on my hard drive.  That is quite impressive!

The best part is this application is free, and is something you really don’t have to use but every once and a while.  Give it a download and reclaim some of your valuable drive space. 

I love Firefox, and I love Pearl Crescent Page Saver but…

With all the memoryleak/slowness/os x funk in Firefox recently, I decided to switched to Safari for all my browsing needs. Today, however, I needed a full area browser window grabber like what Pearl does with the scrolling and the saving and the grabbing (with the stuff at the place, you know). I went to the all knowing power of my Twitterverse and was rewarded in mere seconds with a tool I hadn’t heard of before. Paparazzi! (You gotta love Twitter, seriously, it’s the bomb!). Shocking, Yeah… Something *I* hadn’t heard of (sheesh!) yet… I know! (smirk)
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