Guest Author: Matt McInerney

Hello, my name is Matt McInerney and I have a confession to make: I have more music than I know what to do with in my iTunes Library. My glass is not half full. It is completely full and spilling over the rim. Yes, I’m approaching 10,000 songs… Here’s the thing though: I’d have it no other way! I don’t think I could deal if one of my albums were missing. Even if one song were misplaced, I have to admit I’d be upset. So where am I going with this? I’ll tell you: with a song count in the thousands, how am I ever suppose to decided what to listen to? One’s first instinct may be to create playlists. Sure that will work for the a little bit, but that also is going to have some major flaws. First, in selecting certain songs, there are far too many being overlooked. Second, who has the time to make enough playlists to support every mood and time of day? With this in mind, I’d like to cover the all the bases of iTunes organization and potential. Let’s figure this one out. [Continued]

Guest article by:  Shawn Blanc

I don’t know if it’s cheezy to introduce yourself or not, but hi. My name is Shawn Blanc. A few weeks ago I shot Brent an email about a series I did on my site called Tour My Mac. I asked Brent if he’d like to put it up on iBAM. He said ‘yes’ and a new friendship began.

This is the first of the “Tour of My Mac” series. This post is on the the Mac apps I use every single day that came bundled with OS X or are free to download. [Continued]

If you didn’t already know about flickr, now you do. It’s just the coolest place for photo sharing, in my opinion, but that’s not the point of this post. Just yesterday, they released a very much needed update to one of their “essential” apps. And that app happens to be the OS X photo uploading app called the flickr uploadr. Previously, those of us who have Intel Macs were forced to deal with the slow loads, funky errors and flat out lock ups of the previous version. Now, with the Universal Binary update, we are tagging, grouping and uploading with ease. That said, I’ll keep this short… If you don’t have a flickr account, get one (it’s free) and start sharing like a banshee (do they share photos? If so, I want to see some of their pics). If you don’t know what to do after that, you can always become a friend of iBAM on flickr. See you there!

Okay, not the best icon and an even worse logo, but who cares! Growl for OS X is just about the most useful app on the planet! As usual, I am a late comer to “the coolest apps” party but I have a good reason this time (or at least I think I do anyway). I knew about growl, but didn’t really have a complete need for it until today. Twitterrific 2.1 beta was released today and it incorporates Growl for tweets. Now if this isn’t the most important use for growl, I don’t know what is! Admittedly, I think I may be caught up in my recent double app install excitement, but I do think that growl has to be really high on my “Essential Apps” list after the events of the day today. That said, I highly recommend Growl for your Mac and wish you the best.

One note of advice: you will probably have to reboot after installing and configuring Growl for the first time. It didn’t pick up my Growl friendly apps until I rebooted (FYI).

Text Expander: One of the neatest little apps out there for Mac, but you have to know how to use it or you never will. Trust me, I know! I have had it installed for 2 months and just started this week. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not because it’s not useful, it’s because we are all creatures of habit and prone to do things the “hard way”. It’s okay, you’re not the only one one that hits the delete key a bunch of times to correct one letter 20 characters back then retype the remaining 19 characters again or go all the way up to the edit menu or use the mouse to copy & paste text instead of using the keyboard shortcuts. We all condition ourselves to to make things harder than they really are and that is why Text Expander is so valuable, if you use it. Additionally, as an added plus, it will tell you how much time you have saved, thus stroking your recently wounded human nature. [Continued]