Today is Blog Action Day, it’s purpose is to make people more aware of the environment. The website blogactionday.org is getting as many bloggers as possible to post about the environment to raise awareness. Think about it, 20,000 blogs who have a total RSS feed of 15,000,000 people, that’s milions of people getting the message of environmental awareness. Not a bad number. Next year I plan on participating in full with a bigger post but for now this is going to have to do. Support the cause. Next years will be in August or so so keep a heads up for that.
Mac Apps to Make Your Life Easier
I’ve been pretty busy recently working at my new job and haven’t had much time to make updates to the site. Partly because I have been really busy, but also because I haven’t had a good computer to work off of at home. Well I finally cracked my piggy bank and bought myself a MacBook Pro. I love it, I’ve had a Mac before but it wasn’t a nice portable computer like this one is. Also coming from a PC most recently, I feel a lot more comfortable working on it, especially now that I have installed a few applications that are going to help my design, coding and overall productivity.
Since I hadn’t downloaded apps for a mac in a while, I got some help from my friend Jay Swain on which apps I needed most, and also which ones would just be nice to have. These are the ones I have so far, and I’m sure there are more to come:
1. Transmit – Transmit is an easy to use FTP client for OS X, it isn’t expensive and in my opinion, it can transfer files faster than Dreamweaver or anything else I have used. In version 3 it now supports more things like Automator, Amazon S3 and iDisk. I highly recommend this program for your Mac FTP needs.
2. Adium – Every new Mac comes with the instant messaging app called iChat. It works great and with my new MacBook Pro, I can even have video conferences on the nifty little camera. I was trying to figure out how I could get my Google Chat working through the same program; answer: Adium. This program can connect to over 10 different chat programs and display them in the same buddy list, this is nice for those of use that have multiple chat apps and want them all thrown into one. The only thing it doesn’t have that iChat does is support for video conferences. I would expect this on the next update though.