Image by flibblesan
One of the things I love about going to conferences is that there are usually a lot of Mac users there and that means getting the goods on what new Mac software people are using. My last trips to Defrag and IIW were good in that regard as I found out about a few new things that I'm enjoying.
The first, and probably the most useful, is Snackr. Snackr is an RSS reader that displays the most recent articles from feeds you subscribe to as a rolling ticker on the bottom, top, or side of your display. Want to focus on something? Just click the "hide" icon and it scrolls up. Click on a headline and the article appears. It's made RSS feeds an interstitial activity instead of something I have to remember to do and consequently I'm reading a lot more interesting things.
Another tool I discovered was Tweetdeck. I've been a longtime (if anything associated with Twitter can be termed "longtime") Twitterific user, but Tweetdeck seduced me with it's ability to create panels for Twitter searches. I wanted to follow all the tweets about IIW and Tweetdeck allowed me an easy way to do that. Along the way I got hooked on it's built-in URL shortening panel. I went back to Twitterific and missed that, so I went back. Some people complain that Tweetdeck is too heavyweight and it can be. I run it in single pane mode a lot when I'm on a single monitor.
I like Delicios, but frequently fail to bookmark things. I don't know why, but Pukka has helped. A little scriplet in the browser bar pushes data to Pukka and it does the rest of the work after I enter tags. I know, the bookmark page will do all of this, but it disrupts my browser flow. And I like the sound Pukka makes.
The last app (actually a service) that I discovered was Dropbox. Yeah maybe I'm the last to the block on this. Dropbox's integration with OS X is what sold me (it also works in Windows and Linux). I get a folder that I just put things in and they get synced to the cloud. Right-clicking on them gives me the public URL I can send out to people in email or Twitter for sharing.
That's all it takes: four new apps and I'm a happy camper.
