Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Dan Wood is co-owner of Karelia Software, creating programs for the Macintosh computer. He is the father of two kids, lives in the Bay Area of California USA, and prefers bicycles to cars. This site is his weblog, which mostly covers geeky topics like Macs and Mac Programming.

Useful Tidbits and Egotistical Musings from Dan Wood

Categories: Mac OS X · Cocoa Programming · General · All Categories

Fri, 05 Dec 2003

Part 2, A few of my favorite apps

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This is part two of a series in which I showcase some of my favorite applications, which all tend to be from small companies. (Do the big ones really need any publicity from weblogs?) Check these out and give 'em a spin.

NetNewsWire

What a great way to keep up with news and weblogs. I used to have a daily ritual of web sites to visit to see if anything was new, but now I just subscribe to the feeds of my favorite sites and NNW picks up all the new stories for me. I also use NNW to post stories to my weblog. This should be on every Mac user's dock. Congratulations to Brent and team for their 2003 Eddy Award! free (NNW Lite) / $40

OmniGraffle

A great tool for building up diagrams of all types. The images it generates are very slick (with shadows and such). My only complaint is that there doesn't seem to be a way to select a group of items to drag from a "stencil" to your document. $70/$120 (Pro)

PDF Browser Plugin

I got tired of finding my desktop littered with PDFs that Safari would download for me; most of the time, I want to see PDFs that I get from the Web right in my browser window. This plug-in allows me to do this. I wish I could search PDFs from the plug-in, but otherwise it's perfect. free

DVDBackup

This is handy for occasional use when we don't get a chance to watch a movie that we've rented at home. All it needs is 5 to 10 gigs of free space on your hard drive (not always an easy thing to find!) and you can save the DVD for watching later. free

More to come soon...