And the Oscar goes to… #2

Some of my friend already knew that I love Mac OS X. I think this is due to the fact that you have an awesome GUI on top of a Unix operating system. Because of this, I want to write today a blog entry about my favorite Mac OS X applications.

So the Academy Awards for the best Mac OS X application goes to:

• Magic Number Machine, a free, full-featured, graphically laid out, high-precision, scientific calculator.
• NetNewsWire, brings the power of RSS right to your Mac OS X desktop.
• OmniOutliner, an amazing flexible program for creating, collecting, and organizing information.
• OmniGraffle, need a diagram, process chart, quick page-layout, website mockup or graphic?
• iWork, streamlined processing and stunning presentations.
• iLife, discover new ways to create movies, make music, websites, and more.
• Adium, a free instant messaging application that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, ICQ, Yahoo, and more.
• Carbon Copy Cloner, features an interface designed to make the cloning and backup very intuitive.
• Colloquy, is an advanced IRC client.
• MacTheRipper, go ahead and backup that DVD.
• Transmit, takes FTP and SFTP to the next level.
• Unison, Usenet newsreader to handle messages, files and media.
• SiteSucker, automatically downloads Web sites from the Internet.
• Audacity, is an excellent free audio recorder, editor, and mixer.
• Google Earth, is a free application that gives you a wealth of imagery and geographic information.
• Caffeine, prevents your Mac from sleeping.
• PeekIt, is a free hex editor that allows you to open, examine and change the raw or hex values of a file.
• VLC Media Player, is a free multimedia player.
• MenuCalendarClock, is an iCal compatible menu calendar and configurable menu clock.

Sorry, but I was too lazy to sort it in alphabetically order.

Typewriter Magic

I saw the movie “Shadows in the Sun” recently, a film that tells the story of two men who’re struggling to overcome their fears of not being good enough—to find his own path in life.

An aspiring writer tracks a literary titan suffering from writers block to his refuge in rural Italy and learns about life and love from the irascible genius and his daughters. In one scene of the movie, the literary titan tells the aspiring writer not to use his computer for writing. When you write on a computer, you can type words very fast and easily remove them by just pressing the backspace key. In his opinion, you can only turn raw words into something you can be proud by putting the words in your mind together before bringing it finally onto paper. Because of this reason, he told the writer to use an old-fashioned typewriter.

I really like this idea. In my opinion, writing is an intensely personal thing. You spend hour after hour nurturing your words to get the best way to convey your message. It’s outstandingly gorgeous!

At the end of the movie I asked myself how I could turn my PowerBook G4 into such an old-fashioned typewriter and found a very nice and almost useless Mac OS X program. It will not prevent you not to use the backspace key, but it makes your keyboard to play typewriter sounds. The program is called “Typewriter Keyboard”.

P.S. You can see a wonderful Rumba in the movie, too. ;-)