mac

Shiori is a simple Mac app for posting and searching Pinboard. The tag completion is nice and the URL privacy rules are clever.

This is part three in a multi-part series. Part one: Newsblur Part two: Feedbin Feedly is the only “free” service I’ve examined in this series. It is at least partially ad supported. The ads aren’t particularly obtrusive, but I would still prefer to pay for the service and not worry about how they are mucking with my reading. In this way, it’s very reminiscent of Google Reader. As with other Google Reader alternatives, there is an explosion of development and advancement happening with Feedly.

What do you get when the makers of Fantastical get frustrated with iMessage’s lack of real search? You get Chatology. It almost makes iMessage not suck. I wish I had a conversation in iMessage appropriate for screenshots. It’s nice.

This is part II in a series. Previously I covered Newsblur. Feedbin is a $2 per month replacement for Google Reader. It provides most of the basic controls and similar API of Google Reader, but with a muted aesthetic. That means apps like Reeder for iPad and Mr. Reader on iOS can support it in the future. But, right now only Reeder for iPhone supports Feedbin as a sync service.

I’ve already written about my move to a Synology NAS. I’m happy to say that after serveral months of use, I’m even more satisfied with my decision. The Synology As a refresher, I opted for the Synology 1812+.1 It’s a $1000 commitment to data storage. But that price gets you a dead-simple unix server with 8 drive bays. Half of the value of the Synology server is the software that runs the little beast.

Fluid was updated last week to version 1.7. Fluid is the website specific browser and I use it to turn webapps like Pinboard or Checkvist into a standalone applications. Version 1.7 brings better Retina support and regex support for whitelists and user styles. There’s also support for Notification Center now but you must rebuild your Fluid app to enable it. I’m a big fan of Fluid. It allows me to isolate browsing sessions and leverage app-like behavior on my Mac like application switching.

A nice walkthrough by Jordan Merrick to create a diagnostic utility disk. I’m definitely dedicating one of my old disks for this purpose.

Introduction Google Reader is essentially dead. Its passed on. This reader is no more. It has ceased to be. Kicked the bucket. Shuffled off its mortal coil. I’ll miss the syncing service, but I was never really thrilled with the interface so it’s a minor loss. Rather than throw out a bunch of alternatives that I’ve never used more than five minutes, I’ll give you my opinions from the ground up.

Panayotis Vryonis has a nice post about moving out of iPhoto into Dropbox. Dropbox has done a lot recently to make that easier and there are a number of good apps for iOS photo management with Dropbox. I highly recommend Seth Brown’s post about naming files and adding searchable meta data to photos.

Swing is a new app for the Mac that enables easy file upload and link sharing. It’s primarily a menubar application. Upload a file with Swing and get a link on your clipboard. It’s very similar to CloudApp or Droplr.1 Here’s the kicker though: It uses the ADN file service. That’s pretty cool. Now, if this takes off I’ll need a way buy more ADN file storage. But I like this trajectory.