Extracted Page: http://onethingwell.org/

is a weblog about simple, useful software (on any platform).
Follow along on Twitter or via the feed. Get in touch.

A service that lets you aggregate your stuff from around the web in one place. You can use your http://username.mp URL for OpenID, too.

minimallinux:

kupfer (ett program) | This is my go-to launcher. Simple, fast, decent set of plugins, and doesn’t require compositing. So feel free to use it or your lean, low-end OpenBox machine or your ultrafast Ubuntu rig. Either way, I think you’ll love it.

minimallinux:

kupfer (ett program) | This is my go-to launcher. Simple, fast, decent set of plugins, and doesn’t require compositing. So feel free to use it or your lean, low-end OpenBox machine or your ultrafast Ubuntu rig. Either way, I think you’ll love it.

A single serving web page that shows you at a glance how high the tide is on the Thames, designed to be left open to rise and fall on an iPad or spare monitor.

Make RAM Disk does what it says on the tin.

Via Mac OS X Hints

Make RAM Disk does what it says on the tin.

Via Mac OS X Hints

Monkey is a very small, fast and scalable web server for Linux.

Wiki on a Stick (in short WoaS) is a wiki that lives in one self-modifying XHTML file. It’s perfect to be used at home or at office, on your laptop or USB pen drive. It can be used as a personal notepad, calendar, repository for software documentation and for many other purposes; it allows full customization and extension by your own scripts and plugins. It also offers AES encryption of pages.

A simple screen locker for X. It’s based on slock, and adds a few useful and user-friendly touches to its ultra-minimal predecessor.

miniProxy is a simple web proxy written in PHP that can allow you to bypass Internet content filters, or to browse the internet anonymously.

Thanks, joshdi

A tool for iOS developers to easily resize their @2x images in seconds! No need to painfully export both retina and non-retina images any more for your iOS applications

Just the sort of niche, simple and useful app that’s likely to do better in the Mac App Store than it might’ve without it.

Easily blacklist spam sites from ever appearing in your Google search results again.

A Chrome extension to help rid your search results of content farms, splogs, MFA pages and half-arsed how-to sites.

Also worth mentioning: search engine Duck Duck Go has a built-in blacklist of spammy sites, as does Blekko (though their approach may be too aggressive).

actkbd is a simple daemon that binds actions to keyboard events. It recognises key combinations and can handle press, repeat and release events.

UI Consistency

There’s an interesting debate going on around the lack of user interface consistency in the Mac App Store: Tim Morgan is dismayed, John Gruber is relaxed and the author of Read the fucking HIG is positively livid.

Why is this relevant here? Because UI consitency helps an application do one thing well. Whether it’s the placement of the minimise button in Windows, the ⌘ + S key combo on the Mac or the command --option argument of the command line¹, a consistent UI lets users get to grips with new apps in an instant, and lets developers focus on the hard stuff without having to reinvent the UI wheel with every project.

Where do I stand? Put it this way: the reason I’m a command line person on Linux is the bewildering inconsistency of GUI apps and Desktop Environments on that platform. On the Mac, I’m not the stickler for the Human Interface Guidlines I once was (nor are Apple), but if there’s one thing guaranteed to get on my wick it’s an app that breaks with convention for the sake of novelty (hello, Twitter for Mac’s sliding stack of not-tabs). On iOS? I suspect that once you have the gestural interface’s prods, swipes and pinches down, adjusting to per-app UIs feels far less intrusive—perhaps Lion’s increased reliance on gesture will make UI innovation less jarring on the desktop.

So, I’m sitting on the fence—I’m what Gruber dubs a UI ‘conservative’ at heart, but the iOS, and especially the iPad, has shown that a ‘liberal’ approach doesn’t neccesarily lead to head-scratching and frustration.

What do you reckon?

Aptsh is a pseudo-shell for systems with the APT package managing tool. It offers tab completion, and is smart enough to decide whether you’re trying to remove or install/ upgrade a package.

A little utility that will eject all external drives mounted on your Mac with a quick command key combination, cancelling Time Machine backups if necessary.

Update: The current version of unDock can’t eject FireWire drives. The next version can, and will be available as soon as Apple approve it for sale.

Thanks, David

App Store

The Mac App Store

A few thoughts, in no particular order, after kicking the tyres for ten minutes:

It’s pretty, and it’s fast!
Pricing seems to be all over the place, with some sophisticated apps available for a pittance, and some simple ones priced at a point that makes me think twice.
There don’t seem to be many (any?) stupid cash-in applications, like the fart apps that litter the iTunes Store.
Being able to buy iPhoto 11 without the rest of the iLife suite is a boon.
Some applications—Alfred, Littlesnapper—which I bought in the old-fashioned way are showing up as ‘installed’ in the App Store. ~~Nice. As far as I can tell, this works for apps in /Applications but not ~/Applications, but it may be something developers need to enable.~~ This, counter to what you might expect, doesn’t mean that those apps are integrated into the Mac App Store: if you want the Store to update them, you’ll have to buy them again. Hmmn.
Strangely, there doesn’t seem to be a way to uninstall apps. Trashing them works, though you’re asked for your password and the app in question hangs around in the ‘Purchases’ pane, waiting to be reinstalled. That’s a pretty big bug/lack of feature.
The Mac feels a bit more Linuxy today. But the combination of Software Update, the App Store and manually installed applications is going to be confusing, for me at least (cf. clyde -Syua).
I wonder if the Mac App Store and the iTunes Store’s software section might merge in the future. I think I’d like to use iTunes for media, iPhoto for images and a Mac/iOS App Store for apps. But then I would say that.
Installed apps are added to your Dock: faintly annoying.
A note for impecunious bloggers: I’m seeing developers using LinkShare affiliate links on their sites to link to the Mac App Store, but don’t see a way for affiliate programme members to generate those links (beyond hacking URLs, which probably isn’t a good idea).

One Thing Well

One Thing Well

Extracted Page: http://onethingwell.org/

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