Day One : App review
This year I traded in my paper (Moleskine) journal for Day One. I love the app (it is very nicely designed) and since installing it on my (multiple) Macs, iPhone and iPad I write every day and love how it syncs between all my devices.
My Moleskine was a day-per-page diary which gave me the incentive to write daily as the gaping holes of certain days stared at me. Day One does the same with its calendar view. The advantage of Day One over the Moleskine is that I am not restricted in how much I can write. I noticed that I was adjusting my writing to fit on the page in the Moleskine. Now, I can write as much or as little as I feel inspired to whilst keeping the 'daily' overview.
GMail: Send and Archive – keep your Inbox tidy
Do you use GMail? If so, have you ever checked out the GMail Labs features, to be found under the little green beaker icon up in the right-hand corner? You should, as there are some great time-saving, productivity-increasing, visually-pleasing plugins to be found there. My personal favourite is 'Send and Archive'. Since activating it, my Inbox usually contains no more than about 10 messages and is sometimes even empty whereas it used to be piling over with 1000+ messages.
iPhoto 09
I'm playing with iPhoto 09's new face recognition tool. As you can see, it's not error-free 
iGoogle Experiment
I am one of the chosen few! Chosen as a beta-tester for Google's new version of their iGoogle personalized homepage. However, after my initial feeling of pride at being part of a select few (a pride that conveniently forgot that the selection was most probably made at extreme random by a computer) I have decided I want the old version back. This one is annoying, buggy and space-consuming.
Tap your BPM's
It's been quite a while since I last wrote, but things have been incredibly busy what with moving house, renovating, working on a music documentary and loads more. But in times of stress, little old anal me likes to relax with autistic, repetitive things like Mahjong, Picross and widgets like this one from Flying Cheeseburger.
It's a free Mac OSX dashboard widget which enables you to tap out the beats to your iTunes tracks. The widget calculates the BPM (Beats Per Minute) and you can add the BPM info to the track in iTunes with the touch of a button.
Now many of you may say that there is loads of other software out there which can analyze your music library and add the BPM info to iTunes much more quickly than this method - and you'd be right. But then I wouldn't have anything to relieve the stress
info.xhead | Password Manager
Since having switched to 100% Mac (in August 2007) I have been greatly enjoying the aesthetics of the interface. An additional joy has been found in the countless little shareware apps made for Mac. They not only look cool but are more often than not pretty damn handy too. So I've added a 'Software' category to start sharing my experiences with these apps, like a proper geek.
One of the apps I love the most is info.xhead, a password manager. I know, the name is crap - I can barely remember it - but the app is great. It's basically a program in which you can store passwords, PIN numbers, account info etc. Very sensitive information which you don't want some hacker or burglar getting their grubby little hands on, so it's protected with one master password which you should obviously just remember and not write down anywhere. But be warned, if you forget your master password - there is NO WAY you'll ever get your (encrypted) information back.