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Friday Favorite: Optimal Layout brings app switching and window controls to your fingertips
Optimal Layout is a great utility that fundamentally alters the way that I interact with my Mac. In short, it gives me the ability to use my keyboard to quickly change between windows. That might sound like what you're been doing with ⌘ + Tab, but there are a few important differences. The first is that you can choose not only which app you are switching to, but also which window in that app. Optimal Layout can even switch you to specific browser tabs in Safari or Google Chrome. You can use the mouse with Optimal Layout, but it works especially well for those who prefer the keyboard. Type ⌘ + Option/Alt + F and it will bring up a list of available windows. Start typing and it will match window names. When you find the one you want, simply press Return. This is especially great if you are on a Mac with a small screen or working in multiple full-screen apps, because you can switch between them without using ⌘ + Tab to find the app you want to use. Optimal Layout is more than just an app/window switcher, it also lets you control the location of windows on the screen with your keyboard. You can maximize (full screen minus the Dock and menu bar), half-screen, quarter-screen, or center any window via the Optimal Layout UI, without bringing that application forward. Just type to find the window you want, and then press the keyboard command for where you want that window to go. Or you can use the menu bar controls (which can also be hidden, if you don't want them to appear) to control the front-most window. If that's not enough, there is even a grid that Optimal Layout can show you and help you position all of your windows on your screen if you need to see multiple windows at once. The best way to understand Optimal Layout is to see it in action and try it yourself. There is a 94-second screencast on the Optimal Layout homepage, and a few other short screencasts on the support page. There's even a trial version available so you can try before you buy. Optimal Layout is US$14 and is available on the Mac App Store or directly from the developer. It support Mac OS 10.5, 10.6, and 10.7.
Friday Favorite: After the Deadline
I spend a lot of time in the web browser, so much that I use web apps more than their standalone counterparts. I use twitter.com to compose a tweet, gmail.com to check my email and so on. As a result, I use several plug-ins and extensions to improve the efficiency of my online work. In a previous Friday Favorite, I covered Lazarus, a form recovery tool. Today, I'm going to tell you about After The Deadline, an extension for Firefox or Chrome that'll spell and grammar check your writing. After the Deadline works with most text fields in a web browser. It appears as a small ABC icon in the bottom right corner of a text box. When you're done typing your comment, tweet or feedback, you can click the icon and the extension will both spell and grammar check your writing. When you're checking with After the Deadline, the ABC icon will change to red. Spelling errors will be highlighted in red; grammar errors in green. One little drawback with the tool is that you can edit the errors, but you can't edit the surrounding text until you click the ABC icon and turn the checking off. It's a step up from OS X's spell check feature because the grammar check will pick up a lot of writing errors that spell check doesn't detect. The most common one I get is word repetition such as "the the" or "a a." It's not as thorough as a dedicated grammar tool like Grammarly, but those tools cost money and don't integrate into the browser as an extension. After the Deadline is perfect for informal writing like comments, emails, or feedback forms. It'll prevent you from making a glaring spelling error when you're communicating online. There's also a Wordpress plugin, if you use that CMS. The extension works with Firefox and Chrome for the Mac and is available for free from After The Deadline's website.
Friday Favorite: Lazarus Extension for Safari saves your form text
Don't you hate that sinking feeling you get when you spend five to ten minutes filling out a form -- and then you lose all the data because of a hiccup in your Internet connection, or because of Safari's tab reloading quirks? Before that happens to you again, you should check out Lazarus. It's an extension for Safari, Chrome and Firefox that stores your form data in case you lose it. It works with almost all web forms, with web-based email clients and even in some content management systems like WordPress. The extension/plug-in stores your text in a database and lets you restore it with a single click. Each field that is supported by the extension will display the Lazarus ankh symbol. If you lose your data, you can click on the symbol to restore the cached text. The Safari extension has a few options that'll let you encrypt form data, exclude sites from working with Lazarus, and change the number of days the form data is stored. Lazarus is lightweight and doesn't affect browser performance. It's a life-saver for WordPress bloggers and anyone who fills in a lot of online forms. Lazarus is available for free from Interclue's website.
Friday Favorites: Using Little Snitch to stop apps from phoning home
One thing that drives me mad is when applications try to phone home with information. Usually, these requests are benign; the app is either looking for the latest update or making a serial number verification request. If it's a rogue app, though, it could be sending back information you'd rather not share. To find out which apps are phoning home, you can install Little Snitch. It's a US$30 app that alerts you whenever a program tries to establish an outgoing Internet connection. You can choose to block this connection, or let it through on a case-by-case basis. You can also specify a rule to handle this connection attempt in the future, so you don't have to be alerted each time the app phones home again. Little Snitch gives you fine control over these connection attempts. Besides permanently blocking a connection, you can also choose to stop it for a single session. This session-based blocking is convenient for travelers who are using a cellular connection and want to limit their data consumption. Little Snitch is an excellent app for tracking your outgoing Internet connection. You'd be surprised by the number of apps that try to phone home and how often they do it. Google Chrome is one of the worst offenders in this group as it tries to connect to the Google mothership several times a day. If you want to try it out yourself, there's a limited time trial of Little Snitch that runs for a 3 hours at a time. The full, unlimited app costs $30 and is available from Objective Development's website.
Friday Favorites: Unit Converter
Welcome to Friday Favorites! Every Friday, one of us will get all sloppy over an app, web service, or Mac feature that we feel is indispensable. To me, Dashboard feels like the forgotten relative of OS X, the one that sits quietly in the back of the room during the family reunion that has surprisingly good stories. There's some amazing widgets for Dashboard, and Unit Converter is one of them. It can convert a number of categories including area, currency, power, pressure, speed, weight, volume and more. It's a free converter that might not have all the units you're looking for (compare more than 130 currencies in Currencies to 40 in Unit Converter). I'm in a marriage that requires regular translation of meters to inches, stone to pounds (weight), Celsius into Fahrenheit and pounds (currency) into dollars, and the Unit Converter widget is an indispensable tool in sorting out what my husband is telling me. If you need a quick converter, Unit Converter is free and already on your Mac.
Friday Favorite: BetterZip
BetterZip is a utility I might not use every day, but I'm very thankful for it when I need it. It's an archive/compression utility which handles a broad array of archive formats, including ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, and some that you rarely see on a Mac, such as 7-Zip and RAR formats. While the unarchiver built in to OS X can handle quite a few of these formats -- and is what I use on a day-to-day basis -- BetterZip adds a few very useful tools to the mix. BetterZip opens or creates your archive in a file-list format, and you can drag files between Finder and BetterZip to add to or extract from the archive. Creating new archives is just a "File->New" or Command-N away, and you can save them in Zip, TAR, TGZ, TBZ, 7-Zip or XAR formats. While the Finder lets you easily create archives by right-clicking a file selection and choosing "Archive," it doesn't allow you to easily edit the archive or add to it. For quick compression of one or more files for emailing, it's fine and I use it regularly, but for larger archives that need to be more flexible, BetterZip is an excellent choice. BetterZip also makes it easy to search large archives for a single file you're looking for. Read on for more reasons BetterZip is my Friday Favorite ...
Notational Velocity, Simplenote, and Dropbox bring child-like wonder
The phrase "game changer" is no doubt cliché and overused, but every now and again it just fits. I had heard about Notational Velocity when Merlin Mann posted about it on 43Folders. It changed how I use my iMac, MacBookPro, and iPhone, bringing them all together in a very cool way. The app has been around for awhile (we talked about it five years ago!) but some new features and new technologies make it well worth another look. It took me a minute to understand why I'd want Notational Velocity, it because it sounded like yet another "everything box" like Yojimbo, which I was already using. Notational Velocity does save notes, either in ASCII, RTF, or HTML, but with the latest version, Notational Velocity syncs with Simplenote or WriteRoom for iPhone. It also easily syncs via Dropbox if you follow the important configuration notes here. Imagine if Apple had created an over-the-air method of syncing Notes and it all Just Worked. That's what Notational Velocity has achieved. Notes on my iPhone, my iMac and my MacBook Pro. Edit a note anywhere, and the changes are synced nearly instantly and appear everywhere. It's fast, it's seamless. Thinking about getting an iPad? That's only going to make this setup even sweeter.
Friday Favorite: Ommwriter, the Zen word processor for writers
More Friday Favorites, the apps, tools and accessories that we love to share. As a writer, I love Scrivener. It's great for managing large and complex projects. But for shorter pieces, this blog post for example, I've found a new favorite, Ommwriter. Brett first mentioned the beta of Ommwriter here a few weeks ago. Ommwriter is unique as a word processor for several reasons. It only has a full screen workspace. It lacks several of the options of most other word processors (you can only write in three fonts and three font sizes). Even when you minimize its window, there is no Mac-like genie effect – Ommwriter just fades away. But its Zen-like minimalism and lack of options are the point. Ommwriter puts you in the middle of a secluded snowy landscape on a foggy winter's day. As relaxing music calms you, the words you type appear on your screen as if you were writing them in the sky. It's just you and your thoughts for miles around. And, from just three writings, I can tell you Ommwriter does its job exceptionally well. When I write in it, within minutes I no longer hear the sounds of busy London city life zooming past my flat. You really have to use it to get a good idea of how well it works. For a quick look, check out the video below. In addition to the snowy landscape there are seven built-in soundtracks and images you can choose from. The guys at a Barcelona creative agency called Herraiz Soto & Co. [Ed. note: this link is now broken, sorry for the inconvenience] originally designed Ommwriter as an in-house tool to help their creative people get their thoughts flowing. Now it's available in beta to Mac users here. Let me know what you think of Ommwriter in the comments! Thanks, Charlie Omniwriter from David Wogan on Vimeo.
Friday Favorite: OmniDiskSweeper helps you track down where all your disk space went
"Where did all my disk space all go?" When I was in college, each student was allotted 4 megabytes ('mega' is not a typo) of disk space for both email and files. Granted, this was back in the early '90s, before anyone had heard of "www." or had even thought of ".mp3" or ".mp4". In 1995 I acquired a 1GB hard drive and felt like king of the known world. Sure, it was in a case about the size of a loaf of bread, but an entire gigabyte! All to myself! Today I have a Drobo which is in a case roughly the same size as that 1GB drive, but it has 2 terabytes of redundant storage -- 2,000x the space on that prime example of mid-90s storage tech. One thing hasn't changed: there's still never enough hard drive space. It seems to be as unavoidable as death and taxes. That Drobo? It's about 95% full. Enter OmniDiskSweeper, a freeware program by The Omni Group which will allow you to find where your diskspace has gone. Now, there are a number of different programs out there for analyzing your hard drive space: DiskInventoryX, GrandPerspective, Baseline, DaisyDisk, and WhatSize, to name just a few. Choosing one may be as personal as which Twitter client or web browser you prefer. I like OmniDiskSweeper for two reasons: it is free and it is simple. It uses the same "Column View" that I use in Finder, and automatically sorts the folders which use the most disk space to the top. For example, looking at the Drobo, I can see that about 50% of the space on that device is taken up by programs I have recorded using Elgato's EyeTV. You might also find files in unexpected places. A friend recently used OmniDiskSweeper and realized that he had tried to copy a bunch of files to an external hard drive, but something had gone wrong. Instead of moving the files to the external drive, they had just been moved into a folder in /Volumes/. OmniDiskSweeper makes it easy to delete files right through the app; simply select the file and click the big red "Delete" button. A word of warning! A warning dialogue box will appear, asking you to confirm that you want to "Destroy" the files. They will not be sent to the Trash (since the assumption is that you are running OmniDiskSweeper because you want to reclaim diskspace), they will be deleted immediately. The Omni Group made OmniDiskSweeper (along with several other utilities) free a few months ago, so if you looked at it and were turned off by a price tag, give it another look. It may not have as many bells and whistles as some of the other programs out there, but it's hard to beat OmniDiskSweeper for ease of use. UPDATE: TUAW reader "ithinkergoimac" comments below that OmniDiskSweeper may report incorrect (significantly increased) file sizes if you are using TimeMachine.
Friday Favorite: FolderGlance
FolderGlance 2.55, for Snow Leopard only, is a very useful preference pane that adds a number of additions to the Finder. The simplest and most basic thing it does is to add an expanded contextual menu to any folder when the folder is right (or control, or two-finger) clicked. If there are folders embedded inside the folder you have right-clicked, those folders appear at the top of the display window and can also be right-clicked to inspect their contents. This works for any number of embedded folders. The really neat part, at least for me, is to set custom folders. What this lets you do is to determine folders that you would like to get to right away and denote them as special. Then whenever you right-click, whether in an empty area of your desktop or on any folder, the custom folders appear at the top of your list of folders. This does not replace the functions of the usual contextual menu we've all come to know and love; it expands them. Here's why I love this feature. When I'm writing for TUAW, each post requires a graphic and a link at the very least. Graphics need to be properly formatted, so after adjusting the size, I save the result in a folder called TUAW Pix. This folder is buried about 5 layers into my Documents folder. With FolderGlance, every time I right click, the TUAW Pix folder is right there ready to be opened. Saving the graphics goes from about 8 keystrokes to 2. The preference pane does a bunch of other things as well, but none that I find as useful as the feature detailed above. For the record, here is the feature list: Moving, copying and making aliases of the currently selected files in a folder you browse to Control-free popups: Open the contextual menu without holding down the control-key or using a two-button mouse In-menu preview of arbitrary files Opening files with an application different than the default by using an "Open with..." menu you can tailor to suit your own taste Changing the font size used in contextual menus Browsing into package contents Customizable sorting and customizable display of hidden files and folders. The preference pane gets updated fairly frequently, and in that process, you are asked to force-quit and reload the Finder to make the new version take effect. For me, this doesn't seem to work. I need to either restart or log out and back in for the change to take effect. FolderGlance 2.55 costs US$20 for a license. This is expensive and I'm sure that cheaper alternatives are around, but this, in my workflow, has become an extension of the Finder, and something that I feel should be built into the OS. I use it constantly. You should note that if you are running anything under OS 10.6, there are older versions available.
Friday Favorite: SpamSieve 2.76
My Friday favorite is SpamSieve. We have mentioned it a few times previously, but since it has recently been updated to version 2.76 I wanted to sing its praises again. It's the best way I've found to deal with spam. Using Bayesian filtering, SpamSieve installs as a plug-in to your mail client and lets you mark messages as spam. As you do, it builds a a corpus file of rules telling determining what is spam and what isn't. The more messages you mark, or train, the more accurate SpamSieve gets. I've been using it since November of 2003 and after years of training, it's so accurate that it rarely fails to catch an errant spam encrusted message. When it does, using either a keystroke sequence or a pulldown menu from your Mail client you can train it as spam. At the start, it's quite labor intensive since you have to mark a few hundred messages for it to really start working, but it pays dividends. After a while, you'll have a personalized set of inclusion/exclusion rules that gets better over time. To give you an idea, yesterday I received 307 emails. Out of those SpamSieve correctly marked and moved over 30 messages and missed only 2 that needed training. This is a shot of my corpus screen showing how many messages have been filtered and how many words were read resulting in messages being regarded as spam or good. Yes, over 15,000 messages is a big number, but by being cumulative, SpamSieve gets more and more accurate over time. SpamSieve allows you to import or export the corpus file so if you get a new computer, or decide to use a different email client, you lose nothing.
Friday Favorite: Snapz Pro X for Mac
I was straining my brain today -- admittedly not a hard thing for me to do -- trying to think of a topic for a Friday Favorite. The answer was right in front of me all the time, since one of the most-used applications on my Macs is Snapz Pro X (US$69) from Ambrosia Software. Snapz Pro X, currently at version 2.1.5, is a deceptively powerful Mac application that hides out of the way until you need it. What does it do? It lets you capture pictures and video of anything on your Mac. For those of us who write for tech blogs, create technical documentation, or write books, Snapz Pro X is a fast way to capture full or partial screens. You press the usual Command-Shift-3 to take a screenshot, and the simple Snapz Pro X user interface appears...
Friday Favorite: AppZapper
Every so often I'll go through my Mac's hard drive and delete stuff that's just sitting around. The downloads folder fills with junk especially fast. I also download lots of software out of curiosity, and after a few months my applications folder is bulging.While installing Mac software is often as easy as a click, uninstalling takes a bit more work. Rather than hunt around for preference files, etc. I use AppZapper. By simply dropping an app onto the cute raygun icon, AppZapper finds all of that application's related files -- preferences, caches, etc. -- and lists them in a window. With a click, it "zaps" them (you can disable that sound effect) to the trash. Fortunately, they aren't deleted for good, so you can recover something zapped by mistake. Once you're ready, simply empty the trash to reclaim all of that precious hard drive space. Pro tip: Move it to your Finder Window's sidebar for easy drag-and-drop access.AppZapper requies Tiger or Leopard and the $12.95US pricetag includes free upgrades for life. There are other apps that do this, yes, but AppZapper works perfectly for me.Update: Some readers are reporting that AppZapper doesn't work properly under Leopard. It's never given me any trouble, but if you want an alternative, Hazel is a good one.
Friday Favorite: MainMenu 2 keeps your Mac running smoothly
I'm a sucker for Mac maintenance utilities.That's not to say that I run them on a regular basis like I should do, but whenever I find a new one I like to give it a try and see how it's going to work for me. Dare To Be Creative Ltd. recently released version 2.0 of MainMenu, a collection of Mac utilities that resides in your menu bar.The US$10 application takes up very little real estate in your menu bar, displaying a small rounded square icon with a plus sign in the center (you can choose other icons as well). Clicking the icon unveils the menu seen at right.Each of the clearly identified "buttons" leads to a submenu of functions designed to clean up or optimize some area of your Mac. Under the System submenu, for example, you can repair disk permissions (usually done with Disk Utility), run the daily, weekly, and monthly cron scripts for cleaning up log files, clean caches, rebuild the Launch Services database and the Spotlight Index, and update prebindings (not really necessary since OS X 10.4) and the Whatis and Locate databases. You can also create your own batch files to run a number of the tasks at the same time, restart your Wi-Fi and flush your DNS cache, perform many user-related tasks, and more. When tasks complete, you get Growl notification. MainMenu 2 is my Friday favorite because it puts a lot of maintenance mojo a click or two away; there's no need to use the CLI or dig into the Utilities folder, and yes, I am a very lazy person. What's your favorite Mac utility? Leave a comment!
Friday Favorite: SpreadTweet
Not since the Cola Wars or the Cold War have we seen a battle as fierce as The Twitter App Wars. Like salmon swimming upstream, each little app is fighting to gain your affection. I believe that there's no one Twitter app to rule them all. Instead, individual tastes and needs dictate which one becomes your go-to solution.Unless you're trying to be sneaky.If you're the type who loves to tweet but works for a boss who'd rather you spend your time being productive than tweeting pictures of your lunch, SpreadTweet is for you. Just launch, sign in and you're good to go. SpreadTweet looks just like an Excel spreadsheet. In fact, we'd wager that it'd fool anyone who doesn't actually stop to read what's written there.It runs on Adobe Air, which turns some people off. Those folks can use the web-based version (which probably kills the illusion).
Friday Favorite Triple Pack: Alarm Clock 2, Apptrap, and TimeMachineEditor
When I consider what should really be system software, I always think of three little beauties that belong on every Mac: Alarm Clock 2, AppTrap and TimeMachineEditor. They are all one-trick-ponies, take up little space, are free for the downloading, and Apple should buy them up for Snow Leopard.Alarm Clock 2, currently up to version 2.4.5, sits nicely on your menubar ready to awaken you with your favorite song, or remind you that your dinner is ready to come out of the oven. You can set an alarm to use any song from your iTunes library, or if no song is chosen, it will just beep at you. It has an Easy Wake option that slowly brings up the volume of your chosen song over an adjustable period of up to two minutes. As any good alarm clock, it comes with a snooze feature, which is also adjustable. I use it mostly as a kitchen timer that keeps me out of the kitchen. Multiple alarms can be set of course, and if you happen to have an Apple remote lying around, pushing the pause button will tell an alarm to 'snooze'. Since downloading it, I can't think of a day that that I haven't used it at least onceApptrap is a preference pane that allows you to delete applications more completely than dragging to the trash and emptying. Trashing the normal way usually leaves support files in your library folder that will never go away and do nothing more useful than take up space. With Apptrap installed, whenever you drag an application to the trash and try and empty the trash, you are presented with a window showing you the file and all support files that go along with the application, allowing you to trash them all together in one stroke. There are no settings, options or anything else to worry about. Just install it and forget it. The next time you delete an application, it will be there for you.Note that AppTrap is open source but is no longer being actively maintained; the developer is looking for someone to pick up the project. If you want a commercially supported uninstall tool, you can check out the $12.95US AppZapper or the highly-recommended and multicapable file organizer Hazel for $21.95. Mat also wrote up a helpful Mac 101 on uninstaller tools last year.TimeMachineEditor stops Time Machine from backing up every hour. On my network, with four Macs backing up to Time Machine, hourly, the network slows down to a crawl. This is especially annoying since my information isn't critical enough to be backed that frequently. TimeMachineEditor allows you to set exactly when Time Machine will run. You can set backups for hourly intervals, like every 12 hours, or set up calendar backups which allow you to backup daily, weekly or monthly at any time you set. The hourly calendar interval is new to version 2.1. I have my Macs backup once a day during the wee hours with each Mac staggered by an hour or so to keep the network hit to a minimum. Download all three and see how these brilliant little afterthoughts improve your Mac life.
Friday Favorite: Scrivener
Not long after I bought my first personal Mac in late 2004, I stumbled across an article that mentioned Ulysses, a text editor geared toward creative writers -- essentially the marriage between a word processor and project management software. It allows you to have all documents within a writing project at your grasp. As a journalist and author, Ulysses was a dream come true, but expensive. Costing more than $100 at the time, it didn't fit into a journalist's salary. I wound up using CopyWrite for a time and was fairly satisfied with it until I read in a forum that people were having luck with a program which, at the time, was called Scrivener Gold. I gave the free beta a try and was blown away by the program's potential. When the full-fledged release of Scrivener came out in early 2007, I bought a license as a birthday gift for myself. Scrivener pulls all the things needed for a complete writing project -- be it writing a script, novel, research paper or newspaper/blog articles -- together in one location and has so many features that even after nearly three years of use, I don't think I've fully explored all that it has to offer. I recently started work on writing my first graphic novel, and have really gotten the chance to flex Scrivener's muscles.
Friday Favorite: Dasher
Another Friday Favorite, our weekly opportunity to gush over one of our favorite apps. This week I'm going with an oldie but goodie that I use every day. Way back when Dashboard first appeared, my biggest problem with it was that I simply forgot about it. My main use of Dashboard is for displaying information that I want to remember, e.g. appointments with iCal Events, iCal ToDos with DoBeDo, the weather, etc. However, for this to be really useful it needs to be in front of my face a lot. And since I generally tend to forget to invoke Dashboard on my own this pretty much fails. Enter the basic preference pane app Dasher, which does one simple, but amazingly useful thing: it automatically invokes the Dashboard after a set period of time. Everytime I step away from my Mac and return, the Dashboard is displayed with my appointments, etc. so that now they're in my face enough for me to remember them and Dashboard finally works for me. Dasher is a free download from Splasm Software. It's an old piece of software that has not been updated in quite some time, but it still works fine on my 10.5.7 machine. Incidentally, there's another way to accomplish something similar using an OS X screen-saver. DashSaver (donation requested) from High Earth Orbit installs as a standard screen saver and will also display the Dashboard after a set period of time.
Friday Favorite: TextEdit
What's free, flexible, easy-to-use but powerful and can handle a wide variety of file types? Our good friend, TextEdit, an app that ships with every Mac. TextEdit is, of course, a simple text editing tool like Notepad or WordPad on Windows. But there's a lot more to "simple text editing" that you might imagine, especially when TextEdit connects to services and other apps. I'm going to show you a few cool things you can do with TextEdit: create an inbox, use it as a development tool, or grab snippets of text on the go.First, you should know that TextEdit defaults to the .rtf format. If you're not familiar with it, RTF is "rich text" and, unlike the .txt files generated by something like NotePad, RTF includes formatting, like bold or italics or bullet lists. "Plain text" .txt files are pretty much just the basic ASCII characters and paragraph breaks. So what? Well, if you want things to look pretty, you'll stick with .rtf, a format which is easy to share across platforms. Side note: did you know TextEdit will open Word documents? It isn't perfect, but it works if you don't have Word on your machine. The older .txt format is better for coding or when you don't need or can't have formatting.To create an inbox, I suggest the simpler .txt format. What I used to do was set up Quicksilver to easily append to an inbox.txt file, and I used GeekTool to pin that .txt file to my desktop. You could also use LaunchBar to append, and I'm sure there's a way to whip up an AppleScript, but I never bothered. Instead, when I ditched Quicksilver, I started keeping the text file in the Dock, and I just open it up to add items. All this is portable, indexed by Spotlight, and fully cross-platform compatible.Next up: munging HTML with TextEdit, and grabbing snippets of text from any app and dropping them into a file.
Friday Favorite: Woopra
A few months ago I was looking for an alternative to Google Analytics and found Woopra. It's still in beta so don't expect it to replace your current solution, but I'm having a lot fun using it on a few WordPress blogs. Setup is easy, if not a bit time consuming. First you've got to submit your site for approval for inclusion in the beta program. The first site I submitted took weeks to get approved. The second only took two days. The developers claim that they're working on a first come, first-served basis. Once you're approved, all you've got to do is paste a single line in one of your site's pages and launch the desktop app. The main screen displays a lot of information. Two charts display pageviews and visits. Your top 20 pages are listed in order of popularity, as are search terms and incoming Google traffic.That's only the start. You can watch visitors come and go in real time (even chat with them via a pop up) or tag certain visitors to chart their history. There are some really nice reports built in. For each of the general categories -- Visitors, System, Pages, Referrers and Searches -- there are several sub-categories. For example, view popular pages, landing pages, exit pages, outgoing links and downloads via easy-to-read, real-time bar graphs. You can even create custom notifications should a given event occur. I love it.It works with the iPhone provided that you upload a certain collection of files to your server (there's no official app). As I said, it isn't quite ready for prime time, but they're definitely going in the right direction.
