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Chronos announces SOHO Organizer 6
The busy bees at Chronos have indeed been... busy. Not to be content with the recent release of SOHO Notes 6, the company has gone ahead and dropped SOHO Organizer 6, their "powerful contact, calendar and note manager" that could be compared to an Entourage on steroids (that doesn't suck), sans the email component, but including SOHO Notes. Adding to a list of roughly a zillion already existing features, SOHO Organizer 6 brings calendar publishing to the web, connecting to CalDAV servers for collaborative editing, calendar import/exporting and - naturally - subscribing to published calendars. As SOHO Organizer 6 brings some features that are really focused on the business user, its $99 price will likely also appeal to the more power and business users in the crowd.For those who are upgrading or need more than one license, a $49.99 price is offered to users of SOHO Organizer 5.x, and family packs are available.
SOHO Notes updated to version 6
SOHO Notes, the information manager/junk drawer application from Chronos, has hit version 6 and adds some nice new features. Perhaps in response to Yojimbo, there is new keyword and smart folder functionality. There's also new support for scanning directly into SOHO Notes a la Yep, as well as new custom forms for data entry and 256-bit encryption.I used SOHO Notes' predecessor, StickyBrain, before switching over to Yojimbo. While I prefer the latter for its use of Core Data instead of OpenBase, I do think Chronos does a very good job of seeing what sort of features its competitors are offering and integrating them into SOHO Notes, making it one of the most full-featured of the note-taking applications on the Mac.SOHO Notes 6.0 is $39.99 ($25 for upgrades from previous versions, including StickyBrain) and a demo is available.[via MacMinute]
TUAW Podcast #24: Journler
[Update 2: The direct download link is working fine now, and I pinged the iTunes Store to check our podcast feed again, so it'll take a little time for them The iTunes Store feed has updated so we're good to go. I hope you enjoy the podcast - and of course Journler if you give it a whirl - and please leave feedback as I hope to make a lot more of these in the future (with podcast releases going far more smoothly, of course). Thanks again for your patience.]This week's podcast is a screencast of an app that I finally 'get' and have subsequently gone nutty for: Philip Dow's Journler. It's an app very much like Yojimbo, Mori and SOHO Notes in that it's a journal/digital junk drawer for your work and life. For roughly fifteen minutes I cover some of the coolest features in Journler that both grabbed my personal attention and caused me to chose Mr. Dow's excellent app as my new blogging tool of choice for penning most of my TUAW and Download Squad posts.As usual you can pick up a copy of our latest podcast (weighing in at 36MB and 13 minutes on the dot) from our iTunes Store Podcast directory, this direct link or our own podcast rss feed. I'm also please to announce that I finally did some research into why my previous video screencasts weren't iPod-friendly and have fixed the issue. Even though this particular screencast might look a little tiny on a 5G iPod (I captured the entirety of my 1440 x 900 MacBook Pro display, then re-sized to 640 x 398 for this one), you should nevertheless be able to take it with you on that commute you're packing up for. Enjoy![Update: We are indeed having trouble serving the podcast at the moment. Hang in there, we'll get this fixed as soon as possible and I'll update this post once we stamp out the issue. Sorry for the trouble.]
Get organized: a survey of digital junk drawer apps
A while ago I decided to bring some sanity to the way I do things and organize all my stuff. I'm working on a design thesis in my multimedia undergrad degree, I'm constantly doing research for my blogging work, and I have countless other projects and ideas that were growing in both size and disorganization in my Home folder. When I decided to finally start getting organized, I realized I might not be the only person in this position, and I figured I would turn my research and testing experiences into a post; a sort of survey of what some call 'digital junk drawer' applications.What follows is a pro and con summary of four of the most popular junk drawer apps I looked at, but read this post with a few of my criteria in mind: I like keyboard shortcuts. I like them a lot. Being able to highlight a chunk of text in a browser or a PDF I'm reading and hitting a couple of keys to send it to a junk drawer app is far more efficient and less workflow-intrusive than having to use a mouse to drag and drop it to some far corner of my display. I decided not to touch apps that employ entirely different paradigms such as the wiki-like VoodooPad; I'm not denying the usefulness of these other ways of working, but adding that entirely new level to this survey would've meant putting this post on the back-burner for longer than I would like. I'm using a MacBook Pro 2.0 Ghz with 1.5 GB RAM, and while I synced my notes library across these apps to gauge performance 'n all that jazz, my library is a mere 500 notes (URLs, PDFs, etc.) strong, so your mileage may vary. With that said, check out my survey of some Mac OS X apps that could help you bring order to your digital chaos, and feel free to post your thoughts or mention apps that should've made this list, and why.
