For the longest time, I used Google Reader, which I accessed through a pane on my iGoogle page. This application has completely changed the way I follow RSS feeds.
#Problems with iscrobbler and itunes badauth windows#
The viewer is also slightly transparent and can be set to float over all your other windows so that you will always be aware of what's new. The message viewer is easily accessible from a button in the menubar. It accesses Growl to provide additional visual feedback that there are new tweets. You can also submit tweets from within the application. Every so often (user specified amount of time), it checks to see if there are any new tweets from the people you are following. Twitterific makes following people on Twitter so easy. That gives you instant information that you have new mail, that files have finished downloading, that you've finished uploading images to flickr from iPhoto, you've changed songs in iTunes, and so on.
I currently have it set so that these boxes automatically fade after ~20 seconds, but there is also the option where the boxes can stay on your screen if your computer has been idle for more than a minute. When I get new emails, a box will pop up with the author and subject line. It provides visual feedback of something happening on your computer. MarsEdit also uses the flickr API to allow you to see the photos in your flickr account and easily add them to posts (such as all the thumbnails in this post). I tried using a similar program, Ecto, I believe it is called, but it just wasn't very intuitive like MarsEdit is. I can also set the stylesheet url of this website to get an accurate preview and work out formatting issues before I publish the post. This makes it easy to make text bold, add a link, or embed videos or mp3s. It also has the option of setting my own quicktags. There is also a bookmarklet so I can highlight the text on some website and have it formatted in a new post for me to comment about. Very few keystrokes are needed to get a new post started. Granted, there aren't very many times that I am using my computer and do not have internet access, but MarsEdit is really easy to use. It also requires that you be connected to the internet. The web interface of the WordPress system running this site is not very convenient for writing posts. The number of posts to this site has gone up quite a bit since I've started using MarsEdit. If you have a blog, this application makes life so much easier. Synergy also allows for an information box to be on screen for a user-specified amount of time (like forever in my case), allowing me to instantly see what song on what album by whom is playing. Synergy also has last.fm scrobbling capabilities, but it has not seemed to be very reliable for iPod scrobbling. The cmd-F1 keystroke has been used a good number of times recently as I've been listening to the SXSW 2008 songs. I have also set cmd-F5 to "5 stars" and cmd-F1 to "1 star." The star keystrokes let me instantly mark a song as a favorite or that it should be added to the playlist of songs to delete. I have set F11 to "play", F12 to "next", and F11 to "previous". While it resides in the menubar, you can access controls with user-defined keystrokes. It is an application that I cannot do without. I have used this app since 2002 and is one of the first I add when I get a new computer. iScrobbler gave a more accurate impression of audio that passed through my speakers, but ScrobblePod data reflects the songs worth listening to completion. Although this is technically more accurate to songs that have been listened to, I liked how iScrobbler would submit a track after ~30 seconds. The only problem with ScrobblePod is that you have to listen to the entire song before it gets submitted. Ben Gummer's recent development efforts for ScrobblePod have enabled me to drop iScrobbler complete and solely rely on ScrobblePod.
For a while, I used both ScrobblePod and the more popular iScrobbler to get both iPod and iTunes tracks to be submitted. This application will submit media consumed with iTunes or your iPod to last.fm. I realize that only 25% of the visitors to this site use computers from Apple, but maybe these will help convince you to switch (not likely)! There are some freeware/shareware applications that I use on my computer that have made things very convenient.
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