My plug for XJournal, and 3rd party clients in general
As a function of my boredom and the fact that I don't want to start my homework (I will after this, I promise!), I've decided to put in a little plug for XJournal and Adium. For those of you who use a Mac, maybe you'll find some use in one or both of the two... for those of you stuck on a PC, there are similar things out there, but I have yet to find true equivalents for either of these two wonderful (and free) software gems.
Xjournal is a LiveJournal client for Mac OS X which provides a much nicer, cleaner, and more intuitive interface to LiveJournal. It's by no means perfect, but it's certainly so much easier to use than Safari or an equivalent would be. It makes managing friends, history, and posting simple, straightforward, and clean... and it allows you to save your entries and pick them up later, it lets you use any font you'd like when composing (yeah Optima 12), it makes links and bold/italic simple, and it's got a native, Cocoa UI, which is always a good thing (built in spell-checking is one of the nicer side-effects). Anyways, if you use a Mac and you use LiveJournal, check out Xjournal, it makes blogging that much easier, which is always a good thing =).
Adium is an AIM/MSN/Yahoo/etc. client for OS X that makes IM in general so much simpler. It's open-source and therefore has no ads or other baloney, it's very customizable, and it's clean, intuitive, and a pleasure to use. The ability to connect to multiple accounts at once is always fun (although pretty typical of unofficial IM clients), as is tabbed chatting (chats open in tabs instead of in their own individual window, meaning you have one window for all of your conversations, instead of one window per conversation)... the HTML message view has allowed for some very nice looking themes, and the nice look and feel of the app means it just makes sense and does what you think it should do. It doesn't make sense to me that AOL, who pays someone to maintain their AIM client for OS X, doesn't provide a client that's even near the level of Adium, which is maintained by a few dedicated people who are seriously brilliant and aren't paid to maintain it. There is the middle ground in the form of iChat, but even that just gets too bloated and annoying after a while compared to Adium, which has a tiny memory footprint, sleek and streamlined windows and buddy list, and a host of other nice features. So, for those of you Mac fans out there who haven't ever heard of it or have yet to really give it any thought, check out Adium, it's worth the effort. (For you Windows users who are intrigued, check out Gaim, which is the open-source *nix client that contains the library Adium is based off of... Eliot can attest to how nice it is compared to the nightmare that is the regular AIM client).
That's my plug for some good Mac software for today... I'm sure there will be similar plugs in the future, so stay tuned...
Xjournal is a LiveJournal client for Mac OS X which provides a much nicer, cleaner, and more intuitive interface to LiveJournal. It's by no means perfect, but it's certainly so much easier to use than Safari or an equivalent would be. It makes managing friends, history, and posting simple, straightforward, and clean... and it allows you to save your entries and pick them up later, it lets you use any font you'd like when composing (yeah Optima 12), it makes links and bold/italic simple, and it's got a native, Cocoa UI, which is always a good thing (built in spell-checking is one of the nicer side-effects). Anyways, if you use a Mac and you use LiveJournal, check out Xjournal, it makes blogging that much easier, which is always a good thing =).
Adium is an AIM/MSN/Yahoo/etc. client for OS X that makes IM in general so much simpler. It's open-source and therefore has no ads or other baloney, it's very customizable, and it's clean, intuitive, and a pleasure to use. The ability to connect to multiple accounts at once is always fun (although pretty typical of unofficial IM clients), as is tabbed chatting (chats open in tabs instead of in their own individual window, meaning you have one window for all of your conversations, instead of one window per conversation)... the HTML message view has allowed for some very nice looking themes, and the nice look and feel of the app means it just makes sense and does what you think it should do. It doesn't make sense to me that AOL, who pays someone to maintain their AIM client for OS X, doesn't provide a client that's even near the level of Adium, which is maintained by a few dedicated people who are seriously brilliant and aren't paid to maintain it. There is the middle ground in the form of iChat, but even that just gets too bloated and annoying after a while compared to Adium, which has a tiny memory footprint, sleek and streamlined windows and buddy list, and a host of other nice features. So, for those of you Mac fans out there who haven't ever heard of it or have yet to really give it any thought, check out Adium, it's worth the effort. (For you Windows users who are intrigued, check out Gaim, which is the open-source *nix client that contains the library Adium is based off of... Eliot can attest to how nice it is compared to the nightmare that is the regular AIM client).
That's my plug for some good Mac software for today... I'm sure there will be similar plugs in the future, so stay tuned...