That Not So Fresh Feeling

I wanna buy a new Mac app.

Things I’m considering:

• Coda — The all-in-one web dev app is pretty cool, good looking, and I’ve used the demo to build a couple of pages. It’s nice. It’s also expensive. It’d be a no brainer at sub $50. I’m close to buying it when it’s discounted at $79. It’s hard to pull the trigger at $99.
• Twitterrific — Almost a no brainer at $15, but all it does is remove ads and that just seems kinda wasteful to me.
• Warcraft 3 — I just kind of want to play an old school RTS like Warcraft or Starcraft.

Sell me on an app or a game. Maybe I’ll buy it.

I’ve been meaning for a while to sort of document how I get stuff done at work. It was just over a year ago that I bought my MacBook Pro. Within a week or so, I started using it at work. Probably within the first month, I’d completely moved to my MacBook as my sole work machine. After a year, and particularly since the upgrade to Leopard, I’ve kind of worked out how I get stuff done.

Let’s start with my environment.

The front wall of my office with pictures taken by a former co-worker. And, of course, the famous “Dwight” flasher flyer from “The Office”

The shelf behind me containing random stuff I’ve gotten from eating kid’s meals and ice cream sundaes. And some Yankee Swap gifts. Oh, and I have some windows. That makes my life nicer.

My white board and busted ass bookshelf. And my cool VT light switch cover from Matt, and some random stuff I’ve collected and hung up.

The view of where I sit. I used to use that big ass monitor to do a dual-monitor display, but since I’ve been moving around so much each day, now it’s just there to keep people from having a good look at me.

Finally, the MacBook Pro, my Motorola Q, my 30GB 5G IPod, my noise canceling head phones, and my phone that I don’t ever answer or use. And yeah, that’s Win2k running in Parallels. More on that in a bit.

So that’s where I do my work.

My Mac is setup in a very particular way. The upgrade to Leopard with Spaces has made my life considerably easier. It’s probably easiest to roll through how my Spaces are setup.

Space 1
This is where I use my browser, which is currently Firefox 3 Beta 3, and sometimes Safari 3.

Also running on this space is my “chat” clients. We use Jabber at work, which works nicely with Adium. I’ve also got Twitterrific running on this space.

Space 2
Here’s where my Terminal lives, which is just the default Leopard terminal. Tabbed Terminals make me happy, particularly once I made the default tab switching hot keys to be Command+Left and Command+Right.

It’s all command line and vim and mysql. Good times.

Space 3
Space 3 is where iCal and Mail live. Mail is just downloading my mail from Gmail. iCal is doing some cool stuff. I have most of my life in Google Calendar. iCal subscribes to my calendar feeds from GCal (including my work Outlook calendar–more on that in a second).

With all of my stuff in iCal, I then use the Missing Sync for Windows Mobile to sync my calendars to the previously mentioned Motorola Q (which also connects to my work Exchange server, so it’s almost as a good as a Blackberry).

Space 4
It’s the Windows space! I’ve got Win2k (don’t ask, I had a license lying around) running in Parallels, in Full Screen mode. Parallels runs pretty much just so I can run Outlook (for work email and calendaring) and so I can occasionally test stuff in IE6.

My Outlook runs a plugin called SyncMyCal to sync my Outlook calendar off to Google Calendar (which then gets sync’d down to iCal, as previously described).

Other software that occasionally comes in handy:

• NeoOffice (though it’s slow and bulky and I’d switch if there was a viable alternative)
• iTunes (obvs)
• MarsEdit (for doing this sort of stuff)

That’s how I get my work done. Anything else I should be using?

So, after yesterday’s post about the move to shareware of Aurora (which, again, I don’t begrudge the dev that–it just doesn’t fit into my plans), I got an email from Jerry of Embraceware, the creators of another Mac alarm clock app called Awaken.

Jerry had a good deal for me: a free copy of Awaken.

That’s pretty amazing. I’m a small little blog, written by a web dork. My readership is pretty small. But Jerry is the smartest of marketers. What better way to get the word out about your product than to get it into someone’s hands who’ll try it, write about it, and probably evangelize for it (just based off the fact that it was such a great out of the blue offer).

So I installed Awaken last night, and I woke up to this morning to Bloc Party. It works as advertised, has a pretty nifty interface, and has one feature that Aurora doesn’t: it doesn’t require you to turn off your screen saver password or turn on auto-login. Both of those lower the security of your Mac (particularly if you’re using a laptop, like me), and it always bugged me about Aurora.

Now, with Awaken, even though my machine was locked, the alarm clock turned on and work me up, allowed me to snooze it or turn off the alarm, and then I could go about my daily business.

I like that. A lot.

It’s a pretty app too (especially in full screen mode when you wake up). Here’s a taste (from Embraceware’s flickr account):

Awaken rocks a good bit. I’m probably going to move to it as my alarm clock–it’ll be a whole lot less abrasive than my blaring alarm clock from 1988 (that my girlfriend despises). And then I’ll probably start using it as my sleep timer too, since it’d be pretty cool to toss a movie into iTunes and have it shut down my Mac when it’s done.

Jerry’s done pretty darn good marketing here. I would probably have not even considered Awaken before, but now I’m evangelizing it. I love the internet.

You can check out Jerry’s blog for more info on Awaken.

Aurora’s a pretty cool app for the Mac. I don’t use it very often, but when I’ve been traveling, it’s been nice to have a backup alarm. As I do every day, I ran my little Application Update widget and got really excited when I saw a new release! New cool, free software!

I like things that are free.

Unfortunately, Aurora’s become a shareware app. Well, it’s not really unfortunate. It’s a cool app. I’m sure there’s people for whom it’ll be worth the $15. It’s just not for me; I don’t use it enough. So now I’m left to wonder “Do I keep the old version and get taunted by the AppUpdate widget every time there’s a new release? Or do I remove the old version and learn to live without it?”

Really, that’s what’s currently going through my brain. I think I might actually remove the app. It’s no offense to Aurora, I just don’t want to have that pang every time the widget displays new stuff.