Fear of Fish

In case any of you British people are unaware, there was an announcement at a private Apple event in the Regent Street Apple Store today, letting us all know that the iPhone will be available on the O2 network on the 9th November for £269, on varying tariffs, all with unlimited data (YAY!). The disappointing fact is that it's on EDGE, not 3G. Which is a shame because the 3G network throughout Europe is much nippier.

I for one will be getting one pretty much immediately...now how do I get out of my 18 month Orange contract without it costing me a fortune? ...more to come on this

Check out the O2 site: O2 iPhone mini site

"A true geeks potential can only be realised through the power of the pretty desktop."

Jamie van Dyke, 16th May, 2007

This is how a typical day starts off before the storm, we have Mail, iTerm, Colloquy, and iTunes windows...however, some of you are probably wondering where the windows are, and if you've seen them, why are they so small!

So here's a listing of the applications which I find most important that I have running now:

• Windowshade

  Responsible for icon-izing the windows at the top left of Desktop 2 (Mail, iTunes, iTerm). Note: these are just miniaturised windows, they still show the correct content, so if you're a mail hog, or waiting for something to happen in a window, it's rude to stare!

• Uno

  This makes all the toolbars and windows throughout Mac OS X have a unified look, and doesn't show up anywhere on my screenshots because it gets run once and then goes away.

• Stattoo

  At the bottom of Desktop 2 I have Stattoo, which very kindly gives me an overview of my mail, todos, etc.

• iPulse

  At the bottom right of Desktop 2 I have iPulse, which is an extremely handy application for monitoring all my system stats. I know when I have a busy or runaway process (and not just from my busy MacBook fan) by the colour of certain sections on iPulse.

• Desktop Pictures

  These desktop images are great. They're surreal, colourful, artistic and most of all peaceful. I highly suggest yo grab a print or two from his works.

• CoverSutra

  If you listen to quite a bit of music like me, then CoverSutra is the candy to top off the tunes. The album (Hard-Fi) showing at the top left of Desktop 1 is placed there by CoverSutra, and my Last.fm scrobblings are handled automatically too.

So, that's the quick run through, there's plenty more productivity tools I have running that you can't see, I'll have to sit down and do a full run through some time.

How do you eat yours?

I'm happy when I start work, and I'm happy when I stop (a rare occasion), and my happy gleeful day is all down to the set of utilities that I use day to day. 90% of my work is web development in Ruby on Rails and if your day is spent developing on an Apple, then take heed my advice as it's fine tuned and endorsed by happy joy joy feelings.

Note: If you're not on an Apple machine I seriously recommend you switch, like I did. I spent 10+ years developing desktop and web applications on windows and I had no idea that 'the other side' was so much more pleasant. But that's another article.

I said 10, but in fact I put up 12. So sue me. :-)

Apple and Nike have a set of products coming out that integrate seamlessly to give you the ideal running companion. The iPod Nano mixed with the Nike+iPod Sport Kit tracks your running progress, it does this as well as being able to give you audio feedback as your run and it overlays this on top of your music. Well, the clever marketing video they have gives that impression, it doesn't specifically say that's what it does but I hope so. I thought it was worth mentioning here because although I'm not a runner, I've been pulled in by the marketing campaign so well that i think I'm going to pre-order myself a pair and become one.

Fear of Fish is a new company, and I have the luxury of not being locked into an accounting package therefore I have freedom of choice. However, I'm also an Apple user, and this in fact makes my choices slim.

I tried many packages from the accredited Quickbooks, to MYOB. All of which felt like applications that had been ported from Windows and with a serious lack of thought at that. Maybe it's because we expect a certain aesthetic quality that Windows users tend not to see, or the more likely reason, which is that we are such a minority set of users that spending resources to meet our expectations just isn't worth it.