Steve Jobs and company have spent a lot of time in making Mac OS X the easiest and most feature rich operating system available. Most people might not even realise it, but it is those little touches and small features that make using a Mac that much more enjoyable. For example, have you ever used the expose feature? Isn’t it a simple idea? I agree most operating systems have a “Show Desktop” kind of feature but when you combine that with the multi touch keypad, you really do get Magic. Swipe four fingers on the keypad and you’re there. No click required !
Expose is just one example. One of my favorite features, though, is the Smart Folders features that is integrated into the Finder. Infact, the way Apple has integrated and designed Smart Folders is so brilliant that it’s almost too easy to miss it.
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There was a time when I wouldn’t even think of moving all the RSS feeds that I read to the cloud and I swore by desktop-based applications like FeedDemon. This was before I discovered Google Reader. Nowadays, I use Google Reader to keep up with all my RSS feeds and while I’m not entirely in love with it, I know my online life won’t be complete without it.
A URL shortener is a service that takes in a long URL and gives you a short and memorable URL that you can distribute to anyone you want. The service takes care of redirecting users who land up at the shortened URL to the original URL.
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had an almost vice like grip on the browser market till a few years back and then Firefox came along and a lot of us geeky types moved to it, not only for the superior browsing experience, but also for the huge number of really awesome extensions available for the browser that turned it from a plain and simple web browser to a complete platform.
Gmail is inarguably the best web based email service in the world. We, at Make Tech Easier, use Gmail for all our email communication needs and have never felt the need to rethink on the decision.
Facebook, at their recent F8 conference, announced several new initiatives that puts them right in the thick of the social media campaign. Chief among those initiatives is what Facebook is calling the Open Graph. What this means for you as a user is that if you go to a website that partners with and implements facebook’s Open Graph protocol and has Facebook like buttons, and you click one of those buttons, the website can share your likes (and your behaviour on the site) with Facebook.
If you’re one of those people who like to listen to music all day but would much rather listen to your own music selection rather than depending on some random radio-jockeys choice of music, you’ve come to the right place.
A couple of weeks back Damien posted an excellent tutorial on 
The GIMP has been a poster child for the open source movement ever since it came out. It has been compared to Photoshop and has often been spoken of as the only worthy open source contender in the graphics editor category.
Flame wars over one’s choice of editor are a regular occurrence on almost all the tech mailing lists that I subscribe to. In fact, in my opinion, the amount of time and energy that is spent on debating this topic can be easily spent on researching the feature set of a perfect editor that would fit everyone’s needs.