myBlogEdit

Not that I’ve been updating my blogs too often these days (I do have genuine enough reasons for that) but still, ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard, my preferred blog editor, ecto, has stopped working, it opens and within a few seconds it crashes. I tried clean reinstalling but to no avail. When I have posted a few entries recently, those have been using ScribeFire add-on on firefox, which, by the way is excellent. However, I prefer using non-browser blogging clients, those that blend well with the OS and provide easy way to resize and upload images. I saw this half-price offer on myBlogEdit on macZOT! so I thought I should give it a try before I decide to splash out 10 bucks on it, which already looks a good deal as I play around with this blogging client! And to complete the text, here is a picture I took a couple of weeks ago…

Castle Howard just outside York on a dull day!

Blogging from ipod touch

This is going to be a very short entry. For I’m typing this up on my iPod touch tapping my fingers on the touch screen. Although the screen is very responsive and the predictive input seem to improve as I type along, it’s still a pain to tap fingers for long. Anyway, I found this cool wordpress app for free so thought I should give it a try, and I’m impressed at how easy it was to set up and start blogging. Now I’ll see if I can connect my Bluetooth keyboard with this thing and type fast! But this is cool in itself !!!

yesterday

york dusk

This was the scene from my front door (seen through the small glass panel on the top of the closed door!) yesterday. And this post is a test post really to check a plugin – LR2/Blog – that allows me to export photo from Lightroom straight onto my wordpress blog!

Looks like it works too, but it was a bit slow uploading the picture and loading this edit page, and oh you cannot choose the category directly from the Lightroom either. So I guess this plugin is best suited at the moment for just uploading the picture and you can use it later to add on to your post [this is added here from the 'Edit Post' page within the WordPress admin].

Papers, Dropbox and Blogo

I just though I should write a short post about few of my recent favourite software on mac (macwares). It is not a “review” of any sort, just my “views”. I tend to try pretty much all the ‘shareware’ that I think might be useful, and many of the good ones get filtered through to my ‘to buy’ list that way, especially the ones that I tend to keep running from the day I download them. One of them happens to be Papers.

I used this organiser for academic papers (in electronic format – mainly pdfs) a while back and used it till its trial period ran out. I then was away in Africa and didn’t really have time to organise my collection of academic articles. Now that I’m back writing up my own thesis, I really needed something to organise my collection, which is pretty much all over my computer, and that too quick and in an systematic fashion. I turned back to Papers. Not only does it allow me to organise my pdfs the way I want them, but it also allows me to search for the metadata on the web (I use Google Scholar mainly because I don’t need any special login and find most of the information I need – to use other sources such as Web of Science, you need to set up authentication somehow!) and match them to the papers, all automatically. Now that is really cool. Further, I also got educational discount on my license for Papers so didn’t have to pay the full price (after using it every day for the past week, I think I wouldn’t mind paying the full price). I think going through my pdfs every day and searching for the metadata on the web and matching them with the paper so that they could be organised systematically (by Year, Author and so on), I’m now almost a third through my papers collection. Of course there will be some without metadata on the web, especially the documents that are not publicly available or those that Google Scholar doesn’t have in its database. I think I just need to spend a couple of hours at my office so that I can use Web of Science faster and without having to set up manual authentication to match the rest of the document with their metadata. For anyone with a huge collection of academic papers, books or any other documents and using a mac, I highly recommend this software. Worth every penny!

Blogo

I have been using ecto on my Mac as the main blogging client for a while now. However, recently when my Mac was at repairs, I tried the latest version of Windows Live Writer on a Vista laptop, and it really blew me away. I think WLW is the best piece of Microsoft software I’ve used by a mile. Now I have got my mac back and ecto feels so unfriendly to use suddenly – very unintuitive, very bland, very un-cool. So I started searching for what’s out there and found Blogo. It has got fairly decent reviews, but the problem is it not a freeware, even WLW is FREE! Anyway, I’m giving it a try for now – using its 21-day trial version to compose this post. Lets see how I find it. So far I’m impressed with its simplicity, ease of use, and most importantly, its really cool “fullscreen” mode. It makes you feel like a “writer”, proper writer

And the picture above – a panorama of the Cape Coast in Ghana – is just for the sake of it, to try out features in Blogo