Lately, I’ve been meeting tons of great owners of small businesses with fantastic ideas, boundless enthusiasm and passion for their work. What struck me was how poorly equipped they were, technologically speaking. From working with computers that only booted when they felt like it, printers that had to be coaxed into cooperating and accounting still [...]
Three Reasons Why the Mac Community Makes Me Happy
As some of you know, in recent months, Andrew and I have been working on Alfred, our very own Mac productivity app. It’s been exciting, sometimes tough, but definitely enlightening. And finally, the fruit of our labour, the Powerpack, is nearly ready to be released. We’ve met and talked to tons of Mac users, developers [...]
The Unavoidable Apple iPad Review
In a “sun set to rise tomorrow morning” announcement, I can now confirm that, as a convert to the Church of Steve, I bought an iPad on the day of launch. While it may seem like a given to you, wise readers, I had somehow convinced myself in the two days before launch that I [...]
My new pal Alfred: Mac quicklaunch application
The past few days have been just a bit of a mad ride, following the launch of our Mac quicklaunch application, called Alfred, which garnered +2500 users in its first 48 hours. We created the Alfred App to fill our own need: A quicklaunch tool that can search your local computer as well as the [...]
Blog Topic Challenge: “Favourite tools for getting things done”
Jane Dallaway suggested that I write about apps that help me get things done. As a Mac user, I love to try out new applications written by smaller developers, so I thought I’d share the list of everything I use regularly, so go have a look at my profile on IUseThis. I’ll go in more [...]
Big discounts on Mac software
This is just a quick little heads-up for my fellow Mac users, Give Good Food to Your Mac is giving some big discounts, varying from 30% if you buy 3 apps to 70% if you buy ten. None of the apps were particularly interesting to me, since I’m already pretty well equipped, but you’ll find [...]
Top 10 useful apps for Mac newbies
A week ago, Leopard, the latest version of OS X, the Apple Mac operating system, was released. I already thought that the rate at which my friends and acquaintances were deserting Windows for Mac was high back when Vista came out, warts and all. I knew nothing. It’s less of a trickle nowadays, and more [...]
Cracked MacBook problem solved
I’m an Apple addict, there’s no denying it. Twenty years of using Macs and still going strong. And usually, I couldn’t be happier with what I buy and have rarely had any problems. But on Tuesday, when you looked at me, all you could see was a sad Mac face, because my white MacBook was [...]
To be a Mac user or not to be. That is the question.
Both Andrew and I are used to having friends, acquaintances and outright strangers asking us for advice on buying their next computer. However, in recent months, I’ve been amazed at the sheer volume of people who have been asking whether they should switch to Mac. In many cases, the answer is an easy one: “Most [...]
The voodoo summary
The “Summary” feature of OS X really is like a work of voodoo. To use it, highlight some text in your favourite Cocoa app, like Mail, Safari or Camino, then go into the application’s Services menu and choose a level of summarisation (between 1 and 100% of original text length). In a few cases, the [...]
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8 Big Productivity Tools for Small Businesses
Lately, I’ve been meeting tons of great owners of small businesses with fantastic ideas, boundless enthusiasm and passion for their work. What struck me...
“Look Ma, no slides!”: The Art of Speaking Without Slides
Last night, I gave a talk at Cambridge Mobile Apps Group (yeah, it’s a mouthful, I know!) about marketing your own app with no budget. When I arrived at...
Amazon EC2 4-day downtime debacle: Keeping your users in the dark is naughty
A few days ago, Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2 to you and I) had a catastrophic failure. The world kept turning, but unfortunately, the...
