On this rainy day, The Dude thought that he’d share some of the (less geeky) software he finds useful for those of his readers who use OS X (and you know who you are). First off, there is NetNewsWire (the Lite version is free), a RSS news reader. What is a RSS newsnreader? Well, you can do things like this and make sure that you don’t miss any essential blog posts from your friends without having to visit each page in turn, the program does it all for you. Decide you want to read the page in your browser? Simply click on the headline. Is it not nifty? Continuing in the blogging vein, MarsEdit is a fun tool– especially if you have a toddler who likes to push the power button on your laptop. Basically, it’s an editor you can use to compose your blog entry before submitting it to your blog. The built in Blogger editor is nice, but you have to be online to use it, and if you “inadvertantly” lose power mid-edit, you lose your work. MarsEdit periodically saves your drafts for you while you’re typing away (and just saved this post in fact). Once your done, press the Send to Weblog button, and off it goes. It supports many other formats than Blogger, for those who dislike google. 🙂 For chatting, The Dude found Adium and hasn’t looked back. It supports AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more, enabling you to have all your various friends/coworkers/foes all available in a single application. Now a quartet of desktop friends (in increasing order of geekiness): WeatherPop, EarthDesk, iPulse, and GeekTool. These are a little more on the geeky side (but not as geeky as The Dude gets), but still useful. Click on the links to give you an idea of what each does. The last application that we’ll share for today is the geekiest of the day, and the hardest to describe: Quicksilver. In fact, The Dude isn’t even going to try, instead he’s going to point you to the wikipedia article. How do you use it? Well, lets say that you want to open Mail. If you have it in your Dock, you can certainly just click on it. What if you don’t have it in your Dock? Well, you’d have to either use Spotlight, or manually browse to the Applications folder, then open the app. What Quicksilver allows you to do is have a trigger key (say Ctl-Spacebar) then just start typing the name of the app. Quicksilver comes up, starts to go through the things in it’s catalog that start with “M”, then once it shows up, you hit enter, and it executes that action. So what does this mean for our example? In order to start Mail, I can simply type Ctl-Spacebar, M, enter, and Mail starts. Now, Mail is probably in most people’s Dock, but for those other apps, it’s a useful launcher method. That’s just the start of what it can do- if you haven’t been put to sleep already, the remainder will be left as an exercise for then reader (the toddler is acting up). 100 Quatloos to the first person to correctly identify the origin (title and artist) of the 80s song lyrics quoted on the title line without looking it up (ie. cheating).