Heavily Mac-Centric this time ’round, of course. To be honest, having a Mac has been in itself a huge productivity boost. But also a huge time-wasting tool. Conclusion: Leopard is an unbelievably beautiful OS. I love it!
1. Perennial favorite: Basecamp – I loved it enough to shell out $12 for a month of service this time, which gave us 50GB of filespace to use. My other group members didn’t find it that useful, I don’t think, but I was really grateful that all my files were in a single location – it meant I didn’t have to constantly search through my gmail (where ambiguous and obsolete subject headers don’t help anything) for files and worry about which version they were.
2. Mori – after moving to my Macbook i needed a notetaking program that was the equivalent of Keynote. I consulted Ask Metafilter, and there were many great responses. But a lot of the programs were serious overkill for what I wanted – like Yojimbo and DevonThink, which let you attach PDFs and everything. Mori was the closest to Keynote (the Windows program), so I’ve been using that to take notes in class, and it’s been o-kay. Next quarter I’m gonna try out the new Evernote beta.
2a. Noted is also a great program – small, simple, and auto-save-y. I’m using that for regular, post-it type notes. Just wish there were a non-rich-text option.
3. I tried Smultron for text-editing, but it proved to be pretty unstable, so I’m using TextWrangler for now. I miss Notepad++ though. Also, I’d like a replacement for regular Windows Notepad – something that loads in one second, and is plain text. I don’t always need drawers and syntax highlighting! And I hate Rich Text Format. I just do.
4. RTM has sort of left my sphere of awareness, which is disappointing considering how promising it seemed last quarter. But nowadays I use gcal to send me reminders (via email and SMS), and really, nothing beats my trusty hipster PDA for immediate, daily to-do lists. Using Post-Its instead of whole index cards has been a good idea, I think. Sadly, this means Twitter’s been relegated strictly to entertainment uses. Well, that’s not sad.
Except for the part where I just admitted that I find Twitter entertaining.
5. I shelled out $150 dollars for MS Word ‘04 for the Mac (I got 3 licenses, and figured my sister and I owed Microsoft at least that much anyway, for all the software we’ve obtained through … more unsavory means). Then I tried the 1-month trial of iWork. And yeah. Keynote kicks Powerpoint’s sad little behind. I’m almost willing to shell out $40 for iWork, just for Keynote. Because Powerpoint sucks that much. What is with the no-thumbnails-in-editing-mode, eh???
5a. For collaborative work (which was definitely a theme this quarter, as all 3 of my classes involved group projects) – Google Docs really shines. The simultaneous-editing capability is great, and of course the revisioning history is nice. I really like the idea of Google Spreadsheet Form building. My only quibble is, why don’t they integrate chat in the word-processor? They do it for Spreadsheets!
6. I’m almost done with my 2-year M.A. program, and my classmates are only now slowly absorbing the wonderfulness that is Gmail and its companion, gChat. That’s saved us a little bit of time (mostly through, er, not having to meet for our group projects). Now I wish they’d climb the AIM bandwagon, because then the ones with Macs can use iChatAV, whose AV, remote desktop, and screen-sharing features are seriously awesome. I know I can put it to more productive uses than talking to Boba Boy’s cat! 
6a. Skype might have been a runner-up, but during my Info Arch class we tried to have a guest lecture present via Skype (he was in Denmark), and we had about 30 mintues of technical problems, and in the end we could only establish video connection both ways – we got his audio as well, but he didn’t get to hear anything from our end. It was a minor CF, really, and did not warm us to Skype.
7. I’ve been using Mozy to backup all my school files, which I figure are the most important. Not being accustomed to having such a capacious hard drive, I’ve sort of gotten out of the habit of scrutinizing the files I download – no more being picky about what mp3s to get, and no more worrying that downloading a video file will force me to delete other files from my hard drive! The downside, of course, is that I’ve stopped worrying about backing up mp3s altogether, which means that 160GB external drive I also have has been very sadly neglected. To which, I say: tough!
8. Not a productivity app per se, but Paparazzi, the website screen-capture program, has been an invaluable tool as I study sites, build PowerPoints, and do freelance webwork. So, props!
To try: Jing. JDarkroom. Evernote! Visio.
Want: Mac equivalent of MS Paint. Sometimes, even Seashore is too much, to say nothing of Photoshop.
