Xtra wired Sept 11

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/09/2011 (5321 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Headlines app for Mac

This has to be one of my favourite apps for the Mac. Headlines is an application that allows you to import your RSS feeds from your favourite websites so you can view all the top stories in one window. A little confused? OK, so an RSS feed basically is a link to a news/content-oriented website. The link allows you to view all the stories without all the flashy pictures and designs of the website. RSS feeds are mostly used for applications, like Headlines for instance. So if I took my favourite websites — CNN, Huffington Post, Techno Buffalo — and pasted all their RSS feeds into Headlines, I could view all the news stories in the app itself. It’s really helpful for someone like me who needs to know what’s happening in the tech world all the time. Instead of going to all the different websites and looking for news, I just open the Headlines application and view all the stories. You can download it from the Mac App store for 99 cents. It’s great.

Twitter for the Mac

There are many different apps that support Twitter for the Macintosh. Applications such as Tweetie, TweetDeck, UberSocial and so on. They are all very good and I’ve have used all of those apps in the past. Tweetie is now called Twitter after Twitter bought it out earlier this year for a good sum of money. UberSocial is nice, but very confusing in my opinion. It’s very busy, lots of things are going on simultaneously in that application. Tweet Deck is very good, but it uses a lot of CPU power, which sucks if you’re running a lot of applications. Twitter for Mac, in my opinion, is the best option. It has a very sleek design, and it’s a very feature-rich application. This application is free and you can download it from the Mac App Store. While you are at it, you may as well follow me on Twitter @TheDavidBell.

VLC

With video being the main thing people are viewing these days, there are a wide variety of formats video comes in. For instance .mov, .avi, .mpeg, .mp4. The standard viewing player that Apple creates is called QuickTime. It’s a very useful program that works for most formats, but a there is a wide range of formats and QuickTime doesn’t support all of them. VLC is a free video viewing program that allows you to view all the video formats. It’s really useful to have. In fact, I watch all my videos and movies using VLC. It’s a definite download.

App Zapper

Apple advertises that with a Mac, you don’t have to uninstall applications or go through any tasks to delete an application. All you have to do is toss it in the trash and the application will be forever gone. Is it true? Yes and no. Dragging it in the trash deletes the application physically, but there is still some evidence of the application on your hard drive taking up extra space that could be free and available. The application called App Zapper has a cure for this. Simply drag the app you want to delete into the window, and press zap! Now the application is fully deleted. What makes this utilitarian application useful is that it frees up a couple extra megabytes of space on your hard drive and deletes all evidence of the application. This application is free and if you gave it a Google search, you would be able to find it and begin using it. Have fun Zapping!

Adium

Ever want to incorporate your Facebook chat, Yahoo messenger, Google Chat and MSN into one unified application? Well, Adium allows you to do so. Adium allows you to co-ordinate all your social-messaging services into one application. So, instead of checking Facebook to see who’s online and then opening MSN messenger and checking Google Chat separately, with Adium you can import them all into one place. Once you’ve imported and set everything up, all you have to do is open up Adium to view all your contacts. It’s awesome. Give Adium for Mac a Google search and you will be able to get it for free.