NetNewsWire 2.0 has been released as a beta. It’s way cool—a lot of the rough edges have been smoothed over, it’s much, much faster, and it, once again, sets the gold standard for RSS aggregators. One example of the kind of fit and finish that it comes with is when you click on the Subscribe button, it’ll check to see if there’s a valid URL in the clipboard and automagically paste it into the right field if it finds one. Now that’s cool.
It’s clear that Brent Simmons, the author of NNW, has spent a lot of time listening to his users; one of the really neat things about the 2.0 beta is that it’s flexible enough to adapt to many different ways of reading RSS feeds.
Brent also released MarsEdit, a stand-alone blog editor based on Mail.app’s user interface. It is, unfortunately, not nearly as polished as NNW, but given that it’s a brand new, 1.0 application, I’m willing to give it a break. Even without that needed polish, it’s the first stand-alone blog editor I’ve used that I feel comfortable with (I was never able to get Ecto to work properly with my site, unfortunately). I’m actually using it right now to write this post.
Two other Mac geek toys of note:
- iEatBrainz, an iTunes companion program that will take your poorly/mis-labled MP3 files, compare them against an acoustical database, and then properly re-label them. It’s really cool.
- Paparazzi—not to be confused with the awful movie of the same name, this little app does one thing only and does it well. It takes screenshots of webpages in their entirety. It’s quite the cute toy…
Get off the internet and back to your studies you 1L slave!
iPods appear to be a nearly necessary accessory for law school, so you can study and block out people’s noise, especially those trying to talk to you. And now I can do the same.