A couple of days ago Microsoft released a beta of its next operating system, Windows 7, to the masses. Being the computer geek that I am I wanted to try it out so I downloaded the ISO. Below you will find some screenshots I took during the installation process and of some of the applications. Click on the thumbnail for the full resolution.

By the way, Microsoft: Don’t be stupid and make Internet Explorer + Active-X mandatory to download the ISO, also it wouldn’t hurt with a torrent.

I burned the ISO onto a DVD, and booted it up in a virtual machine. I am using VMWare Fusion running on an iMac Intel Core Duo 1.83 GHz with 1.5 GB of memory, half of that memory dedicated to the virtual memory (yeah, I think I need to upgrade my memory a bit).
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Yesterday, on January 6th, Cultured Code released version 1 of their task management application Things. I have been using the beta version for quite some time and it has become my favorite to-do manager that helps me get things done.

The availability of GTD applications for Mac was pretty small just a couple of years ago, but lately a lot of applications has become available. The most notable ones are iGTD, Actiontastic, OmniFocus, Midnight Inbox and of course Things.  I have evaluated all of them, but Things is the one that I keep coming back to.

When making a software application, especially one like this, it is difficult to get the correct balance of either too few features versus feature bloat. Things, in my opinion, got the perfect balance.
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Picasa, the Google developed software for organization and basic editing of photos, has been made available for Mac users! iPhoto, the application included on all new Macs and in the iLife software package, is quite good already; but some competition doesn’t hurt anyone. iPhoto is great, but a bit slow when you start to get a huge library of photos. Perhaps Picasa brings an improvement on this front?

One bad thing, however: It seems to be Intel only; so I am not able to use it on my trusty iBook G4. Another reason to get myself a MacBook Air.;-)

You can download Picasa for Mac from http://picasa.google.com/mac/

Wordpress 2.7 has finally been made available for download for stand-alone installation. The developers have worked a lot with the admin interface in this version; and the result is, in my opinion, really nice! I’ve always liked the Wordpress platform in itself; but the admin panel has been so-so. I strongly encourage you to check it out. You can do so by creating a free account at wordpress.com or by downloading it, also free, from wordpress.org/download if you’d like to install it on your own machine/server or at your hosting provider (Wordpress requires PHP and a MySQL server to work).

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XMind, the Mind Mapping software based on the Eclipse RC platform has gone Open Source! XMind is definitely one of my favorite pieces of software; though the price has been a bit prohibitive for many people. Now that it is open source, with an optional “Pro” version with some added collaboration features, it should probably get a bigger foothold in the mind mapping echosystem.

If you need a software app that help you structure your thoughts XMind I suggest you try XMind. It is available for download at the XMind website for all major operating systems; Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

I just finished updating the Wordpress installation powering this website to version 2.6.3. Sorry for the downtime. As you also might have noticed I have voice enabled the website using Odiogo; look for the “listen now” button in the articles. If you have a blog and would like to create a podcast out of your content Odiogo will take your RSS feed and convert it to audio using text-to-speech technology. The service is available to bloggers for free! You will however get a small Odiogo ad at the start. Odiogo also provides services to mainstream media.

I regularily need to access SSH to the university or any of my other machines so a SSH client on my iTouch was installed some weeks ago.:-) I didn’t really have use for it untill today though. I installed iSSH and set up a connection. Works great! I love how it puts the keyboard dimmed in the background, still able to type. If you got an iPhone or iTouch and need a SSH client I strongly suggest you to get this one.:-)

Apple just updated the firmware of iPhone and iTouch to 2.1. I have noticed big improvements on stability and a more “fluid” interface; not to forget a huge difference in the time it takes to backup the device in iTunes.. Today I found a cool little new feature that just goes to show how much attention Apple pays to details. The podcast window in iPhone/iTunes now shows a small icon next to half watched podcasts. Very practical for me as an avid podcast watcher.:-)

Testing out the Wordpress iPhone/iTouch app. Working great!