Category: Software (Page 2 of 3)

A listing and description of all of the software that I run between OS X and iOS.

My Suite of Apps: SimCity BuildIt

January 23, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

Rarely do I talk about games on this blog, but considering I’ve been doing a few posts on the types of apps I have running on both my desktop and my laptop, it seemed fitting to share it.

To be honest, I don’t play many games. I have an obsessive personality and if I get into something too deep, then it can end up costing me far more than a few hours lost here or there (and that’s not a good thing when you’re trying to run a business, trying to raise to kids, and trying to generally be wise with the way that you’re spending your time).

Anyway, when I was young, I was completely enamored with SimCity 2000 (“reticulating splines“). Though I don’t know if I was really old enough to get all aspects of the game, I was pretty good about filling up a map with a city and then generating revenue.

Their tax dollars at work

But then I had to get out of it for a bit. The games continued to get more and more advanced and school, life, and so on became busier and busier.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, SimCity BuildIt was released.

My Suite of Apps: Living Earth

January 2, 2015 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the most interested aspects of working with people all over the world – aside from the fact that, y’know, they’re all over the world – is coordinating time zones with people for phone calls.

Sure, it’s easy to coordinate one-on-one calls with people when it’s only two timezones you’re working with, but when it comes to adding three or more people to a call, things get more interesting.

Case in point: I’ve been in a number of calls where I’m chatting with people in the UK and in Australia all at the same time. That’s a pretty big shift in time zones, right? We’re about as spread out as you can get when it comes to setting up timezones.

And yeah, it’s easy to go about coordinating timezones through the use of various web sites that are out there, but there’s one app that I’ve found that I really like not only for that reason, but also for what it offers as it relates to other various information about the planet (yes, planet).

Check out Living Earth.

My Suite of Apps: Boom2

December 26, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that those us who grew up on Winamp had the luxury using every time we launched the application was the equalizer.

This was quickly one of those things that was easy to take for granted because as soon as you launched another audio player, you’d either find something that was subpar or you’d find nothing at all.

These days, as much as I love working on a Mac, it’s still hard to believe that one of the largest pieces of audio software on the planet – iTunes – doesn’t ship with an equalizer.

I don’t know why this is – perhaps it’s because it’s built into “everything just works” ethos, but for those who care about squeezing every bit of sound quality out of their speakers knows, the sound works but it’s not as nice as it could be.

Enter Boom2.
Continue reading

My Suite of Apps: Dispatch

December 19, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things about using both OS X and iOS is that I try to make sure that every application that I use on both devices helps me to make sure I’m getting as much stuff done as possible.

That is to say that I want the work that I do on my phone to play nicely with the applications and the work that I do on my laptop and vice versa.

But one place in which I’ve had a hard time in getting things in a suitable state is with email. Regardless of what email strategies, clients, and all that other jazz that I’ve found, I’ve never really dug my workflow.

Until I found Dispatch.

My Suite of Apps: Gemini

December 12, 2014 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’ve mentioned in previous posts in this series that I’m pretty big on how I organize my photos. That is, I use a service for backing them up, and a utility to make sure that they are also stamped with the proper date and time as per the EXIF data.

But another challenge that comes with managing not only photos, but other files such as MP3s (be it music, podcasts, eBooks, documents, and so on) is making sure that you don’t have duplicate files lying around the file system.

To be clear, sometimes you may want the same copy of multiple files. For example, say you buy an album from Hammock and then you drop a couple of tracks from them on a playlist or a, gasp, mix CD, then you wouldn’t want to delete both copies of the files.

In any case, if you’re trying to keep your pictures, documents, MP3s, and other files in as lean as shape as possible, I recommend Gemini for identifying, locating, and removing duplicate files.