Category Archives: technology

Looks like 37 Signals had a busy weekend because they silently rolled out Writeboard on Sunday night. What is Writeboard? Well, it is the next great thing from 37 Signals. This time it is all about collaborative writing. If you have a need for yourself or others to write basic text documents that can be edited by anyone you choose and you can see all of the revisions of the said document then this is the tool for you.

Simply type in the name of the document you wish to create, a password and your e-mail address and you are presented with a blank text slate ready for you to write. Heck, dare I say encouraging you to write. Once you have typed what you wish, save that version. Any further edits are listed on the side with the time they were made and a dot indicating the amount of the edit based on it’s size.

You can also invite others via e-mail to give them access to the document so that they can view and make changes as well. All of this is kept track of in the sidebar. You can see who made the change, when it was changed and get an idea of how big the change was. Perhaps the coolest feature is the ability to compare two versions of the document, thus allowing the user to easily see ever edit that was made. All of this is of course done with the 37 Signals “less is more” sense of style and usability.

Well worth a look not only for those with a need to write collaboratively or even for a solitary writer who would like to have a central place for a document (or documents as you can create multiple Writeboards) and could use the versioning features. Yet another outstanding webapp from 37 Signals.

P.S. In case you were wondering, this post was drafted using Writeboard

Update: Here is a very detailed review of Writeboard at Solution Watch. Go check it out if mine did not fill in enough of the blanks.

OK, so Om Malik threw down a challenge on his blog to the rest of us to let the world know our top ten favorite Macintosh apps. The rules were we had were to focus on the great small shareware and freeware applications that are out there. Therefore, without further ado, here are mine in no particular order:

Newsfire – My favorite news reader. Fantastic interface and it saves me hours a day.

OmniOutliner – The best outlining program I have ever used. I am obsessed with outliners and have paid for several over the years so that is saying a lot. I use it for everything from brainstorming, project management, to do lists and even organizing my bills and expenses (yes it really is that powerful and flexible).

MacJournal – Developed by my friends at Mariner Software. I use this for all of my journal entries mainly as it has the ability to act as a blogging client. It can do much, much more than this but that is all I use it for. I still love it for that alone.

Mariner Write – Another Mariner product. I have written about this simple yet powerful word processor before. It still saves me from the bloat of Word and remains one of my favorites.

Fetch (wait, make that Transmit) – What can I say, I have been a Fetch user since, like, the birth of FTP. Therefore I have never tried anything different. Then last night, based on it’s appearance on every other top ten Mac app list I read, I downloaded and played with Transmit. All I can say is that I never knew what I was missing and I will be switching as soon as I can.

Notational Velocity – This is, by far, one of the cleverest note programs I have ever seen. I have also written about this one before. So simple, an interface that gives new meaning to sparse and just about every aspect of it keyboard driven. I store all sorts of little snippets of info in here.

Quicksilver – There has been so many things written about this application that I don’t know if I can do it justice. Just download it, read everything Merlin Mann has written about it and consider your life changed.

Notetaker – A great note taking application and outliner. I like it a lot but it has largely been replaced by OmniOutliner and Notational Velocity. I still highly recommend it though. It has a number of very cool features. Once again, I have written in greater detail about this one before.

VLC – Plays almost everything that Quicktime can’t and it is free. How can you go wrong.

Konfabulator – Because Dashboard does not hold a candle to it. Although, I do admit, I wish there were some third party Dashboard widgets that Konfabulator had.

Yet another web application to replace one that lives on my computer. Blinksale is a new web app that is designed to help small businesses create, send and manage invoices. I have played around with it a little and it is killer so far. It is very much like a 37 Signals product so if you love Basecamp, Backpack and run a small business you will love this. I have been a long time user of Customer Tracker to manage invoices for my Consulting Business. It has not seen an update in ages and I get the sense that the developer has no plans to make improvements any time soon. Therefore, I am going to give Blinksale a trial run and see how it does.