At the moment I’m doing some work that means that by the end of this week I’m going to have put a fair whack of travelling under my belt.

On Friday I went down to London and met up with Swanny for some post-work drinks. We’d decided just to keep it a quiet one, and went for some food on Fleet Street near his offices. I ordered superfood, and despite my initial skepticism, discovered it was well and truly super. “Super food for a super guy” the waitress said.

Inevitably, the plan to have a quiet one failed pretty quickly after the fairly noisy second.

On Saturday I had to be up and in Victoria for 11, so after a fantastic slap up brunch courtesy of Mrs. S, I headed into town where James, Tom, Luciana and myself met up.

The Channel 4 building is a fantastic bit of architecture and from our meeting room we had a good view of their newest bit of art – a giant sculptured ‘4’, viz. their idents.

A few hours and a good number of workshopping activities later we wound up at around half four. Being at a loose end until 8pm, I went and found John for a lightening-quick pint in between band practise and a concert, before sushi, then met up with Brown in Clapham before heading home.

A very busy day, but both enjoying and satisfying.

Tomorrow I go to Sheffield.

Yesterday I had a request to set up some hosting by a friend of mine. He does some small web design projects for local businesses and regularly asks for a small dollop of space to host the sites.

Once in a while you come across a great example of someone not understanding how the web works, and when he told me the domain that this newest client wanted to host, I couldn’t help but cringe at the address they’d picked.

The domain starts http://www.a12one … (I’ll leave the rest out to spare their identity), and despite my friend’s explanations that the logic was faulted, the client had come to believe that, because it starts with ‘a1’, it will appear at the top of Google searches.

Ah if only. I think you would find if that we’re the case. Being A A J Higgs it would have tangible advantages for me. Needless to say, I can’t really see it happening, although it would be quite amusing soul destroying to have to press the ‘o’ in Gooooooooooooogle approximately 24 billion times to get somewhere near the Zs pages. Poor Xerox, Yellow Pages and Zoo Magazine; they wouldn’t fare well.

As an additional punch to the groin, I have a feeling that mixing letters with numbers might cause a migraine like headache when recalling the aforementioned address. It could only have been ‘improved’ upon by inserting hypens at every available opportunity.

You might have noticed of recent my per week quota is thinning out. This isn’t due to lack of things going on (on the contrary) however, in an attempt to bump up my weekly posting figures, I thought I’d supply the world with a service – the ten ‘must have’ tracks for drive time.

I’m pretty picky about the music have on in my car – more so than when I am working or relaxing. This list is therefore pretty refined, and although not all of it will be to everyone’s taste. I do like to rock out a bit. I think it’s got to be better than the 2007 album, Top Gear Seriously Cool Driving Music.

1. Whole Lot of Love – Led Zep
2. Voodoo Child – Hendrix
3. Baker Street – Foo Fighters (cover of Jerry Rafferty)
4. What’s My Age Again? – Blink
5. Sure Shot – Beastie Boys
6. Dakota – Stereophonics (summertime only)
7. I See You Baby – Groove Armada
8. The Middle – Jimmy Eat World
9. Worst Comes To Worst – Dilated Peoples
10. Forever Young – Youth Group (summertime only)

Guilty Pleasure – there is one more track not listed here because I am so embarrassed about it, but for me it is an essential. It’s a summer track and it reminds me of 1997. I am not going to tell anyone what it is.

Since the whole Led Zeppelin back catalogue is now available on iTunes, there is no reason why anyone can’t go out and buy the entire playlist…

A while ago I wrote about the things that you most certainly need on your Macbook , or at least my take on it. Three quarters of a year on, I’ve made the full switch to Apple, and my desk is now also sporting a 24-inch shiny, aluminium iMac.

I thought therefore it was probably a good time to add and edit my original list, especially since I have now made the leap from Mac OS X Tiger to Leopard on both my machines and certain things are either irrelevant, more essential than ever, or just specific to desktop-based working.

So here is my all-new iMac Essential Selection.

AppDelete

This funky little freeware app has served me well of recent. With the need to remove quite a lot of old programs that I’m no longer using, the newest release of AppDelete swiftly removes any application and associated system files to the Trash.

Initially I was worried about losing some critical files (typical of my Windows-paranoia) but so far I’ve not encountered any such problem, and it does a very tidy job.

Caffeine

This is a DVD-watcher’s essential that I discovered a few weeks ago.

Caffeine is a truly featherweight program that has only two states with no configurable options – just ‘on’ or ‘off’ – and when ‘on’ ensures that your screen will neither dim nor sleep. Like matchsticks for monitors.

This was never a major concern for me on my Macbook as I only used it for work, but when watching videos it’s a bother to fiddle with the energy settings every time.

Camino

I didn’t really cover browsers in my last mac selection, but being as they come in a few flavours and I have the fortune of knowing most of the major ones inside out, I thought I’d share my choice.

Camino is Mozilla’s Mac-native offering, and though not ideal for developing (it can’t handle plugins like developer’s-dream Firefox), it is a beautifully quick’n‘slick.

If you use Firefox on a Mac and you haven’t tried the new version of Safari or Camino, do it for a week and you maybe be surprised at how slow Firefox can seem. If you are wondering what the pages look like (if you are worried that you are going to get some odd Konquerer-like experience) don’t worry – it’s Gecko, so it looks like Firefox, but feels like it’s drunk a crate of Red Bull.

Expanding Camino: MoreCamino & UserAgent

If you are going to run Camino, I strongly suggest the following two extensions.

MoreCamino is an extra preference pane and just a single file to be copied to your Application Support folder. For the sake of a few seconds to install the thing, you can benefit from Firefox-like Google searches from the address bar, instant search-as-you-type functionality and a couple of other things that I’m not that bothered about.

Secondly and more importantly if you are a Yahoo! Mail user, you’ll want to grab a copy of UserAgent – another small extension that allows you to bypass Yahoo!‘s annoying and not-turn-offable inbuilt your-browser-is-not-officially-supported message by pretending you are using Firefox.

Flickr Uploadr

Well, you might not be bothered if you don’t use Flickr, but then again, why aren’t you using Flickr?

Quick and easy, I used to use the Windows one, and now I use the Mac one. Flickr Uploadr is fully Quicksilver compatible too.

Transmission

OK, I used to use an app called bits on wheels, but when I saw Transmission and how truly simple the whole thing was I switched over. If you need a handy little BitTorrent client that doesn’t take up acres of screen real-estate, this is my recommendation.

MAMP

As I predominantly work with Apache/PHP/MySQL sites, having a development environment is key to everyday coding. If you are not a web designer/developer, this isn’t going to be much use to you, so I’ll let you skip to the next app.

Leopard comes with Apache/PHP/MySQL pre-installed, just not enabled. I used to use XXAMP on Windows for my development environment, but their Mac version is still very new, so I opted to try MAMP after failing to really get to grips with the default OS X installations (config file nightmare).

MAMP is very simple. You install it, you install the widget, you pick your default root directory for websites and then you’re off. Simple as that.

If like me, you want a little more control, you probably could do with upgrading to MAMP Pro, or if like me, you are feeling a little adventurous, you can use your existing apache knowledge to customise the shipped httpd.conf and your hosts file to get multiple Virtual Hosts. It just takes some of the headache out of setting up the environment.

gReader Theme (from HicksDesign.co.uk)

So this isn’t strictly a piece of mac software. I used to use it on Windows, and all it is a theme for Google Reader, but none the less, it makes the rather stark, white and blue interface a little more appealing.

For the sake of copying a CSS file into your Application Support folder, it will make your feed reader a much happier place to be.

Transmit

Cyberduck, I’m sorry to say, for me is dead, and Panic’s Transmit is the way forward. Trev has recommended this little FTP client to me again and again, but it wasn’t until last week I downloaded the trial version and have been FTPing gloriously ever since.

There are some great little features such as semi-direct FTP from one server to another. If you’ve ever had to switch servers, you’ll probably know how much double checking you have to do to make sure you have all the files you wanted – but this seems to be a thing of the past with Transmit. Again, full Quicksilver integration and ‘droplets’ which allow in-Finder drag-and-drop uploads a breeze.

Quicksilver

If you saw my last list, you’ll realise I’m repeating myself here, but Quicksilver really does need another mention. In terms of time-saving, this app is just awesome.

The development stalled for a long while, but is now back on track as an open-source project, and despite the improvement’s to Leopard’s Spotlight feature, it’s not quite time to give up on Quicksilver. Especially with the new and rather suave Cube theme (install from the plugins pane)

For those who don’t know what Quicksilver is, it’s a application launcher and system indexer that allows access to practically any aspect of your mac in a matter of keystrokes. Ctrl + Space brings up a floating menu that you can use to locate any application, file or folder, then carry out pretty much any action upon it.

Want to open a word document without trawling the filesystem – you can. Want to instantly bluetooth sync your phone – can do. Want to create a new text file on the fly – completely possible.

If you can get into using it, it will speed up your workflow.

iWork, Numbers

Since my last evaluation of Apple’s own iWork suite, the addition of Numbers, the spreadsheet application has added to the desirability of the package. Much in the same vein as the other offerings, it makes a good all-round accountancy log.

Generally, iWork’s ability to handle Microsoft Office documents is fantastic, but I wish that saving files back into their original .doc, .xls and .pps formats wasn’t quite so much of a clicking-trail.

Actually, I’m not fully decided on my choice of office suite at the moment. Matt recommended NeoOffice as a suitable replacement to the rather clunky basic OpenOffice app, and which I found useful for a while, but Google Docs has actually proved it’s weight in gold over the past few months when I’ve collaborated on projects that were separated by the Atlantic Ocean.

Bento

Now this is a odd one. I’m not really recommending it as such (it’s not fully baked yet), but more expressing my intrigue as to this new, preview-only app from Apple-subsidiary, Filemaker.

Bento, which is named after the compartmentalised Japanese lunchbox (think sushi/sashimi), neatly and smartly fills the gap in iWork that Access bulkily fills in Microsoft Office.

I say this because it is not a power-user application, but if as I suspect, it does become part of the iWork suite, I think it will become indispensable at home and in the office.

Until now, creating a database has really been the preserve of the software engineer, but this very elegantly and simply allows anyone to tap directly into their existing Mac databases (your media collection, your Address Book and iCal) and combine that data with your own custom collections of information to provide new and exciting catalogues and databases.

The examples provided are things such as sports-team tracking, room-booking, class-monitoring – all the sorts of things until now might have required a much heavier-duty and costly solution.

This is definitely one to watch.

Honourable Mentions

New to Transmit, I am also new to Panic’s other major offering, Coda. I’m in the process of looking at scaling down my current editing processes to something a little less heavy, and this program appears quite promising. I have to admit, I’m not entirely sold – inline editing such as tag wrapping and auto-completion lacks somewhat, but the file-management aspect is a definite plus. I’m still undecided whether this is my next purchase.

Automator for a long time wasn’t on my list of favourite applications. I struggled to see it’s use. Macro recording was one of the things I sorely missed from Windows 3.1 onwards, yet Automator still seemed to be taking a step backwards.

However…

I have since discovered the wonders of what can be done with Applescript in combination with Automator, and have produced some nice little routines which I now use to maintain my photo collection, my development environment and well, not much else at the moment, but I do have a list of things I want to try and batch up in the near future.

Productivity Tips

There are a few other little productivity tips I would like to share now also.

Active Screen Corners/Hotspots

OS X allows you to setup four hotspots on your screen (each corner) where, if you thrust your mouse, you can control certain Expose and screen functions. This is great if you need to quickly disable your screensaver, turn on your screensaver or sleep your screen – all things I need to do regularly. To set them up, visit the System Preferences > Expose & Spaces.

Inserting Odd Characters

As a Windows user, I used to know all those useful keycodes for strange characters. OK, well I knew two – the copyright symbol (Alt + 0169) and (Alt + 0232). Exciting eh?

Well for a convert, this is all different now, so I thought it might be worth mentioning that if you quickly need to insert the copyright symbol on a mac, it's Alt + g (not really logical is it?), and to add an accent is far easier than remembering a whole code – Alt + e once, then just follow it with the letter you want to accent (such as an a, e or u).

Other diacritic marks are achieved with other Alt + combinations, but a good way of making sure you can reference these shortcuts quickly is to enable the language icon in the menu bar, which provides very quick drop-down links to the Keyboard Viewer and Character Palette. Do this in System Preferences > International > Input Menu and tick the two options mentioned. A little British (or other) flag will appear next to the date.

Making The Date Better

Talking of the date – it always annoyed me in Windows that I had to hover to get the correct date, and on Mac to have to click on the menu bar time. A problem no longer. Taken from a Lifehacker tip, simply open the International System Preferences pane as in the previous tip, but select the Formats tab instead.

Now click on the Customise button in the Dates section. Change the show drop-down to Medium, then copy the contents of text field below.

Cancel the page, then click on the Customise button in the Times section. Once again, select Medium from the drop down, then paste in the copied block in front of the time. Press OK and see the date magically display next to the time in the address bar.

If you are a Leopard user, you may also have noticed that the iCal icon now updates the date in real time if you keep it in the dock, but I still quite like it up in the top right-hand corner.

Navigating Menus Using The Keyboard

I could continue to go on at length about this, but you’re probably bored stiff if you’ve even got this far, so I will conclude with this final Leopard-only tip.

Press Ctrl + Shift + ? on most applications and the help menu will drop down. Now start typing what you are looking to do. Copy, Paste, New Smart Folder (this is how I discovered this) and the help menu will not only show appropriate topics, but also the menu item you might be looking for. Another couple of keystrokes to select the item might have stopped you from touching the mouse all together.

Conclusion

There are loads of brilliant little apps and shortcuts out there, and these are just the ones I like/find indispensable. If you have others, feel free to share (until the comments close).

The Multipack site has been in need of some attention for a while, and although we often discuss it at meetings, not much ever seems to change – we’re all too busy to do anything about it.

It took most of Saturday, a pub lunch, plenty of peanuts, quavers, beer and diet coke, but we’ve made some in roads into the code side of things. Tasked with design, Gaz, Owen and myself got the basics nailed down pretty quickly, but the final design was a little less forthcoming.

Despite having the whole day to take photos, I totally forgot, so you’ll have to rely on everyone else. We were based up in the Custard Factory at the new offices of One Black Bear and spent a lot of time swimming in mac paraphernalia – there isn’t much else in there.

Anyway, there is progress, as yet not that tangible, but it’s a good start.

With regard to the rest of the weekend – I went for a drink with Jon and Rosie on Friday in a pub I didn’t know existed, then on Saturday bumped into another John back from university while getting onto the train.

I got asked to be in a TV documentary this week, but have turned it down. Such are the pressures of life on the famous and well-loved.

Yesterday was a fantastic day, but probably not a very productive one.

After being woken by UPS with the delivery of my iMac (woo yay for technology and unpacking stuff) I spent most of the day in the tedium of transferring everything over from the Windows machine.

Anyway, work aside, I finally saw the Foo Fighters last night at the NEC Arena in Birmingham. I can well and truly say that was the best gig I’ve been to, and my high expectations were all met.

My sister and her friend came down from Aber to watch, and we arrived in plenty of time to see the support act, Serj Tankian and lead vocals of System of a Down do some solo material. He was good and the music more appealing than I had maybe guessed at, but of course I was far too preoccupied with the idea of the main event.

I was surprised and very happy by the variety of stuff they played, especially from the back catalogue. I’ve been to gigs before where you only hear the new album, but all the classics came out and they mixed up both the best of their rock and acoustic.

I managed to get about one to two rows back from the front of the stage by the end of the night (by accident rather than intentionally) and so had the whole four song encore up-close.

So much energy, so much great music. I had a fantastic time.

Photos here.

Being as it’s been a week and a bit since I installed Leopard, I thought I’d share my thoughts.

As an ex-Windows user, upgrades in OS X tend to be less visually different than the ones for their Microsoft counterparts. Rather than re-skinning the whole interface, they instead have a more evolutionary approach to the process.

I’m not overly excited by the new translucent menu bar, the rounded corners and gradients on the context menus, the new screensaver features, the shiny dock or the black Apple button, but it does add enough to make you feel like you have upgraded; at least a little bit.

Apple touts version 10.5 as including 300 new features, but you won’t realistically notice most of these on a day to day basis. That said, there are some very nice additions, and one or two annoying ones.

Time Machine

Time Machine, like most reviewers have reported, is bliss. Backup is a nightmare for me and to be able to just whizz back through a collection of files until I get the one I want is far superior to my current methods (running tailored Windows BAT files, and on my MacBook, occasionally copying the contents over when I remember). I probably would have liked a little more control over the setup, the ability to publish to a wireless drive (apparently this feature was originally to be included, but then pulled for the final release) and also a way to change the regularity of the backups on certain folders.

Terminal

Terminal can now be made a lot prettier, and I think it’s possible to load up custom windows at startup, but so far I haven’t been able to figure it out. If I do, I will be very happy.

Coverflow, Quicklook & Network Access

Coverflow for files – now that is awesome. Speed-wise it’s like greased lightening and to be able to visually go through several hundred web files in realtime and pick the correct one is ridiculously nice. I also absolutely love the fact this is not restricted to the machine I am using. Machine-sharing has become ludicrously easy and I can use Coverflow on not only the contents of the other Macs on my network, but also the Windows machines too.

The new networking benefits improve screen sharing (Remote Desktop style) too, and it’s much nicer than using VNC. Super speedy too over my wireless network.

Although Quicklook is sold as a feature of it’s own, it’s just another implementation of the technology used in Coverflow, but again is super quick and very nice to use, although I did have to customise my toolbar in order to get the icon to appear.

Finder

I always used to read that people hated the default Finder application, but my only problem with it was the lack of a working ‘Cut’ function. Well, that still appears to be missing, so no happier there, but the newly laid out views and search tools are fantastic and a much welcome upgrade to the old one.

Speed

I can’t really tell much how much speed improvement I have over my old installation, but it does seem quicker, and I don’t think I could ever have said that about my previous Windows upgrade experiences. That said, boot up seems to take about the same amount of time, but as my Macbook stays on sleep mostly, that’s not really a problem – actually if anything I think it wakes faster now.

iTunes

Of course, since I didn’t overly praise the visual elements above, I’ll have to make some sickening applause of something eye-candyish, so it’ll be the new iTunes visualisations. There are a handful to choose from, and they are stunning. I mean really stunning.

iCal

iCal has received a nice refresh that hasn’t alienated me too much (which is just as well as it is one of my most frequently used apps) and now has a more sensible use of screen real-estate – allowing the changes to events to be made ‘inline’ rather than occupying a drawer that used to take up a quarter of the screen. I’m also enjoying publishing my calendars to the web, although I’m unsure if that is a new feature, or just something that became more obviously labelled in Leopard.

Stacks

I’ve not found much use for the Stacks feature yet, but I have a feeling it will come in more use as I start using my iMac for major development work. I can see potential for dropping current project folders down there for ease of access.

Mail

Lots of Mail users appear very happy, but it’s not an app I use at the moment, mainly because Yahoo! don’t yet offer IMAP (and they better do soon because these GMail types are making me weep now). I will use it as soon as the doors are opened (I could use POP, but it’s just too limiting).

Issues – Skype, Firewall, Dock, Quicksilver & Growl

I have fallen foul of a few compatibility problems however. Skype hasn’t been working and I found out that is because I had turned on the OS’s firewall. Leopard’s firewall is controversially off by default, but setting it to anything other than ‘allow all incoming connections’ makes the Skype icon bounce twice before quitting automatically. No explanation given. A reinstall solves it, but then a restart means you have to reinstall again. It’s a rubbish situation. Turning off the firewall and a reinstall apparently solves this, but it’s not ideal.

Another minor issue for me is that Quicksilver now appears in the dock permanently and there doesn’t appear to be anyway of removing it (I really don’t need anything else clogging it up). If you are using Quicksilver, make sure you upgrade to the newest version now, as there has been some issue in the old one pinging the author’s server so much that it has taken the site down. You will need to download the new version from the link posted here.

In the old dock, running applications used to be marked with a very obvious little black arrow. Initially I though this had been totally removed, but it turns out it has been replaced with a thoroughly wimpy glowing puddle. If there is one thing I really want back, it’s an obvious way of telling which apps are running.

I had an issue with the Candybar theme in Growl not displaying any text, but switching to any other theme seemed to solve that. Apart from these handful of irritations, I have been genuinely impressed with the upgrade and yet to discover anything truly horrible.

So far, loving it.