These days everything is moving digital. Today there is digital signage (for advertisements), magazines post their articles on their Web sites often for free or in online subscriptions, newspapers are going completely Internet based and the list goes on and on. Another industry whose medium is making the transition is the book industry.

The popular O'Reilly publishing company's now has what's called the Safari Books Online service, and the Pragmatic Bookshelf has every one of their books in PDF format and also pre-release their books (called Betas just like software).

This would be understandable considering these are two companies whose demographics are technical people; programmers and IT Professionals who would be the first to make the switch. PDFs are also great for students and scholars, I have quite an impressive library that has cost me a small fortune and takes up a lot of space, but now thanks to the Sony Reader and the Kindle you can go from this to this.

And not only do you save on space but also price. PDF versions of books are always priced typically around $10-25 less than their paper counterparts.

More and more people are using PDFs and reading books either on their Kindle/Sony Reader/Computer and you should too. However first to read a PDF book on your computer you need an application, and on the Mac there are three; Apple's own Preview, Adobe Reader, and the open-source alternative Skim.

Preview

Apple made quite a few changes when they shipped the latest version of Preview with Leopard, now it features annotation capability; including highlighting with different shapes, and the layout and looks are both much better.

Preview is limited in its features, but there are still enough that you could get dazed and confused. Thankfully its menu is fairly intuitive. It's installed by default on Mac OS X and also supports multiple image formats.

Adobe Reader

Adobe's Reader is perhaps the most widely used PDF reader on computers (or at least was at one point.) They invented the format so you'd figure that they would be the first to take advantage of any new-cutting-edge features in it. However I've found that really isn't the case here.

The Adobe Reader looks more like a well implemented AIR app than a Cocoa Mac app, however the interface is still nice. It also has a simple front-end GUI, which is great if all you want to do is read the PDF.

However if you want to get more interactive Adobe Reader isn't for you. The functions are difficult to find, the menu isn't very clearly laid out.

Adobe Reader allows comments, but only if the PDF author used Adobe's LifeCycle to enable the feature. In all the PDFs I've used I've never seen this enabled.

Skim

And finally there's my personal favorite, Skim. Skim is open-source and is developed by C. Hofman, A. Maxwell, and M. McCracken. You can view and put in bookmarks, view in Full Screen or in a Presentation mode and it also supports the Apple Remote. You can highlight and underline text, put in circles and boxes to focus on something and also annotate and embed notes into the PDF.

Another cool feature is being able to link to locations in other PDFs as well.

Skim also has the best GUI of the three as well. Unlike Adobe Reader, Skim's menu has every feature available in intuitive places and commands. Some that I use a lot include:

• Command-N for putting in a Note (located in Notes --> New Note)
• Full Screen at Command-Shift-F (or View --> View Full Screen)
• Add Bookmark with Command-D (Bookmarks --> Add Bookmarks)
• New Circle with Option-Command-C (Notes --> New Circle)

You can also navigate through the PDF using Command-Left/Right for moving between pages and choosing your Page with Option-Command-G.

Skim by default not only has a full menu, but they also put a lot of their features out in the open with buttons in it's toolbar. I like things simple and for there to be more room for the PDF so I toggle off the Toolbar (Command-B) and also hide the Notes Pane (Shift-Command-N).

Then I display the PDF as I would read a book (showing both pages) by going in the menu to PDF --> PDF Display --> Facing Pages. I also show only the current pages by unchecking PDF --> PDF Display --> Continuous and checking PDF --> PDF Display --> Book Mode. Also make sure you set this setting to default by checking PDF --> Use Current View Settings as Default.

With this setup I refuse to read a PDF in any other application, it's that good.

Skim was built for reading PDF books it's by far the best PDF reader on the Mac.

Preview is the next-best alternative but its demographic is too spread out and is built for viewing images more than reading PDFs.

Adobe Reader comes in last out of the three, its confusing menu and implementation of features makes unenjoyable for PDF reading.

What Is Fluid?

Fluid is an awesome relatively new app that is leading the way for SSBs (Site Specific Browsers.) Site Specific Browsers are (name makes it obvious) web browsers that are designed to interact exclusively with a single web site. When you do this you can also build in more functionality for that site than a general browser can.

Who/When Is Fluid Useful For?

Fluid (and other SSBs) is absolutely wonderful for the ever increasing number of web apps, sites like Digg, Base Camp, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, GMail and so forth. That does leave a big chunk out of our typical web browsing sessions (after all it is called web browsing/surfing), however when you click onto a link that leaves that specific site (whatever it may be) Fluid knows to leave it to your default web browser. For example if you had a specific Fluid browser for Digg and while in it you clicked a link to a YouTube video, Safari (or whatever default browser you have) would open to that site. One example of what a SSBs like Fluid can provide that a typical browser can't is when used with Google Reader it shows how many unread articles you have (similar to what NetNewsWire does), or when used with Facebook it will show you how many unread messages you have.

Plug-ins

Through Plug-ins Fluid can utilize the tools OS X provides, there are two Plug-ins installed by default; the Thumbnail and Clipboard. To use them either click on the top right button to open up the menu bar and click on which one you'd like to use or press Command-Option-Command-C for the Clipboard, and Command-Option-Command-T for the Thumbnail Plug-in. The Thumbnail Plug-in is without a doubt one of the coolest and most functional implementations of Coverflow. Let's say I have an app for Digg and I open the Thumbnail Plug-in up, it goes through each link and image and lines them up for me to view and navigate through. Or if Coverflow isn't your cup of tea you can use the included grid format. The Clipboard Plug-in does exactly what you'd think it would do, open it up and then you simply drag links, text, or video and so forth onto it for future use.

This is what I'm talking about (click for bigger version.)

How Do I Use Fluid?

Here's a screencast on how Fluid works. Basically you use the actual Fluid.app as a hub/generator for all your other SSBs. So fire up Fluid.app and input the URL of the site you want the app to be for, the name of it, the location and whether you want the icon to be the Website's Favicon or your own. And that's it! Now you have made your own Browser for that Specific Site.

I recommend using your own picture for the icon as the Favicon tends to be a small image and gets pixalated when it tries to get to the regular application icon size. Thankfully, there is a Flickr group dedicated to Fluid icons that look great.

Developers, Developers, Developers!

Fluid is also very developer friendly, it features a Cocoa Plug-in API, Bookmarklet support, GreaseKit scripting built-in, JavaScript Drag and Drop API like all WebKit browsers, and also Fluid's own JavaScript API with some additional functionality.

Where Can I Get It?

Todd Ditchendorf is working on Fluid like crazy and it is updated very frequently, check it out at it's own site, here.

Other Resources and Articles on Fluid

• TechCrunch in December, March, and April.
• Lifehacker
• 37Signals
• 43 Folders
• Daring Fireball
• Wired
• The Unofficial Apple Weblog
• ReadWriteWeb
• Lifestreaming webapp Socialthing!
• Community Q&A site Fluther

Note: 1Password also has Fluid support. To use it you need to be running at least 1Password version 2.6.BETA-2 and then run this command: sudo rm -R /Library/InputManagers/1PasswdIM and then restart 1Password.

One of the greatest things about the greatest RSS reader on the Mac, NetNewsWire, is how many things it can integrate with. It can go hand-in-hand with your blog, your Twitter account, your Del.icio.us account and many others because of its scriptability.

How to use with your blog

If you're using the latest NetNewsWire you've probably noticed the "Post to Weblog" icon.

When viewing an article you can either click on that icon or use Shift-Command-P.

To post to your blog NetNewsWire needs to go through one of the many Blogging clients on the Mac like ecto or MarsEdit.

One you have one of those installed make sure that it is seen by NetNewsWire by going to Preferences (Command-,) -> Posting. Change "Post to weblog using:" to whatever client you're using.

Now when you use "Post to Weblog" your client will open up automatically create a new post and insert the link into the editor.

How to use with your Del.icio.us account

I depend on Del.icio.us for storing and centralizing all of my bookmarks. Therefore the web apps I use must have the ability to integrate with Del.icio.us, and NetNewsWire--no exceptions.

NetNewsWire has a few different ways to post your news articles to Del.icio.us, if you go back to Preferences (Command-,) -> Posting, you'll see "Post to Del.icio.us using:".

Your options for posting to Del.icio.us include Pukka, Cocoalicious, Postr, Webnotehappy, and your plain old web browser.

I prefer the web browser, so when I use the "Post to Del.icio.us" function (News -> Post to Del.icio.us or Control-Command-') NetNewsWire will bring up this small window from del.icio.us:

Pukka, and Cocoalicious are the other two clients that I would recommend. Unfortunately, Pukka costs $14.95. While Cocoalicious is free, it has lately had a pretty slow development cycle along with some problems using the Del.icio.us API.

Postr is almost a legacy app right now that never really got off the ground and Webnotehappy costs $24.95 for a single user.

How to use with your Twitter account

NetNewsWire also integrates with Twitter through Twitterrific. The function is bound to News -> Post to Twitterrific (Control-T).

Twitterrific automatically sends your link to Twitterrific in the form: Reading "title of the article" at "URL of the site". Like so:

.

For some other tips on using NetNewsWire check out here (it has a lot of links to other sources as well.)

The latest Firefox Beta, version 5 came out this past week and I was hoping that they would have made the change to the to the buttons they've been talking about. But they didn't and the huge, ugly Back button still sticks out like wart on Margaret Hamilton. Thankfully though the fix is fairly simple and it does the job.

Here's how to make it go from this:

to this:

1. Open up Firefox
2. Go to View --> Toolbars --> Customize...
3. Make sure "Use Small Icons" is checked

It isn't great, but in my opinion it's at least better and gets a little closer in terms of aesthetics to the best browser in the world, Safari.

Twitter has taken over Flickr as the default web service for building desktop apps for. It's especially great for people just learning to program because you already have the service there, you have the API to hook into and that leaves you all set to code and have some fun. Here's a list of some great Twitter clients; some standalone and others that are built-into text editors.

Text Editors

Vim: Here's a script that I wrote that allows you to Twitter from Vim. The usage details are all on the Vim Archive Page. It allows you to post from the command-line, buffer, current-line and visualized-text. It's very simple and the only thing that it allows you to do is post, not view what people have posted.

Emacs: This is the script that I based my own off of, it allows you do all the things that the Vim one can do, the usage detail are in the script commented-out. You can get it here.

TextMate: Here's another I wrote that you can post to Twitter from TextMate, this one is pretty nice because it brings up a GUI Dialog instead of the other TextMate Twitter scripts where you have to type the text into a window or select it and send it. You can get it here.

AIR Applications

AIR is Adobe's cross-platform runtime-environment that allows you to build Internet applications using Flash, Flex, HTML and Ajax, and the apps can also be used on your desktop. These are the full-featured apps, they allow you to post, and view the people's posts that you "follow."

Twhirl: This one is unique in that it allows you connect to multiple Twitter accounts (although I don't know why you would), it has the ability to shorten your URLs right in the app, allows you to post images to TwitPic, be able to search through tweets, has support for English, German, Italian and Spanish, has different color-schemes, and auto-updating. Other than those features it obviously has the features found in just about every other app like notifications of new tweets. Another thing Twhirl does that is always attractive to me is active development, the last release (0.7.3) came out on 2008-03-20.

Tweetr: This one lacks some of the features that Twhirl has and has a bit more of Zen-like, minimalist approach. I like the aesthetics of Tweetr more than any another application, by default it integrates with Leopard very nicely. Features that it is missing in comparison to Twhirl are: no built-in shortening of URLs (no big deal since Twitter does this anyway,) can't look up Profiles, Friends, view your Archive or search through tweets in the app. Tweetr is also missing a lot of potential customizability in comparison to Twhirl. Tweetr is definitely more centered around simple posting and reading tweets, you can't get the whole twitter experience from it, but Twhirl really tries to take over and be where you go to tweet, read other's tweets, view other's profiles and so forth and in doing so gives you the whole experience.

To sum it up; whenever I'm not inside TextMate I'll use Twhirl, it certainly isn't ugly but its not as polished as Tweetr however the abundance of features makes it very appealing to use.

Others to mention: Spaz, similar to Tweetr, has good aesthetics but lacks on features, and Snitter, similar to Twhirl, has more features but isn't as attractive. However the development of each of these apps isn't as often as the others.

One of today's most interesting technological developments are portable Ebook readers. The two most popular readers are Amazon's Kindle and the Sony Reader. Unfortunately for the Mac both of these companies are lacking compared to their Windows counterparts in terms of support, but I will give it to Amazon that they are least a little better. However the Kindle's lack of support for .pdf files and it's design was too ludicrous for me so I purchased a Sony Reader.

To get my Reader working with my Mac was fairly simple after a little research. There are a few options, but the best and most popular is an application called libprs500, the home site is located here.

libprs500 is open source, cross-platform and will work on Linux, Windows and most importantly OSX. Just do the usual install for .app files, click on here to download the app and move it to your /Applications folder.

To use it just connect your Reader to your computer and libprs500 will recognize the device automatically (libprs500 supports both the older PRS-500 and the newest PRS-505.) Click on whatever storage area you're going to put your Eboks, it could be either the Reader's own built-in space or your own SD or ProDuo card.

Then go up click on "Add books" and then navigate to the Ebook you want to put on, if you click the little arrow beside the "Add books" you have different options for adding multiple Ebooks, one for putting multiple pdf pages together to make a single Ebook, and another for getting different individual Ebooks from a folder.

I put together a screenshot (shown below) that shows the steps to add in Ebooks, just follow the numbers (1-3.)

Note: if you get a little error popping telling you that there is no folder, or something on those lines make sure you have the destination selected.

Mutt is one of the best email clients out there, it's fast, efficient, you can keep your fingers on the keyboard, it has key bindings and macros, threading, regular expression, pattern matching and more.

With a little tweaking you can get Mutt to also integrate into the Mac environment, for example here's how you can get Mutt to use your contacts in your Address Book:

1. Install the Little Brother's Database (lbdb) (we're gonna use MacPorts, if you haven't installed it first do that) and do the command:
   sudo port install lbdb
2. Modify the lbdb's configuration so that it uses the Address Book by opening the lbdb.rc file in /opt/local/etc/ and change the following lines: (line 43) # METHODS="m_inmail m_passwd m_finger" To this:
   METHODS="m_muttalias m_osx_addressbook"
   and uncomment (delete the # on the beginning of the line) the following lines (68-69):
   #MUTT_DIRECTORY="$HOME/.mutt"
#MUTTALIAS_FILES=".muttrc .mail_aliases muttrc aliases"
3. Modify Mutt's configuration:
   open your ~/.muttrc file and in it put:
   set query_command ="/opt/local/bin/lbdbq '%s'"

And you're done, restart Mutt, compose a new email, start to type the first characters of a contact's name or email address and press Command-T, select a contact and continue your email.

[Via:macosxhints.com(modified to work with lbdb MacPort)]

Mutt is the greatest mail client on any platform. It's quick, simple,
extensible and configurable, you can use your favorite editor for writing
emails and more. However one bad thing is that by default you can't set it
as your default email reader, and by default I mean that when you click on a
mailto link (like this one) it won't automatically pop-up and begin your email.

There is a fix and that is MailtoMutt, which you can get here. MailtoMutt is a very
simple application that runs in the background and handles mailto urls for
Mutt. Here's the actual download site on sourceforge, since the last build
is a little old it's only binary is for the PPC architecture so we're going
to build our own native binary (for either Intel or PPC).

So download this
version (mailtomutt-0.4.1.tar.gz). Unpack it and go to the directory in
the terminal (cd to wherever you unpacked it, probably in your
Download folder). Then in the folder that you unpacked that contains the
source and especially the Xcode Project run the command
xcodebuild. Now move the MailtoMutt.app that is located in the
folder build/Default (you can click and drag or do mv
build/Default/MailtoMutt.app /Applications) to your /Applications folder.

Now to set it as your default mail reader go to Systems and Preferences open
up RCDefaultApp and go to Email in the Internet tab and make the Default
Application MailtoMutt. And now you're done, every time you click on a
mailto url it will open up for you in Mutt.

picture-6.png

For Emacs users on Linux one of the most efficient and important things to
do is remap your Control Key to your Caps Lock key. This is because the Caps
Lock key has such a prominent position on the home row and yet it is rarely
used compared to the Control key.

On Linux you can change your xmodmap, on Windows it's even trickier,
however on the Mac is only takes a few clicks.

1. Open up your System & Preferences
2. Go to Keyboard and Mouse
3. Click on the Keyboard tab
4. On the bottom left corner click on "Modifier Keys..."
5. Change the Caps Lock Key to the Control key and the Caps Lock key for the Control Key.

And you're done, now it's much easier to use your Control key. It's even smart , the light on the Caps Lock key will light up only when you hit the newly remapped key for Caps Lock and not the traditional one. Unfortunately
for the Vim users there doesn't seem to be a way to move your Esc key to the
Caps Lock right so we'll just have to live it or find some other way.

Whenever you choose "Save File As..."(or Link As... and so forth) in Safari it opens the typical window that allows you to choose whatever folder to want to save the file by mouse. However often I want to save an Emacs or Vim configuration or script to their respected hidden folders (~/.emacs.d or ~/.vim) and you can't choose a hidden folder by default.

The inefficient way is to just download the file to some visible folder and then either move the file in the finder or use the mv command in the terminal. The efficient and smart way is to go to the "Save File As..." window in Safari and do Command-Shift-G. The window below will come up:

Now you put in the folder that you want, for example I would put in ~/.emacs.d and it would come up and I can choose so save my file in the hidden folder.

Enjoy!