This is probably only going to be of interest to fellow mac-heads out there, so if talk of the latest OS X apps puts you to sleep, look away now.
First off, the browser formerly known as Chimera has reached version 0.7. Camino looks none the worse for its identity change and comes with a whole raft of improvements and updates.
Now here’s a handy little program: Cocktail doesn’t make your mac do anything it couldn’t do already but it does offer a much friendlier interface than typing in the command line. Cocktail allows you to run daily, weekly and monthly cron jobs at any time you want as well as house-cleaning chores like cleaning out log files and caches.
On a more whimsical note, Meteorologist gives you weather information in your menu bar. It takes the weather information from Weather.com and can be configured to show multiple locations. I have it set up so I can see how my friends and family are doing in Baltimore, Cork, Seattle, Sierra Vista and Freiburg as well as being extremely lazy by having it show the current weather conditions in Brighton and Hove in case I’m too lazy to actually step aside.
Finally, there’s a mac program that’s been carbonised that’s of great interest to me.
Barfly is an ABC composer and converter. ABC is a file format for sharing tunes using simple ASCII notation. It’s the file format of choice for most Irish music websites including The Session.
When people submit tunes to The Session in ABC format, it’s up to me to convert those tunes into .gif and .midi files. Up ‘till now, I’ve been reliant on legacy OS 9 apps. In fact, pretty much the only reason why I run classic is to use those simple programs.
Now, with the new version of Barfly, I’ve become an OS X poster child. It’s especially handy not having to start up Classic on my iBook when I’m updating The Session.
And that concludes this round-up of new OS X applications.