Jim Barraud

My friend and colleague Jon Sykes recently launched his latest side-project usernamecheck.com. It’s a service for checking a slew of social networks to see if the username you regularly use is taken or not. Actually, you may have heard of it since it’s been getting a ton of press lately. It’s been mentioned by swissmiss, Lifehacker and CNET. Turns out a lot of people like keeping tabs on their brand and identity when it comes to social networks. Companies like Coca-Cola could appreciate something like this.

Mr. Sykes has recruited me to help out with the UI and design of the site. So look for updates to usernamecheck.com in the coming weeks (or days).

Yesterday Google formally announced it’s long rumored browser, Google Chrome. The rumor that Google has been working on it’s own internet browser has been around for quite a while, but it’s mostly been based on Google’s relationship with Mozilla. It’s been thought that the fabled Google Browser would either be based of the Gecko engine or a retooled and rebranded version Firefox. But it turns out neither was correct.

Google Chrome was built from the ground up to handle the hefty demands of today’s web applications. Some of it was built in-house, other parts based on current open source software. The rendering engine is based on Apple’s Webkit. The same rendering engine that’s used in Apple’s Safari web browser as well as the browser used in Google upcoming mobile Android OS.

One of the biggest selling points of the browser is how it works under the hood. Each tab in Google Chrome runs it’s own process. Meaning if there’s a bug encountered in one tab, it won’t crash your entire browser and all the other tabs you may have open. Which is essential in this day and age with increased usage of web based apps. Other browser manufacturers have gotten around this issue by remembering which tabs were open when your browser crashed, then reloading them all when you relaunched your browser.

Another rumor that’s been around for quite some time is the Google OS. That Google is developing it’s own operating system to compete with Windows and OSX. While they have created their own open source mobile OS with Android, I’ve never pictured them creating their own PC based OS.

My theory is that Google Chrome is the Google OS. With the majority of Google’s applications being internet based, it makes a certain kind of sense that it’s “OS” would be a browser. A browser they can optimize to make the user experience of their applications more enjoyable as well engineer to be more secure and stable then other browsers on the market. And while they’re at it, make it open source. Allowing other browser manufactures to learn from and improve on Google’s advances, making the internet experience as whole more rewarding while integrating standards Google is promoting or has developed. As development progresses I would imagine Google will be tying it’s properties in even more into Google Chrome. Built in Gmail and Google Calendar services, native support for Google Gadgets, and integration with Google Docs.

You can read more about Google Chrome in this online comic Google put together. Google Chrome will be available later today in Beta for Windows only, with OSX and Linux versions coming soon.

Update: The beta (Windows only) of Google Chrome is now available.

I’m always excited when I find a solution to a problem that works within my existing workflow. For example, I’ll be attending the Nine Inch Nails show at the IZOD center tomorrow night and I need to remember to bring the tickets. Because for one I’ll be leaving from work so I need to grab them first thing in the morning and two, my memory is crap. I’ve tried various reminder services in the past, but since they don’t fit into my existing workflow I always forget to use them. Ironic, I know.

Since I’m an avid Twitter user and Twitter is a notifcation/messaging service, I thought it would be great if I could tell Twitter to send me a reminder at a particular time to remember the tickets. A quick Google search later and I discover timer. A Twitter bot that serves this exact purpose. Add timer to your following list and send it a direct message with the minute count of when you’d like to be notified and the message you’d like to receive in the following format “d timer 30 Remind me about that thing”. You’ll then be reminded of that thing in 30 minutes via a direct message.

This really shines if you setup Twitter to notify of direct messages via SMS. This allows you to both set and receive reminders from anywhere via your cell.

One downside is you need to set your reminder time via minutes. So if you want to be reminded the next day at a particular time you need to figure out how many minutes that is. It would be great if you could set the units of time. For example, if you wanted to be reminded in two days of an event it would be cool if you could format it as “d timer 2d Do that thing you need to do”.

Other downsides revolve around the fact that this is done through Twitter (which as I’ve said is also the advantage). And Twitter is known for having it’s share of outages. So if Twitter is down, so are your reminders. There’s also no way to edit existing reminders or view the reminders you’ve set. But for me those are minor gripes.

One of the touted new features of Firefox 3 is a more native look within your operating system of choice. I’m a Mac guy, so lets focus there. The new Mac theme is called Firelight. While it is a huge improvement over the Firefox 2 default theme, it still falls short of feeling like a native Mac app. It feels more like a Windows app pretending to be a Mac app. Gray gradients do not in itself make a Mac interface. While well known Apple pundits have given excellent Safari vs. Firefox comparisons, I figured I’d take a slightly different approach.

I’ve been a Safari fan for a while. I love it’s simple interface and think the webkit rendering engine is top-notch. But most of my day-to-day work involves working on web applications that are predominantly internal facing. And the ones I work on usually don’t have official support for Safari (as much as would love it they did). While Safari’s web development debug tools have made great strides, they still don’t compare to Firebug. That being said, my default browser for the past year or so has been Safari. Firefox 2 was just far to buggy to be considered any more than a development browser. Normal browsing and “getting things done” tasks were left to Safari. Firefox 3 on the other hand has made tremendous leaps over Firefox 2. I’ve been using it since beta 2 and while I still run into the occasional bug, I run into them far less often (days to weeks apart as opposed to hours). Now that Firefox 3 is officially released, I’ve made it my default browser (we’ll see how long that last though).

Default Firefox 3 Theme

Now that I’ve made Firefox 3 my default browser, how do I get around the not so native feeling of the Firefox 3 interface? Turns out there’s a wealth of options to paint your brand spanking new Firefox 3 with a coat of Safari. Lets check them out.

GrApple

This is the foundation to your Firefox Safarification. GrApple if a Firefox theme by Aronnax that pretty much mimics Safari in any way possible. You have two flavors to choose from, Yummy or Delicious. The difference between the two are the placement of the tabs in the tab bar. If your going for authentic Safari, you want Yummy.

Fission

One of the nicest safari features is the integrated loading bar into the address bar. Fission is a plugin that adds this useful feature to Firefox. You have the options of changing the color of the loading bar or adding a custom image, but the GrApple theme takes this into account adds that for you.

Stop or Reload Button

The stop and reload buttons are combined into one button in Safari. This cleans up and simplifies the toolbar a bit (or adds room for even more buttons depending on your taste). Use the Stop-or-Reload Button extension to combine these buttons in Firefox.

firefox-mac-pdf

One of my favorite Safari features is the built in PDF viewing support. The day I don’t need to load up the Adobe Acrobat Plug-in is a good day. The firefox-mac-pdf extension adds this same built in PDF viewing support to Firefox.

Tab to Window

Sometimes you need to pop out a tab into a new window. This often happens to me when I’m referencing content in one tab to fill out a form in another. Surprisingly this isn’t a built-in feature, but here’s an extension to fix that. Safari makes this easy in that you can just drag a tab off the tab bar and it’ll turn into a new browser window. This solution relies on good old contextual menus. Not as fancy, but it’s functional.

Color Management

Safari has great color management support since it reads the color profiles that can be embedded into images. Browsing a site like flickr is different experience in Safari then in any other browser because the colors are displayed “correctly”. Firefox actually has built in color management, but it’s not enabled by default due to performance issues and other small regressions. But the Color Management extension will enable this feature for you if you want to try it out. And I say try it out because I personally don’t recommend using it full-time since I did experience some noticeable performance issues when I had it enabled. The other issue is you need to define your system default color profile and no matter what I did I couldn’t get the colors in the browser to be correct. All colors in the browser, including the toolbar, were dark and over saturated. I’m not an expert on color profiles, so maybe I’m missing something. But the color and performance issues didn’t seem worth having this feature enabled. Which of course is probably why it’s off by default. I only list here as another weapon in your Safarification arsenal. Use it with caution.

Firefox with GrApple Theme and Stop/Reload plugin

Now these add-ons will get you most of the way there. But there will still be things you come across in your day-to-day Firefox use that reminds you of Firefox’s non-native Mac roots.

• There is no integration with the operating system wide keychain for password storage. I’m fully aware of Firefox’s password saving capability (and I use it), but this is functionality that should really be utilizing the system wide keychain. It gets real annoying when passwords are saved in multiple locations and there’s no way to keep them synced. This is probably my biggest Firefox pet peeve.
• Contextual menus have squared off edges and not round. It’s a little thing, but it gives you that “something’s not right” feeling.
• The form controls are not native. They’ve done a lot of work in trying to make them look native, but they still feel a bit off.
• There’s no support for the system wide dictionary. Command+Control+D has to be one of the most under used OS X keyboard shortcuts. I use it constantly, but whenever I mention it or someone sees me use it, they ask “what’s that?”

I know there will be the usual “Just use Camino” comments. I’ve used Camino and I think it’s a great browser. But I rely on Firefox’s web development extensions too much to even consider it.

If anyone has any solutions for the above issues, drop me a comment. I’d love to hear them.

code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

Visualizing the commit history of the Python scripting language project. (via Chris Glass)

I’m a big flickr fan. It’s a great service for sharing and discovering interesting photos. But I’ve always felt browsing around flickr to discover new photos could get a little tiring. You have your standard single page with a photo, previous & next buttons, or a page of paginated photos. Presented in a very basic way that’s similar to the majority of photo-sharing services out there. I usually prefer to view photos in flickr’s slideshow mode because of it’s darker background and larger photos, but this isn’t a great method for discovering new photos or browsing around.

I’ve just stumbled upon a nifty little app called DestroyFlickr (via). DestroyFlickr provides alternative methods to viewing, downloading and uploading photos on flickr. Photos are presented on a dark gray background in a casual format. The app divides itself into several workspaces. You can load various content into each workspace and easily switch between them. For example, you could have you’re photos displayed in one workspace and various contacts photos in the others. The app is built with on the Adobe Air platform, so it will run on either windows or mac provided you have Adobe Air installed.

DestroyFlickr succeeds in making it seem as though browsing flickr is like browsing photos on your own hard-drive. A desktop native feel is given to content that exists entirely online. At times it feels as though I’m using a kind of “Lightroom Light” app for browsing photos on my computer. It’s the first Air based app that I’ve used that doesn’t feel much like an Air app (and that’s a good thing).

DestroyFlickr is still in the beta stage of development and the developer has stated that there are plenty of other features he wants to add, but currently can’t until June 30th because of its submission to the Adobe Design Achievement Awards. It’ll be interesting to watch this app as it develops because there’s a tremendous amount of potential here.

Location based social networking isn’t exactly a new thing. One of the earliest and more popular services in this area was Dodgeball. Dodgeball was eventually bought by Google, but nothing has been done with the service since it’s purchase in 2005. But location based services seem to be on the rise again and Brightkite is one of the newer players on the location based social networking scene.

I was blessed with a Brightkite invite by Mr. Jon Sykes. While Jon has been singing it’s praises, I’ve been more on the fence. Being a big fan of Twitter, I wasn’t sure I needed another Twitter-like service to keep tabs on and update. Plus there’s the selling point of the service, it’s all bout location, location, location. Whenever you’re at a new location, you can check-in via your phone, computer or other mobile device. With your location set, you can then post notes and photos about that location. Notes and photos are essentially twitter-like messages with the ability to post photos. While I can see the value in this for those who work/live in large cities or those who are big into the social scene, it was hard to see the value for someone who’s location may not change that often or who doesn’t have the flexibility to spontaneously meet-up with friends.

Over the past couple weeks I’ve used the service on and off. And honestly, it’s been fun seeing what friends are up to and the photos they’re posting. The challenge for me has been finding where Brightkite fits in my “digital lifestyle”. I already use Twitter for posting short messages and Flickr for posting photos. But lately I’ve been more selective about the photos I post on Flickr and the messages I post on Twitter. I’m not posting as many “going to the store” type of posts to Twitter and I’ve refrained from posting lower quality photos (such as cameraphone) to flickr. But now I’m finding this is the space where Brightkite fits in nicely.

With Brightkite you have various privacy settings available to you. At the high level, it’s public or private. Public is no holds barred. All info about your checkin location will be posted. Private on the other hand has a subset of privacy settings for how to handle your photos, notes and location while you’re in private mode. You could choose to display your exact location to only your friends while the non-friends will only see the city from which you posted. These settings are applied on a per-post basis. So while you’re home you can set your privacy level to private and all posts while in private mode will be marked as such. Then while your out and about getting lunch, set your privacy level to public while you’re at that location. All posts marked private previously will remain private. My only pet-peeve with this is that if you mistakenly post a photo or note as public, you can’t change it to private. You’ll need to delete that post if you’re concerned about the info being public. What I would like to see when it comes to the privacy settings is the ability to set privacy by location. For example, being able say “When I checkin at home, automatically set my privacy level to private”.

I’m now using Brightkite to post the short location based posts I would normally restrain myself from posting on Twitter. Because that post is now within the context of the location it was posted from. And I can set the privacy of that post so only my trusted friends will be able to see it, making Brightkite more personal than something like Twitter. While you can make your Twitter stream private, it’s an all or nothing option, you don’t get the level of privacy controls you get with Brightkite. I’m also using it to post location based photos that I normally wouldn’t be posting on Flickr. In addition to the personal aspects I’m using it for, I can see it being a great tool while traveling or attending conferences.

While I gave Brightkite a hard time at first, I’m beginning to see where it could fit in the current social networking ecosystem. Will I stick with it? Who knows. Ask anyone I know, I’m the most fickle person when it comes to… well, anything. Currently Brightkite is in private beta and is invitation only. I currently have 5 invitations left, so if you’re interested in checking out Brightkite and you want an invite, drop a comment on this post.

iPhone 3G
Very nice. I really dig the white variant. 3G speeds are obviously a good thing. The suits will love the Enterprise Exchange integration and will probably prove to be the killer app of this iPhone. The addition of GPS is huge. This will fuel a slew of awesome location based services. The price drop is very welcome, but still won’t get me to by one since it’s still chained to AT&T.

iPhone 2.0 Software
This is what I was really waiting for since I’m an iPod Touch owner. I was expecting more in the way of new features, but I’m sure the addition of the SDK and App Store will more than make up for it. I’ll be plunking down my $9.95 nominal payment come early July. Oh, and three words. SUPER MONKEY BALL.

MobileMe
.Mac rebranded. The angle this time is “Exchange for everyone”. Which is odd because if by “everyone” they mean people not in an office environment who don’t use exchange, that may be an issue. Because office workers are the only ones who would really know what “Exchange” is. Sure, there’s small business and non-microsoft shops. But they more than likely have their own solutions (Google Apps?). Essentially MobileMe is a glorified way to sync your Address Book, Email & Calendar with your PC, Mac, and iTouch device. I’d call this a minor improvement over the current .Mac and that it falls short of it’s potential.

“I asked him if he’d come up with a few options. And he said “No, I will solve your problem for you. And you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution; if you want options, go talk to other people.””

I have to admit this years Macworld keynote was pretty lackluster. There wasn’t that sense of “Apple’s done it again!”. It was more “Oh, that’s nice”. Anyway, here’s may take on what was announced.

Apple TV Take 2
The new Apple TV looks pretty sweet. With the ability to download content directly to it, sync it with my mac and rent feature films this could easily replace countless stacks of DVD’s in my house as well as move out some media equipment. That is if it would work on my TV. I’m not in the High Def age yet so that leaves me out in the cold. But when the time comes to buy that new TV, an Apple TV will also be in the shopping cart. Out of all the announcements Apple made today, I believe this to be the most significant and exciting.

Time Capsule
This is a fabulous idea and I totally want one. But oh wait, I purchased an Airport Extreme that has the ability to hook up and share a USB hard drive. And before Apple released Leopard, the ability to sync time machine with this connected hard drive was a touted feature. Then when Leopard was released to the wild, the feature was dropped. Awesome, 50% of the reason I purchased the Airport Extreme was dropped. Thanks Apple. The optimistic side of me is hoping that a 10.5.2 update will resurrect this feature and that it wasn’t dropped in order to make selling this product more viable.

iPhone & iPod Touch updates
I don’t have either of these so I really don’t have much of an opinion. But I think charging iPod Touch owners $20 for a software update that provides additional apps that already exist on the iPhone while providing a software update that offers significant new features to iPhone users for free isn’t right. And the fact that all new iPod Touch owners get this update for free doubles that. If I was an iPod Touch owner I’d be pretty pissed.

Macbook Air
It’s a gorgeous machine. Beautifully designed and I love the simplicity of it. But it’s not a sub-notebook. It’s a notebook, just a lot thinner with less features. I think having it as thin as it is with the footprint of the 12” Powerbook would have made this a killer product.

10.5.2 Update
It wasn’t announced or released and it’s the only thing I really wanted. There are a slew of stupid annoying bugs in Leopard and I’m praying it will fix most of them. The most significant of which would be fixing iCal.

While the upgrade to Leopard has overall been a great thing, as with any OS upgrade, there have been some issues. Many of these I listed in my Leopard Observations post. But the most annoying and persistent has been that of iCal not firing off any reminder alarms. I rely heavily on these to remind me of meetings and conference calls and not having the reminders has been a huge pain in the ass. And I’m not the only one with this issue.

I was hoping that the first Leopard point release 10.5.1 would solve this (and other) issues, but it hasn’t. After a couple of quick tests, alarms still aren’t firing… then rage ensues. After taking a deep breath and doing a little digging into the iCal library support files, I discovered two glimmers of hope. alarmsCache.plist and notifications.plist. These two files are located in the /Library/Application Support/iCal directory. After removing these files and restarting iCal, my reminder alarms have miraculously sprung back to life. Hallelujah! I don’t think these files are anything more that cache and preference files, but you never know. So remove at your own risk.

I post this for anyone else suffering from this bug in hopes that it will save you some sanity.

Update: Nevermind. After fixing this several times, after a few days it just reverts back to not working. If anyone has a definitive fix, please let me know.

I’ve been working with Apple’s new operating system for a couple weeks now and figured I’d post up some of my observations.

• The overall level of visual polish is higher then any previous OSX release. The entire system feels more cohesive.
• The new dock is an atrocity. But I rock mine on the left of the screen so I get the much more pleasing alternate dock.
• I thought the new transparent menu bar would bug me, but so far it hasn’t.
• Spotlight is actually usable. Fast enough to make a great app launcher and search results appear faster and seem more relevant.
• The new ToDo’s and notes features in Mail are a great addition and I can see myself using them regularly. But currently they’re almost unusable if your making ToDo’s within Notes. There seems to be a bug that decides to randomly make items you’ve designated as ToDo’s in your notes… to not be ToDo’s but just sentences of text.
• It’s nice having a system wide ToDo’s system. But it would be helpful if they were color coded in mail in accordance to the color of the calendar they’re associated with.
• The new Mail.app is much improved in terms of performance and features. But also suffers from a bug that randomly decides to not show your message in the bottom preview pane unless you select it twice.
• I’m finding Spaces to be super handy. Other’s are finding issues with how it’s been implemented. I understand the issues being argued, but my personal workflow hasn’t really hit it (yet).
• You can now double click an image embedded in an iChat window and it’ll open in preview. This was previously only doable if you’ve installed the Chax plugin.
• iCal is much better at handling Exchange based calendar invites (and changes). Not perfect mind you, but much improved. They also seem to have done away with the asinine requirement of having your email being defined in the invite in order for you to accept it. Which was a tremendous pain in the ass for invites sent to mailing list groups.
• As great as the iCal improvements are, it seems riddled with as many bugs as Mail. My alerts no longer work, which is torture for someone who relies on them. And there are times where it will not allow me to pick the calendar I would like a meeting invite to be placed in.
• When you take a selective screenshot, you now get X&Y coordinates next to your cursor. And when you start creating your screenshot selecting, it displays the height and width of your selection. This is super cool. (And it’s small touches like this throughout the OS that make it awesome.)

There are many other cool new features and a few more minor annoyances, but these are the items I come across and affect me on a day-to-day level.

Interesting… If you use one of these custom Safari 2 builds in Leopard michelf.com/projects/multi-safari/ , you get the older Web Clips icon. It’s non-functioning though.

Fellow Media-Hive cohort Mr. Sykes has launched yet another one of his pet projects. Hexday.com. The concept? Pick a color, but only one. Come back tomorrow and do it again. Rinse. Repeat. Feeling orange today? Or maybe blue? How do your color picks relate to the rest of the community?

This is one of those concepts when pitched to you, you respond with a “huh?” or “why?” or “I don’t get it.” And honestly, I’m in the “I don’t get it crowd”. Yet, the morning rolls by and I pick my color. I check to see what the people I know have picked. Not sure why, but I do. It’s just one of those things.

Future features include buddies, RSS & widgets. But the interesting thing will be once this has been up and running for a period time. Then crunching the colors to see what kind of trends can be found based on time of day, time of the year and how your colors relate to your buddies.

So yes, you’re probably saying “huh?”, “why?” or “I don’t get it.” But that’s also what they said (and some still say) about Twitter. And now they’re struggling to keep up with the volume.

So what’s your color?

Being a parent comes with it’s fair share of lifestyle changes. Most you come to expect in the beginning of your child’s life. Sleepless nights, dirty diapers, screaming, etc. But no one seems to prepare you for the later years. And by later years, I mean 3-6 years old. These are the years your child will set forth into the world of Preschool, Kindergarten and extracurricular activities. Along will all social training you and your child will need to endure learn, there’s one other issue I’d like to highlight. Paper.

Your child will begin to bring home massive amounts of paper in various forms. From sign-up forms, approval forms, book-order forms, class projects, everyday schoolwork and calendars. This massive influx of paper can wreak havoc on a person who’s attempting to wage a war on clutter. But what I would like to talk about are the calendars.

All of the paper goods your child will be bringing into the home will fall into three categories. Trash material: pointless notices (not as much as you hope). Fridge material: recent class projects to show off and reference material always needed on hand (like calendars). Archive Material: Older school projects and long term reference papers like school policies, etc.

My fridge has no less then 4 calendars plastered on it at any one time. You have items like; Normal school calendar (days off, special events, etc), Lunch calendar (what’s for lunch… if it should be “one of those mornings”), karate schedule (the boy), and the dance schedule (the girl). I say no less then 4 because with my wife being a teacher, there’s usually more calendars involved.

Then there’s the regular family calendars. These are thankfully entered nicely into the computer and are shared between the wife and I. These calendars can all be nicely cross-referenced for conflicts and availability. Works a treat in this modern age. What doesn’t work in this modern age is various paper calendars plastered all over my fridge. The solution? Online calendars.

There are various free online calendars that organizations and users can utilize for posting their respective schedules. Google Calendar is my personal online calendar of choice. These calendars can be shared and then subscribed to by the modern technological parents of the world. Thus freeing them (us) from the fury that is paper calendars. (For bonus points, use a calendar that publishes to an “iCal” format. This is a standard format that most modern desktop calendar programs can subscribe to.) One could argo that we could enter in these events into our own personal electronic calendar. Which is something I’ve done with our garbage schedule. But there’s two main issues with this.

The first issue is time. Modern parents can barely make the time to run their family as it is, much less sit down for a couple hours and enter in your child’s Lunch schedule every month. The second issue is accuracy. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a change in any one of your child’s schedules that you were just notified through your electronic calendar?

I know there are organizations and schools out there that already do this. And I applaud you. But unfortunately none of mine do. So please, embrace the online calendar. It will save you time and resources (think of the trees!) and save us, the modern parents of today’s world, the little sanity we have left.

I finally got the new Mac OSX (10.5) Leopard up and running. I had attempted to do a regular upgrade, but that ended in a blank blue screen staring back at me after restart. I attribute that to either the fact that the image size of Leopard is 6.66 GB (the number of the beast!) or more than likely, months ago I installed some third party system level app that I completely forgot about. A quick “Archive and Install” resolved the issue.

First impression, it’s pretty nice. Seems faster (spotlight seems usable!) and there’s some gratuitous visuals that bug me. I’ll post a full observation after putting this cat threw it’s paces over the next couple days.

Update: Turns out my installation issues stemmed from my Logitech trackball driver. Apparently Logitech doesn’t know how to properly write Mac OSX drivers for it’s mice and relies on hackie third-party solutions. Providing users of it’s software hours of fun when trying to upgrade to Apple’s latest and greatest operating system.

I often find myself downloading shareware/freeware/demo applications thinking they’re the greatest thing. Then after a week or two realize they serve no good purpose and abandon them. But I also find that if an app sticks around after a week or two, it’s worth recommending to others.

Here’s a couple applications I’ve come across recently that I think rock. These are small out of the way apps that can make a big impact. And to top it off, they’re free.

Library Books

I’m a big fan of the local library. Not only for reading stimuli, but for audio/video as well. In today’s modern age library catalog lookups, requests and renewals can all happen online in the comfort of your own home via the library’s website. You can also see what you have checked out and when things are due. But what if you didn’t have to check the site?

Along comes Library Books. Library Books allows you to see what’s checked out, when things are due, what you have requested and when your requests are available all from your Mac OS X menu bar. It takes a little configuring to get Library Books to access your local library’s system and it’s still at a very early development stage. But with added features like iCal integration and color coding of overdue items, it’s already a great little app.

Side Note: Pair this little app with The LibraryLookup Bookmarklet which will search your local library from the item’s Amazon.com page and you have a one-two punch of library goodness.

Caffeine

Nothing’s more annoying (or embarrassing) when presenting your big presentation and your screen saver decides to kick in or your computer decides to take a nap. Followed by fumbling through system preferences to turn these features off. Along comes Caffeine. Caffeine is a menu bar item that when clicked prevents your computer from sleeping, screen dimming or screen saver from launching. Once your done, click it again and your computer returns to it’s normal operations.

Twicetab

Since it’s launch as a beta, I’ve been a big fan of Safari 3. While previously I was a dedicated Firefox user, Firefox’s role has been pushed to development use only. But one thing I miss from Firefox is the ability to double click on the tab bar to open a new tab. Twicetab is a little plugin that brings this feature to Safari. It’s a little thing, but makes me feel more at home.