Davide Di Cillo

Posts Tagged ‘Review’

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Things I use: my menu bar collection

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Icons of Notify, Dropbox, Little Snitch, CloudApp, MagicPrefs, Snippets, Alfred, Air Display

As you can see from the image above, I have a quite few application icons in the menu bar of my Mac, so I decided to write a post about them. I think those are really great application and I’m sure some of you could find them helpful too. From the left:

Notify: It’s a really minimal email client, that completely run from your menu bar, you can read and send email, perfect for quick emailing, and it also links you to your mail application. Perfect if you use Gmail or other web email services.

Dropbox: This is my main file sharing platform. I use this daily to share files with the rest of 39′s team so we always have the latest version of what we are working on. And you don’t have to do anything, just add it to your Dropbox folder and it just works.

Little Snitch: It’s a great application to make sure that anything can go in or out from your Mac without your permission, and also monitor your network usage.

CloudApp: This is another file sharing tool, just simply drag a file to the icon and it will be uploaded to a server and the link to it will be placed in your pasteboard. I mostly use the screenshot feature, so that every time I make a new screenshot, it automatically uploads it to the cloud and creates a link to it.

Snippets: I use this application to manage all my snippets of code or portion of test I need to use often. It has a great shortcuts support and it makes writing boring stuff (code included) much faster.

Alfred: This is a quicklaunch application (similar to Quicksilver), really fast, beautifully designed. I’m so used to it that I use it even to switch to already opened applications.

Air Display: This is the latest addition to my menu bar. This application lets me use my iPad as an external monitor over wifi. Really handy if you ask me.

I hope some of these apps could help you as well. Now the question is: what’s in your menu bar?

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Posted in Apple | View Comments

Gity, a Git client for OS X

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Since we started working on Get Apps Done, I had to deal with Git. I never used Git before that, but Heroku, a great platform for hosting Ruby on Rails projects, forced me to. Using Git isn’t too complex, but when you start getting errors or merging problems, then a nice interface would be very helpful. The first client I tried was Git GUI, not really an eye candy but it was getting the job done, but still it didn’t offered me a nice and clear interface for Git. GitX, another Mac OS X Git client, was definitely a great UI improvement, but it was somehow incomplete for what I needed. Finally I recently discovered Gity, in my opinion, a very well done Mac OS X client. The interface is very Apple-ish, and it makes easier to solve problem even for a designer like me. While it had a $18 price tag until recently, now Gity is free and open source, and you can download it from Mac Endeavor’s site.

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Posted in Developing | View Comments

iPhone Application Sketch Book Review

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Links to the mentioned products:
iPhone Application Sketch Book
iPhone Stencil Kit

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Posted in Apple | View Comments

Two weeks of Magic Mouse

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Apple Magic MouseIt has been about two weeks since I received the Magic Mouse I won thanks to Mobclix, so I thought I’d share with you my impressions.

First of all, the object is beautiful. It could sit on my coffee table in the living room, and my guest would never guess it’s a mouse. As far as functionality, I think we are facing an evolution jump as big as switching from a mouse with a track ball (do you remember them?) to a laser mouse. No more cursing when the page doesn’t scrool, no more experimenting with new ways of cleaning the scroll-ball, it just works… Beautifully and flawlessly. When you first start using the mouse, the shape could make it a bit uncomfortable; it’s significantly flatter than its predecessor, and the movement to scroll the pages could feel awkward, but after a few days you won’t notice it anymore, and you’ll soon wonder why no one thought of this earlier.

On the downside, Apple decided to remove two of the four buttons: the middle and the “squeeze” buttons. Honestly, if I didn’t win the mouse I wouldn’t buy it for that exact reason. Button 3 and 4 were my access to Exposè, and I just couldn’t live without it. As far as multi-touch control, Apple only gives you two buttons (left and right), the 360 degrees scroll and a double swipe left and right to control the browser history and other stuff, like iChat tabs or to scroll through your e-mail messages in Mail. I was actually surprised Apple didn’t take more advantage of some functions they already enabled for the Macbook’s touchpad, such as multiple-finger movements to trigger Expose and Spaces. But luckily, just a couple of days ago, I found an awesome software that lets me set up all sort of multi-touch gestures and now I fully control Expose and more simply by “caressing” my mouse. I’m sure Apple will release an official driver to do all these things soon, but for now I’m happy with how Magic Mouse and BetterTouchTool are working together.

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Posted in Whatever | View Comments

Clicky Web Analytics Review

Friday, November 28th, 2008

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled on Clicky, a analytic service and so I decided to give it a shot.

Click here to visit Clicky official site.

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Posted in Whatever | View Comments

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