Posted by Justin | Friday, May 29, 2009, 4:31 PM
Ok, so I said I would post a little bit about some cool programs I've been using since I got my macbook. I really only have 2 to report on right now, but I might do a comparison of Parallels vs VMWare Fusion down the line. But maybe not, those come about a dime a dozen.
Cool application #1 : StreamRipperX
For about 4 years I was supporter and hard core user of Real Rhapsody. It's a service that you pay about $15 a month and you can listen to nearly any album out there whenever you want, no charges per song like iTunes. The past year I've been all about Zune Social, but StreamRipperX might curve that a little bit. Pandora.com, Playlist.com, there are tons of palces you can listen to music for free or for a small monthly fee really.
But... StreamRipperX you ask, what is it? You haven't even mentioned anything about it yet?! Well, here I go, I had to give my props to those other great apps, but this one is free. It's a project supported on sourceforge.net, anyone can download it. It ties in beautifully with iTunes Radio. Basically, find your digital radio station you like on iTunes, drag the station over to the StreamRipperX application and hit play. As you play the stream you can rip it along with any metadata information that comes along with the track saving it into your iTunes library. If you have a large hard drive, I say let 'er rip and be off with your good self. Any duplicates that are played wont be doubled up and you can create a huge playlist with in days of songs you love and maybe some you don't. Either way, you have tunes ready to go with you anywhere! So to StreamRipperX, I cheers to you tonight!
Cool application #2 : Adium
Yet another chat program is the first thing that comes to mind when I downloaded this app. I've used many programs that let you connect up to multiple chat servers. I mean, we all use more than one these days. I myself use about 3. So... something like Adium is a godsend. It can be pretty annoying getting popups from random programs from random people randomly. ha. The seemless integration is very cool, then again, most of these things have that.
The first thing I noticed about Adium is how gorgeous it looks compared to most chat apps that seem cluttered, but then again, this is a mac, and most things just look better than my typical PC world experiences. The custom theming is pretty simple to change up gives your Adium even more character than out of the box. The status seems to work perfect across all services as far as I can tell, which is very nice. If you want to be away, busy, whatever, alive and well, it works like a charm. Lots of messengers i've used have really annoying popups in awkward places that I always turn off right away. The growl notification in Adium is one I actaully left on, you get a little jiggle from you icon dude on your menu bar and a little transparent popup on the top right corner of the screen. Totally out of the way. The chat history is also really nice, it's searchable and so easy to use. you can see the chat history for all of your different chat services all from one place. Comes in handy sometimes to reference things, especially if you use it for work. And lastly, if you go to the Adium website, they have a Xtras area where you can get all kinds of cool little widgets and, icons and other random neat things. All in all, if you have a mac, check it out. Although, chances are, I bet you already have this! ha!
So there ya go, another post and a couple uber-licuos apps to check out!
PEace out.
Tags: welcome, blog, MacBook
Categories: Techie
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