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Further to my post which included details of NovaMind— if you’re looking for some Mind Mapping software and don’t want to spend any money, you should investigate FreeMind. It’s available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux,… in fact any OS with a JVM (because it’s a Java app). It works great, but it has fewer features than NovaMind.

One of the nice things about Open Source software is the developers by and large aren’t bothered that users might somehow find out about a competing product and switch to it. In fact they are usually quite open about other products already available. If you take a look at the FreeMind Wiki pages you’ll find an entry for Alternatives to using FreeMind, which lists some other free and commercial Mind Mapping programs. I see that sort of thing quite often on FOSS sites, and it always makes me smile. You just don’t normally see information like that on commercial software sites.

Since my earlier post I’ve bought a couple more apps, and upgraded another.

• NovaMind
  I work for a company which has thankfully embraced Mind Mapping as a valid way of sharing ideas. Of course, the rest of the office is using Windows, and those that Mind Map use Mind Manager. I paid just over £50 for my copy of NovaMind, considerably cheaper than Mind Manager. It imports and exports Mind Manager files as well. It’s amazingly easy to use, and you can do some cool text effects with just a few mouse clicks. The only thing I wish it had was a library of images to use for the start image of the map (with mind mapping, it’s recommended to start with a vibrant image in the centre, which should ideally be in at least 3 colours). It can import images from iPhoto— maybe I should create a library of suitable images there.
• VoodooPad 2.0 (Flying Meat Inc.)
  VoodooPad is fantastic! I urge you to download a copy of the free version, VoodooPad Lite. I upgraded to the full version the next day, it was so obviously worth the money. I use this most days now. It’s really handy for making notes, as it’s really easy to hyperlink everything together. I called my first document “Jon’s Development Wiki” but it turns out I’ve just put everything in there. Why bother creating separate documents? It’s easier to have your whole life linked together in one.
• Notebook v2.0 (Circus Ponies)
  I haven’t actually bought this because I already own it, but a new version has been released and my 1.2 license still works with it. Yet again it looks impressive, although it still has a bewildering array of preferences, inspectors, and nested configuration screens. It’s laden with features though, maybe this version will be the one that gets me using it regularly?

The default key bindings for the home and end keys in Mac OS X are different to any other operating system I’ve ever used. By default, they seem to be bound to the viewport, rather than the line of text you are editing. In a multi-line document, the Home key scrolls up to the top of the document, and the End key scrolls down to the bottom. In each case the caret stays where it was.

As a programmer I find this behaviour to be just plain wrong— I want Home and End to move to the start and end of the current line.

I have found a way to “fix” this problem by editing the default keybindings file, ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict. Create the directory and / or the file if they’re not already there, and make it look like this:

{
        /* Remap Home / End to be correct :-) */
        "\UF729"  = "moveToBeginningOfLine:";                   /* Home         */
        "\UF72B"  = "moveToEndOfLine:";                         /* End          */
        "$\UF729" = "moveToBeginningOfLineAndModifySelection:"; /* Shift + Home */
        "$\UF72B" = "moveToEndOfLineAndModifySelection:";       /* Shift + End  */
}

If there are already entries in DefaultKeyBinding.dict, just add the 4 new mappings above to the main section of your file.

The only piece of DOS or Windows shareware that I ever registered was a message editor for FidoNet called GoldEd.

Through many years of Linux usage, I was sort of proud of the fact that I didn’t need to buy any software for it, because everything I needed was available as Open Source. In a previous job I did buy an excellent piece of Linux backup software called Arkeia.

Since switching to Mac, I have bought the following software:

Shareware

Applications

• Notebook (Circus Ponies)
  I hardly ever use it to be honest.
• OmniGraffle Pro (The Omni Group)
  Very useful for doing nice network diagrams for work. I also used it to make a plan of my bathroom at home.
• Ecto (Kula Co, Ltd.)
  Using it right now. :-) It’s a nice way to keep my blog posts organised, but I hate the way it messes up all of my carefully hand crafted HTML if I switch to Rich Text mode.
• Pulp Fiction (Freshly Squeezed Software)
  It starts up when I log in and runs all day. Without it I’d spend a lot more time clicking around the web.
• Letter Star (Objectpark Software)
  I hardly ever use it, but when I do it does its job with no fuss
• Aqua Data Studio (Aquafold Inc.)
  Java version of MS SQL Server Manager. I use it quite often at work.

Utilities

• Menu Calendar Clock (Objectpark Software)
  Runs on bootup, I don’t use its “special features” all that much, but I appreciate the fact that I can customise the time format in the menu bar. I have (at the moment) “Fri 4 Feb 12:26”
• Side Track (Raging Menace)
  Superb piece of work! I can’t live without the side scroll-wheel emulation.
• Salling Clicker (Salling Software AB.)
  I used to use it loads, now not so much. Now I’ve got iWork I might use it more so I can control Keynote from my phone.
• Audio Hijack Pro (Rogue Amoeba)
  Comes in handy every so often. Nice for archiving material from the BBC Radio player.
• Konfabulator (Pixoria Inc.)
  It was a cool gadget for a week or so. Then I just got bored with it. These days I never use it.
• xScope (ARTIS Software & The Iconfactory)
  It works great when I don’t have an external monitor plugged into my PowerBook. When I do, xScope crashes when the Loupe tool moves across to the other screen. I’ve reported the bug twice over the last year, and even had an email confirmation of the bug, but they still haven’t fixed it.

Commercial Applications

• iLife ‘04 (Apple)
• iLife ‘05 (Apple)
  I use iPhoto quite a lot. I ordered my first Photo “Book” the other day. I bought a DV Camcorder just after Christmas so I’ll be making a lot more use of iMovie and iDVD soon.
• iWork ‘05 (Apple)
  I’ve only just got this, but it looks really good. I’m working on a presentation in Keynote, and I’ve written a few letters in Pages.
• Quicktime Pro (Apple)
  Well worth it and only a few quid.
• Photoshop Elements 2.0 (Adobe) (came bundled with a Wacom Graphire 3 graphics tablet)
  I don’t use the tablet as much as I thought I would.
• Photoshop Elements 3.0 (Adobe)
  I wish I could afford the full version of PhotoShop. Every tutorial ever written seems to assume you’re not using Elements. The main thing I wish Elements had was guides.

I don’t know what this proves. Mac users buy more software? Mac users don’t mind paying for good software?

At some point I should dig out the receipts and add up what I’ve spent so far…

How much did the MWSF Keynote cost you?

Answer: £98. I ordered iWork 05 and iLife 05 last night as soon as I’d finished watching the keynote. Which took until 2am because the rest of the world was also trying to watch it.

The 1GB iPod shuffle can also serve as a plain 1GB USB memory stick, so I’ll probably get one at some point. It would also be nice to replace the Windows box in the basement with a Mac mini. It’s pretty much only used by my kids for browsing Cbeebies.

I use Command-Up and Command-Down in Safari all the time. They are equivalent to the home and end keys, but they are a lot easier to use because there is a Command key right next to the arrow keys on my PowerBook keyboard, but the fn key is the other side of the keyboard and therefore needs two hands. Another pair of useful keystrokes is Command-Left (Back) and Command-Right (Forward).

To make these work in Firefox, you have to edit one of the files, /Applications/Firefox.app/ Contents/MacOS/res/builtin/platformHTMLBindings.xml.

Open that file in an editor and find the section that starts <binding id=”browser”>. Inside that section you’ll see a load of <handler event=”keypress”… lines. Add the following lines somewhere in that section:

<handler event=”keypress” keycode=”VK_UP” modifiers=”accel” command=”cmd_scrollTop”/>
<handler event=”keypress” keycode=”VK_DOWN” modifiers=”accel” command=”cmd_scrollBottom”/>
<handler event=”keypress” keycode=”VK_LEFT” modifiers=”accel” command=”Browser:Back”/>
<handler event=”keypress” keycode=”VK_RIGHT” modifiers=”accel” command=”Browser:Forward”/>

Save the file and restart Firefox to apply the changes. Don’t forget though, because you’ve edited one of the files included in Firefox.app, if you upgrade Firefox you’ll need to apply the changes again. There is supposed to be a mechanism whereby you can make the change in your user profile directory, but that feature is currently broken.

At the weekend I returned home after spending a couple of weeks on my hols in North Wales. After unloading the car, I gave my web server a kick. A few days into the first week we had a power cut, which wouldn’t be a problem normally but the server got stuck during the BIOS check. It was complaining that the cover had been previously opened. Would it have been too much trouble to incorporate a timeout into the message so it could have booted up unattended? Cheers Dell!

I took my PowerBook with me on holiday, as I needed somewhere to upload my digital photos. That’s what I told my wife anyway. I stayed disconnected for a few days, then couldn’t stand it any more and worked out how to connect to the net via GPRS on my mobile, over BlueTooth to the powerbook. It worked well enough, but it always took two or three tries before it connected, and the connection timed out about a minute of idle time, which was quite frustrating.

A colleague brought in a load of ogg files. Could he play them under iTunes? No problem! Here’s how:

1. Go to the QT Components SourceForge page and download the plugin (there are versions for Windows and Mac
2. Inside the disk image you’ll find a readme file and OggVorbis.component. Put OggVorbis.component in /Library/QuickTime (as described in the readme)
3. Restart iTunes and it will work!

Ogg files now import into iTunes, and most of the metadata works as well. If you “Get Info…” on an ogg file you’ll find it listed as a QuickTime movie file. You won’t be able to attach artwork.

Apple recently announced that the next version of Mac OS X (codenamed Tiger) will include the Blojsom blog package.

Since I am both a Mac user, and a Java developer (Blojsom is written in Java) I decided to download the latest version and try it out.

Up until now I’ve been using geeklog, which is fine and all that, but to be honest I’ve never been particularly fond of PHP. I don’t like the way that the site content and logic is all crammed together in each file. I’ve only just started to scratch the surface of Blojsom, but it seems to use a much more favourable design, with pages built up from Velocity templates.