i heard about this little gem on macbreak weekly. as an aside, all of leo’s podcasts are entertaining and informative even if you’re not really into the subject matter. every week the guests have ‘picks of the week’ where they recommend a piece of hardware or software.

a few weeks ago they recommended the flip camcorder. i finally got around to ordering one on the weekend, and it was delivered today.

basically it’s a solid state video camcorder (ultra series records 60 min of 640×480 video) that runs on 2 AA batteries, the ‘flip’ part comes from the flip out usb connector. works with both mac and windows. price is around $150 (depending on where you buy it). this with a copy of visualhub (another macbreak weekly pick of the week), a stack of blank dvd’s, and a mac of course (complete with iMovie), and you’re the next tarantino… or you’re the person who’s avoided at the next family get together.

i have a digital camera but i know i don’t use it nearly as much as i’m going to use the flip camcorder…

i can only assume the next step in this products series will be including an sd card slot. i think the company should seriously consider that before cranking up the resolution. i haven’t been this excited about a toy in a long time

i was going to title this post “onenote for mac”.

the one program i missed the most after dumping windows and moving to the mac platform was ms onenote 2007. i seriously missed it.

i tried jpad which is a treepad like program written in java. it hasn’t been updated to keep up with the new treepad formats, and doesn’t really ‘feel’ like treepad. i didn’t have it installed for very long.

the evernote guys are now supporting mac, and the mac version is better than the windows version i was using. still in beta but a pretty good note taking program.

this brings me to notebook. it’s a lot like onenote 2007…but better. a LOT better. i’m pretty sure notebook is what onenote wants to be when it grows up. AND (it just gets better it’s a third of the cost. that was suprising given that mac equivalents to windows programs tend to be twice the price.

anyway, if you need note taking software for your mac and want it to feel like note taking software, plus do everything onenote does (and more) then notebook is your program.

and to save yourself a read of the manual, go through the video tour, if you have any memory rentention for what you see, this should be all you need to be productive with notebook.

it’s now my new favorite piece of software

mac’s os x is seven years old now. and the os itself has been around since 1984.

and for 24 years editors have sucked on it. at least that’s my impression because the best editor sitting on my mac right now is boxer… a windows program (running under crossover)

i downloaded macvim (that link seems to be more up to date than the actual macvim page), but i must have done something funky with the install because it doesn’t seem to recognize anything i put in my .gvimrc… i’ll give it another try before i give up on it completely.

the ide side seems to be ok. between komodo and netbeans i can work with my favorite languages.

BBEdit doesn’t really do much for me… neither does textmate… both are underpowered compared to what i’m used to.

so far i like jedit. there’s a slickedit for the mac, but those guys are charging funny prices.