Download from here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html.

Scarlett

This is the app which won my patronage Reason: the name (Scarlett reminds me of the Scarlet Letter and Scarlet Pimpernel), the application-icon, and the ability to listen to the eBook.

Bookle

First the history: Bookle app is developed in collaboration by Adam Engst of TidBITS and Peter Lewis of Stairways Software. The book-publisher / author and software pro programmer combination is hard to fail. The app also features a library interface, allowing you to access your books from the app interface itself. In my list of software to try!

Book Reader

There is a nice video where the features are shown:

The next in Amazon’s cloud offering: Cloud Search [Blog explaining the service]. I am not very much impressed the instance model of the service. I would love to see a service where I am charged based on my query traffic and index size.

End December 2011 I bought my first Mac. It was bought out of frustration of traveling with my Win 7 Lenova laptop. It crashed during a trip and my work got stranded. I also have a reliable Ubuntu laptop, but my work increasingly demands tools like MS Office and proper diagramming software like Visio.

Since buying my first Mac, I have been glued to it, and tried so many excellent software which comes with it. Out of this selection to softwares, the things that I mention as essential for me are listed below.

Office Suite

1. MS Office 2011

MS Office 2011 has become indispensable for me. But I miss One Note which is not available on the Mac.

2. Pages

One of my unachieved dreams is of becoming a book author. And guess what, Pages has a cool export-to-epub feature!

3. OmniGraffle

Diagramming tool for me.

Text Editors

1. Smultron 4

The logo, iCloud integration, fullscreen mode and syntax-color support for many languages: all this was irresistible for me!

2. TextMate

XML formatting and syntax color support for Java properties file were missing in Smultron.

3. iA Writer

This brought back memories of Wordstar. A strip-down editor which allows to focus only on the content. This has become indispensable for me.

Web Development

1. RapidWeaver

The choice was between RapidWeaver, Sandvox and Freeway Express. After a quick evaluation of all three, I picked up RapidWeaver. RapidWeaver had a good extension API and had many excellent third party extensions (but all of them pretty pricy). I don’t repent on my choice.

Image Editing

1. Pixelmator

I am not a UI guy. And Pixelmator had all the features I needed from a graphic application.

2. ImageWell

A cute app for quick editing and resizing.

Screenshot

1. Sequence

A small app with lifetime-free upgrade. The UI needs some exploration to understand.

2. Skitch

A very nice free app now in Evernote stable.

Utilities

1. Zip View Pro

I hated the default Finder operation of extracting the zip file. This software gives Windows like functionality of viewing and extracting zip files.

2. Path Finder

I was also annoyed by the behavior of Finder when pressing Enter after selection of a file: Finder gives the option of renaming the file. Couldn’t accept this misfeature of Mac. Path Finder is a nice alternative to the default Finder.

One important factor of choosing an online service is about data. Is my data safe? Can I pull out my data any time when I decide to stop using the service? Both are important factors I consider when choosing a service. Services from providers like Google have their brand name, and I blindly know that they keep my data safe. But what happens when you sign up for new services?

FileIt.in is now providing this safety-net for you now. You may export your data anytime (in Atom format). This is if you want to migrate from FileIt.in to any other service, or if you just happen to be cautious and want to have another backup (FileIt.in has nightly backup scheduled).

Please accept my apologies for not updating this site frequently! Well, as many would have guessed, I was totally engaged in a project: FileIt.in. I created FileIt.in for my own purposes of storing study notes, sharing them with others using various social networking tools. Registration (you may directly login using your Google or Yahoo! account) is free. So try it out

For the technically curious, the technology behind FileIt.in is discussed in this post. It is running in a 256MB RAM Ubuntu VM.

Last few days I have been playing with various NoSQL databases. One DB which attracted me because of its beautiful API is Neo4J. To test out it’s API, I created a sample cli-blog application. People interested in the source code can get it here: http://code.google.com/p/subwiz/source/checkout.

Today I converted the WizTools.org commons-lib project from the mini-projects site to a separate project. This involved the migration from the svn repository to a hg one. The sequence of steps I did:

$ sudo apt-get install hgsvn
$ hgimportsvn http://wiztools.googlecode.com/svn/commons-lib/trunk wiztools-commons-lib
$ cd wiztools-commons-lib
$ hgpullsvn
# Edit .hgignore and commit it
$ cd ..
$ hg clone wiztools-commons-lib wiztools-commons-lib-remote
$ cd wiztools-commons-lib-remote
$ hg push https://wiztools-commons-lib.googlecode.com/hg

Recently I posted in Twitter that my favorite DVCS is bzr. Immediately Manish asked me why not git or hg. Here is the answer:

git

I love GitHub. I use git regularly. But when compared to bzr, I love bzr more. Why? I find git’s SHA based version numbering cryptic. The default installation of git does not support command shortcuts (like st for status, ci for commit) which I am used to from my svn days (fact: this can be manually set using git alias).

hg

This choice does not have any rational backing! I did not like odd-sounding hg in the command prompt. bzr sounded more natural to me.

If you are one of the old-timers who has migrated to Ubuntu from RedHat/Fedora distribution in the past, you might be familiar with the ntsysv tool in those Linux versions. I used to use that oddly-named tool to switch-on/off services in my Linux box. I was searching for a similar tool for Ubuntu, and found rcconf:

$ sudo apt-get install rcconf
$ rcconf