Jumping Ship

Hey folks, it’s been awhile. With school back in full swing, I haven’t had much time for posting, but I’ve had plenty of time to use my MBP and offer some more feedback. In addition, the new version of Mac OSX, Leopard, is now available to the general public. The initial reviews for Apple’s new OS have been overwhelmingly positive, and I’m looking forward to receiving my free copy in the mail (thank you Student Developer Program!).

Moving on, I’ve recently been toying around with taking all of my notes digitally, and the good news for mac owners is the app that I have found works best you will probably already have installed on your machine. Omnioutliner, produced by the amazing guys over at The Omni group, is a simple yet powerful outlining program that’s great for class notes, to-do lists, and even writing novels. This program makes it very easy to take detailed notes in my classes, and has the added bonus of being dynamically searchable (similar to spotlight), so that when I want to go back and review for an exam, all I have to do is type in the first few letters of the term or concept I’m looking for, and it takes me right to it. I’d gladly pay the $40 for the software, but the fact that it comes bundled with all new macs (as of Tiger, not sure about the new Leopard software kits) gives you all the more reason to open your Apps folder and give it a whirl.

Speaking of time-saving apps, here’s a simple yet effective app in the most unlikely of places…backups. SuperDuper! (despite the somewhat lame name ;p) is actually one of the best backup apps I’ve ever used, for one primary reason: before each backup session, it tells you exactly what it is going to do in plain English. Now, I feel that I’m pretty technically inclined, but when I’m looking at a bricked laptop with a midterm to review for (yes, I did seriously crash my mac to a barely bootable state, but it was entirely my doing…I was messing with the core GUI/studying/watching a movie/eating a sandwich simultaneously…a very bad idea in retrospect), it’s nice to know that the program is accommodating to my panicky state. In one simple step, I hooked up an external hard drive that I rigged from an old IDE internal hard drive, and overnight had it restore my mac to a state prior to the crash. It was refreshingly effective, sort of like what system restore is supposed to do for windows. The rollback was more effective, however, because superduper actually formats the drive first before it moves the stored image back onto the drive, making the end result what you would expect. All in all, a real lifesaver, and worth every penny (read: free). It will be interesting to see how well this program fits in with the new Time Machine feature in Leopard, but I’m sure there will always be a place for third-party backup utilities so long as there are paranoid people like me.

Well, that’s all for now…thanks to those of you who have linked to me, it’s nice to see that my info is useful to some of you out there!