Melinda & Cristiano

Yes, it’s time for Appdate #10, meaning that there are at least 10 cool applications out there for the Mac!

My pick for this Appdate is a simple little application that does something very powerful: it prevents your Mac from getting any sleep. The fitting name that was chosen for this application is Caffeine as it works like a shot of caffeine to your OSX. It measures only 48KB and it can be downloaded for free from here.

The idea behind Caffeine is that there are these moments that you want to prevent your Mac (including the screen) to go to sleep or standby. Some examples for why you would want to do these include reading a PDF on screen, or showing a YouTube movie to friends. In both cases you don’t want to go and touch the mouse every few minutes, and you neither want to go and mess with your power saving settings.

When installed, Caffeine gives you a little icon in your menu bar that can be clicked on to turn Caffeine on/off. It is the simplest app I ever used, but it does something so powerful that I can’t live without it anymore. Thanks to Melinda for pointing this little application out to me.

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Don’t want to wait for BarCampLondon3? Go to BarCampBrighton!

During BarCampLondon2 some people came up with the idea to setup more frequent BarCamps throug the UK, and one of the first places people came up with was Brighton. I personally don’t know that much about Brighton but many people at BarCampLondon2 seemed to be from there so it seems like the place to be.

Register at Upcoming quick because there are only 60 to 80 places and already 59 registrations. Thanks to Dan for noting this BarCamp to me an Ian Forrester and the others for (again) setting up a BarCamp in the UK.

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In response to my comparison between BarCampLondon2 and FOWA before, both Simon Willison and Dan wanted to note that they DID have a nice experience at FOWA. But then Alper came with this nice article on the Kwiqq blog where Raj Anand described his experiences at BarCampLondon2 and FOWA. Nice thing here is that Raj tried to quantify his grief in terms that you and I should be able to understand. I quote:

BarCamp (Tag: BarCampLondon2):

• Flickr: 1,545 results
• SlideShare.net: 10 results
• Google: 93,100 results
• Yahoo: 48,900 results

FOWA (Tag: FowaLondon07):

• Flickr: 930 results
• SlideShare.net: 0 results
• Google: 576 results
• Yahoo: 259 results

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Last week was a quite busy week in London. Many events were planned around the hype that is FOWA (Future of Web Apps conference). I met quite alot of people at BarCampLondon2 that was 2 days before FOWA and stayed in contact with some of the people that went to FOWA afterwords. What I managed to understand about the FOWA experience is that I am happy that I didn’t pay 200 pounds to go there.

The problems where numerous. First of all the organisation was rubish for a payed event. According to Jeremy Keith there was no free WiFi and no free beverages. The atmosphere was therefore kindof below standard which led to many of the FOWA people to be found at other events in the evenings. This is how I met Andre Ribeirinho from Portugal who escaped to the Girl Geel Dinner at Wednesday.

I stayed tuned to all the interesting talks at FOWA with the help of Colin Schlueter and the use of Twitter. I was amazed that most of the interesting speeches where also given at BarCampLondon2 (for example Simon Willison’s OpenID speech), and all the others were regarded as salesmen-talk. I wonder what Dan thought of the event as he was actually not paying but working.

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As we only moved to London recently I thought that attending BarCamp was the best way of meeting new people. So yesterday I motivated Melinda go to the first Girl Geek Dinner of the year. It was a lot of fun and even had a talk with a guy that knew Alper and Colin. Somehow networking here goes fairly easy. Melinda even had a talk with 3 Aussie guys from Google, which was interesting for her network but even more for any future job opportunities?

For the people that I met there I still want to ask them to keep a look at TipIt.to and FourStarters which will be two sites that will becoming more and more interesting in the next couple of weeks.

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