Melinda & Cristiano

Starting from today, Mailplane is localized to Dutch. Me and 5 other translators did our best to bring the tool to Dutch, Icelandic, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. All and all the app now runs in 11 languages. Pretty neat!

[Read announcement on Mailplane blog]

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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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Went to the Apple store exactly two weeks ago to have my MacBook fixed. I had a little crack in the topcase (again, third time) and as I was 1 month out of warranty I was hoping to be lucky. Amazingly the Apple Geek was ok with the repair, and even wanted to replace the bottom-case too, which had a very small crack.

As an extra he told me to have a look at my battery, that recently had dropped to a capacity of 59%. After 1.5 week of phoning the Apple Store and complaining about the time it took for them to take care of this “high priority” repair, I was happy to see that they finally managed to repair the topcase, bottom-case, battery and fan on the Sunday before I left for The Netherlands.

Pretty cool how they even decided to replace my battery outside of the warranty. Kudos for Apple again, but please, next time do my repair a bit faster.

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I am a real PDF person. Not because it is a technically cool product or something, but mainly because it is very well integrated in Mac OS X and it makes exchanging documents very easy. Unfortunattely I think that reading a PDF on Mac can be a pain in the ass, so I was very happy that Melinda discovered Skim: A PDF reader and note taker. The full emersive full-screen mode is perfect when you want to read an e-book or just concentrate on the text in general. Best of all: it’s free!

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I really enjoy my new Nikon D40 and as some of you might know I even like to provide all my photos on Flickr with tags, names, sometimes descriptions, and most of the time Geo Tags. But as I keep shooting more photos, keeping track of where I shot them is beginning to become difficult.

So I know that there are small bluetooth GPS devices that can keep track of your location and then later on match the photos with the proper GeoTags. There are many examples online about how to use these GPS devices and most of them are very broad, for me too broad.

Basically all I need is a GPS unit that keeps track of my location throughout a day. It needs to work with a Mac, and if possible the software better have some nice integration with Flickr. Anyone have any experience with this that could help me?

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