Switching to British English on Mac OS X
April 12th, 2011 by ravi

UPDATE: On MacOS Sierra, after you have set your language preference using System Preferences -> Language and Region, you can then go to Text Preferences under Keyboard settings to follow step 3 (and onward) from below.

If like me you have not yet learnt to drop the ‘u’ from ‘colour’, then you might have noticed that Mac OS X Snow Leopard makes it annoyingly difficult to switch the system language preference, especially for spell checking (worse, I suspect the interface for spell check language settings is buggy). To that end, below is a quick outline of the steps I used to switch to British English (click on the small images to see the full version).
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My search for a tasks+notes app
March 29th, 2011 by ravi

I have been searching for an app that lets me quickly write notes that also double as tasks – and therefore could use a due date/time and reminder alarm. There is the built-in “todo” capability in OS X iCal, but not only does it sport a terrible UI, it is also dismal at syncing across computers (this feat can be accomplished, as far as I know, only by the hack of storing such Todos on an IMAP server). Below is a summary of my quirky search for such a tool. Quirky because the authors of these apps could justifiably object that their app is being unfairly evaluated here. For example, Day One is a journal application, not a note-taking app, much less a task manager. At the same time, there are candidates, like JustNotes, that have a reasonable claim to appear on any such list. But nevertheless, here they are:

  • MyTaskNotes: Mac notes and tasks app
  • Evernote: multi-platform note manager
  • Wunderlist: multi-platform task manager with sharing
  • Notificant: multi-system notification for Mac and web
  • Day One: daily journal app for Mac and iPhone
  • 2Do: an iPhone task manager with sync to OSX/Windows

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Sequel Pro now supports SSH
September 23rd, 2009 by ravi


Say you are not a PC. And you use MySQL in some manner that is compliant with the rules and ordinances of your community. And you are part of the dying breed that considers web GUIs nice and all, but a native client application is where it’s at. Then, the go to tool on the Mac for your MySQL interaction needs was CocoaMySQL. And if you thought the awesomeness of this tool could not be improved on, you didn’t reckon on SequelPro, the son of CocoaMySQL. And the hits keep on coming. The latest version (0.9.6) delivers on the SSH tunnelling capability that has always existed as a teaser in the UI. Did I already say awesome?

Snow Leopard gets less elusive
August 24th, 2009 by ravi

Mac OS X Snow Leopard Logo

Image by Dekuwa via Flickr

The fanboy sites are buzzing today with the news that Apple has announced Aug 28th as the release date for the next version of their operating system. This one is called Snow Leopard and I won’t even attempt to go head to head with the likes of TUAW and John Gruber in trying to tell you all that is awesome about it… so go read what they have to say.

Me, I am wondering what tools I use currently will be replaced by new features that are built into Snow Leopard. For instance, text replacement is now built into the OS, voiding the need for Typinator. Tools that display date in the menu bar can be given the short shrift as well, though some of them support additional features (e.g: interface to iCal). Can the most excellent Formulate Pro be upstaged by the new Text annotation tool and other features in Preview? Will QuickTime X edge out video conversion tools? If you give me $29, I can let you know on Friday! ;-)

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