Applications

Ever since giving up last year and jumping into the social network fray I've been looking for a good status update viewer and aggregator. I'm trying to keep up with updates from a growing list of family, friends, and peers on Twitter, Facebook, and occasionally Flickr. I'm using Ping.fm to cross post status updates. I've tried the dedicated clients and plugins, but none worked for me quite as well as EventBox.

It's amazing how reliant I've become on key strokes, especially when it comes to graphics editing. A few months back I noticed that holding down the shift key in Adobe Illustrator no longer constrained items to 45, 90, or 180 when moving and that spacebar + command didn't bring up the magnify option. My initial search yielded nothing, probably because my brain was mush and incapable of putting together logical search phrases. I haven't needed to do much work in Illustrator until recently so I tried the search again and low and behold, a solution!

I just finished poking around in the blogging client ecto and liked it so much that I purchased a license. It's interface is uncluttered, relatively intuitive, and the clincher was the price--just $17.95 vs. MarsEdit's price tag of $24.95. Those windows users reading this can consider Ecto as your blogging client too.