I’ve found some great apps since switching to Mac, here are some of them.

• Adium – Free multi-network chat client
• Billings – Time tracking and invoicing app that makes my life a million times easier! Customisable invoice templates and account snapshots make handling costs so much easier.
• Coda – Commercial one window web development app from Panic Software
• Daylite – Commercial calendaring, contact management and email integration – apps to do all this come with OSX but Daylite just ties them together really nicely. Integrates with Billings too for easy invoicing.
• EasyBatchPhoto – Commercial image editing app with all the useful tools – resize, watermark, rename etc.
• Evernote – Free app/service that works with web browsers and mobile phones, letting you clip text and images from webpages and sync everything to the Evernote servers so you can access it from anywhere. Great for filing all the stuff that will useful ‘one day’.
• Fireworks – Adobe graphics app that I use for designing websites. Everyone else seems to use Photoshop, but Fireworks is quicker and easier for me and still gives great results!
• iDrive – Automatically backup your local stuff to their remote servers (Free basic account).
• KeePassX – Free password manager to keep all your URLs, usernames and passwords together.
• Little Snitch – Commercial outbound firewall to stop software contacting websites without your permission.
• MAMP – Free Mac, Apache, MySQL & PHP – Local development environment that mirrors popular web server technologies. Develop your site locally for security and extra speed then transfer to the live server.
• Name Mangler – Free batch file renamer.
• Quicksilver – Free task launcher that starts from a key combo – about a thousand times faster than finding the icon and clicking it.
• Smultron – Free fast, simple text editor with code highlighting.
• Speed Download 5 – Commercial download manager.
• Things – Commercial to-do list app that can be used with GTD principles.
• Transmit – Commercial fast and pretty FTP client from Panic Software.
• Unison – Commercial newsgroup reader that redefines downloading from newsgroups. Also from Panic Software – I love their apps!
• Xee – Lightning fast free image browser that’s much more capable than the OSX Finder or Preview.

When “if (is_home())” or “if (is_front_page())” don’t work, there is another way to do it based on the URL rather than WordPress internal variables that might not work the way you expect:

How to Detect the Front (Home) Page of a WordPress Blog | blog.dt.org.

Just got back from a very informative and well delivered talk on what cloud computing is and why it matters at Nott Tuesday, Nottingham’s tech meetup. Powerpoint can be the worst thing ever, but Simon Wardley made his talk extremely entertaining with liberal use of graphs and kittens.

I have heard cloud computing debates before and it usually gets a bit confusing as everyone confounds what they actually mean by cloud computing, and then go off on a bender about security etc. Simon dispelled common myths about the cloud and laid it all out in simple terms, referencing numerous sources and historical events to explain what the cloud is, what it isn’t and why it is relevant. Check out a version of the talk on Youtube below.

A client tipped me off to this SEO and templating framework and I have had a brief play with it. Basically, it installs as a theme, and then gives you a massive amount of control over your layout by clicking buttons instead of programming it. This means quick theming, and that people who don’t code CSS can theme their own blogs. Nice.

See more at: http://diythemes.com/

A new Zen Cart ecommerce site by FCS Websites launched this week for Zaanti complimentary therapies, Nottingham. Zaanti stores offers organic Aloe Vera products, cosmetics, unique hand crafted gifts, jewellery, books, vintage items and collectables so go have a look!

On a tech note, we completely reskinned the admin system for this project and then released that as a free addon for the Zen Cart community икони