Wednesday, September 23, 2009

20 "Must Have" Mac Apps

Seems like every geek has done a post like this and although I am a bit late to the game, I thought I might share with you all what I thought was my top 20. So here it is in no particular order of importance:

1. Quicksilver - Free

Do you ever find yourself searching for an app that you don't always use in the Applications folder for too long? Do you feel like your dock is getting cluttered up with too many apps to find and launch easily? More importantly, do you feel like the unnecessary switching of your hand to the mouse from the keyboard is unproductive? Here's your solution! This is always one of the first apps I install after installing OS X. it lets you launch any application you have installed in just a few keystrokes. It's every Mac user's essential companion.

2. Adium - Free

This is a multi-protocol IM client. It's essentially pidgin with a cocoa frontend. It's the best multi-protocol chat client out there with a sexy look to it. It however does not currently support video chat and some of the other nonsense features that I personally never use just yet. For video conferencing, Skype does the trick for me.


3. Tweetie - Free w/ Ad's



Hands down the best Twitter client I have used. It's nice and compact and built with usability in mind. Tweetdeck is probably the only other app that is better for certain users but I find that Tweetdeck seems to be only optimized when it takes up too much space on your monitor.

4. iStat Menus - Free

Keep track of your CPU and RAM usage at a glance!

5. Cyberduck - Free

GUI Based File Transferring Software. FTP, SFTP, and Many more! I love using the command line personally but there are certain tasks that helps to have a GUI to work with.

6. Parallels + MS Office Professional - $99.99 + $499 / $60~if you have a friend that works at MS.

Let's face it. As much as I love Macs and love Linux, MS has a huge place in the market. That and there are just certain areas that MS still dominates in features and performance. When you are collaborating with and/or supporting MS Windows users, you just need to have Windows and MS Office handy. Rebooting doesn't cut it. Virtualization is your answer.

7. Dropbox - Free for up to 2GB of Storage

Want a seamless way to share files with friends and co-workers? Or even just a way to work on the same files between your computers no matter where you go? Dropbox is the ultimate solution. Best of all, it supports Windows, Linux, and Mac.

8. OmniGraffle - $99.95 (Standard)

An award winning diagraming program. This is my bread and butter. I have to be able to communicate with my clients visually.

9. The Gimp - Free

Can't justify the cost of photoshop because you are not a professional graphic designer? This is the perfect alternative to Photoshop.

10. MS Office for Mac - $399 / $50~if you have a friend that works at MS.



I am old school and like my e-mail, calendaring, and contacts all in one window. I can't wait for Outlook for mac to come out. Until then, Entourage and a set of native office programs are essential to my day-to-day work life.

11. Colloquy - Free

A free IRC program. Believe it or not, IRC still has a lot to offer. This is where I get help and advice when I encounter issues that my IM friends can't fix. ;)

12. Skype - Free (Prepaid Long-Distance and Local Calling to Regular Phones w/ Low Rates)

This is how I keep in contact with my disparate teams around the world at the lowest cost possible.

13. TextWrangler - Free

Whenever I am not using VIM, this is what I use to take a quick look at code, edit config files, or make notes with.

14 Navicat Lite - Free

Need a gui to display your DB queries in an organized manner that supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Oracle? This is it!

15. Firefox - Free


I have been a Mozilla fan since the beginning and even though 3.5 has been a little slow, my browser usage habits are so tied to Firefox, I find myself still preferring it over faster alternatives such as Safari and Camino. It just feels natural for me to be using Firefox and I think a lot of my friends that might not have as much of an extensive background with Mozilla would agree with me too.

16. SSHFS - Free

This is a utility that allows you to mount a remote file system via SSH. A must have if you work with Linux servers as much as I do. It's also a secure alternative to windows file sharing.

17. TrueCrypt - Free

This utility allows you to create encrypted images to store files that are confidential.

18. Cocoa Packet Analyzer - Free

An alternative packet sniffer to Wireshark for Mac users. Very useful when you are analyzing a network and its traffic.

19. TunnelBlick - Free

GUI utlity for OpenVPN; one of the best VPN solutions I have ever used.

20. Remote Desktop Connection - Free

Need to remotely login to Windows servers? There's a native app for mac! =)

So there you have it! My 20 "must have" apps. It really was hard to narrow down to 20 because there are a lot of other Mac apps that I love and use all the time. Regardless, I had a lot of fun putting this list together. =) Hope this blog entry was useful to you all and I would love to hear your comments.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Fisher Plaza Fire & Disaster Recovery for Web-Based Companies

An interested article by John Cook (@johnhcook) on his venture blog:



How one CTO avoided a Web site disaster after data center fire

The recent fire at the Fisher plaza has caused quite a bit of pain and agony for the IT folks that work for companies hosting their infrastructure at this colo facility and more importantly cost the companies a lot of revenue from being unexpectedly down for extended periods of time. Perhaps, the CEO of Redfin should be applauded for his support of the extra cost the CTO incurs by having redundancy to be prepared for such an uncommon disaster. Then again, they have been burned before which takes a bit of the impressiveness away but still, at least they learned because some will never learn and it was made apparent by this recent fire at Fisher.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Seattle 2.0 Awards


I should have done this post a long time ago but haven't had time due to the new cross bordering project I have been working on as of late. Anyway, Seattle 2.0 Awards was great! Kudos to @calbucci for putting on such a great event! Congrats to @kabir and his team @ Appature on the "Best Boot-strapped Startup" nomination, John Cook at TechFlash on winning the "Best Blog from/about Startup" award, and a huge round of applause to @picnik and its CEO, Jonathan Sposato (whom I finally got to meet) on sweeping up the floor with awards left and right. It's definitely well deserved!

I was also happy to see the evidence of Cheddrmedia gaining quite a bit of visibility in the startups world with the recent launch of twishitter.com, a site powered by their platform. =D You all should check it out... Too funny...

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Ignite Seattle! 6


At the beginning of last week, I promised my biz dev manager that I would start attending more local startup/tech events so we finalized a list of upcoming events that we thought would be interesting and Ignite Seattle 6 ended up being on it. I have been meaning to check out Ignite for many years so with some background knowledge of what it is all about to begin with, I was pretty psyched to finally attend for the first time. It was hosted @ the King Cat theater this time which is supposedly a much bigger venue than where it was hosted before. The organizers must have been glad because the turnout was great! At first most of the titles of tonight's talks didn't really strike me as anything to write home about but to my pleasant surprise, I was pretty engaged at least 80% if the time. I guess I am still a geek at heart huhn? Anyway, here's a good piece of news for you all that thought you missed out on a once a year event: They are going to start doing these quarterly from now on! So it will be sooner than later before you can experience Ignite Seattle too! ;) I am definitely interested in attending again.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Seattle Social Media Tweetup + Meet Chirstine Lu



This is definitely another testimony to @chrispirillo's ability to rally a great turnout. On Friday night, Chris organized a tweetup at Pyrimid Alehouse in SODO for some social media folks local to Seattle. We all had interesting conversations over great beer and also had the pleasure to meet our special guest, @christinelu, founder of China Business Network who happened to be in town with @cfnoble.

It was refreshing for me to re-emerge into the local community in Seattle after having been in Asia for more than a month. I got to meet a lot of likeminded entrepreneurs who gave amazing insight like @caffeinatedSEO and his business partners.

Now that I am back in Seattle for a little while and all the big projects are pretty much over with, I plan to become more active again; both on and offline. Special thanks to @frenzzy, and Carl [who really needs a twitter account... ;)] for coming along with me. It was great times! =)

Speaking of interesting events, Hong Kong Forum is going to be early December this year. This is going to be the first year I am attending. Even though it's so far away still, I am super excited already!

Monday, January 19, 2009

A Good but Slow way to get a logo designed for your company...

Recently, a friend asked me to pick my favorites out of a sample set of logos made for his company. It turns out he was using crowdSPRING.com, an online marketplace for creative services. How it works is you post your need for a creative project and a community of creative professionals will see your post and the ones that are interested will submit their work/samples. I have heard of crowdSPRING (cS) before but never had a chance to really take a look closely but this time around, I had a reason to actually use it.



My first reaction was that the site was slow and unresponsive. The usability wasn't top notch either. However, at the end of the day, it still got the job done. I think the people at cS have come up with a great idea but their engineering / IT team has a ways to go to to make this a product that I will actually enjoy using.

There's one other thing that I am a bit puzzled about and it could be because I haven't had the time to dig deeper. That is what if I don't find something that I like out of all the submits for my posted project? Am I still required to pick one and pay? What governs the quality assurance aspect of this marketplace?

BBC News: Windows Worm Numbers "Skyrocket"

Over the weekend, I received an abnormal amount of calls from friends about not being able to boot their computers. Turns out that most of them have caught malicious worms that have recently been flying around via e-mails and live messenger. Some of them might also derive from users that seem to use a lot of BT. Here's the pattern that identifies the similarities between all the victims I have spoken to over the weekend: All of them didn't have proper anti-virus protection installed on their computers and that most of them at the same time also use their computers for important business functions along side personal usage. Mean while, this article popped up on BBC:



With the rising number of malicious viruses and worms out there, here's my 2 cents:

Go get a copy of AVG. It takes care of both viruses and spyware while being low on resource consumption. Keep that up-to-date religiously, and also keep your windows updates coming. This is a simple solution that has worked very well for most of my clients and friends that take my advice. *knock on wood* ;) That said, nothing is full proof but security practices are all about reducing risk rather than attempting the impossible; complete elimination. Even so, you will loose quite a few less gray hairs as long as you do your due diligence on reducing risk.

Monday, January 5, 2009

Soonr: Powerful cloud services platform

It has been a while now and I have heard numerous times, "You never update your blog anymore!" So I am going to try to pop my head back up out of the water. Since I last updated, I decided to give in and purchased an iPhone because my Samsung Blackjack II was starting to act up after being dropped in the washer... I know... don't ask... =P I must say though, I am pretty impressed with the iPhone and am generally very happy with it. I also got used to the soft keyboard pretty quickly just like everyone told me I would. However, there are still 3 grips that I have about the iPhone which has probably been written all over the web already:

1. No MMS support...
2. Lack of bluetooth capabilities
3. No video recorder unless you hack the hell out of your iPhone (subjective)

In any case, back to the main topic. I recently ran across Soonr, a "desktop to cloud to iPhone" technology/service via Venture Beat.



I finally gave it a try today and thought that it works amazingly well. This is definitely something that can prove to be useful in a collaborative environment especially since a lot of my co-workers and friends all have iPhones as well. I also have a few documents that I constantly update like my billable hours that I some times would like a quick glimpse of w/o having to open up my laptop while I am on the road which I can now do with Soonr. Best of all, the service is free! Now I just hope that they come out w/ some simple document editing features so I can also do last minute edits and such on the fly. Give it a try and let me know what you all think! =)