The Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Student edition will bring you an updated version of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint which will set you back about $150 from Apple which is for the “Family Pack” which allows you to install it on three Macs! While the Microsoft Office for Mac Home/Business edition will bring you an updated version of Outlook, Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. This version will set you back around $200 for a single license but if you would like two licenses then it’ll cost you around $280 from Apple.com

You can head over to Apple.com and order it, right now!

Notational Velocity is an application that stores and retrieves notes. It is described as a modeless, mouse-less Mac OS X note-taking application.

I’ve tried many notes application starting from Mac OSX’s own Sticky, to the once-paid-but-now-free xPad to the heavy-weight Evernote and few others in between which didn’t really caught on to me. xPad came very close to be being my ultimate note-taking app and I even paid for it. Evernote is an awesome application but I’ll categorized it as a heavy-duty utility rather than just a note-taking app. Its being mentioned here as it can and do take notes. However, its an overkill for just ‘note-taking’. I use Evernote more to collect/archive documents, adding notes on top of them and syncing it across computers and devices for reference from multiple location.

Notational Velocity

NV is an app with a simplistic approach to usage with some kick-ass features. Its primary focus is that you’ll just search, if found, it goes there else creates a new note if required. The content is compressed and encrypted (optional). Once you got used to the few keyboard shortcuts, you’ll feel at ease with your keyboard and mouse interaction is not needed for most of your task. There is no concept of “Save” in NV, its just saves as you type.

How does it work

You just type in the search area. Press return to add a new note with that title. While you type, NV searches for notes whose body or title contain your words. Observe that naming a note and searching always occur simultaneously.

When you select one of the found notes (e.g., using the up/down keys) NV displays its body in the lower text area (what you’re reading now). If you had typed the beginning of a note’s title, NV would have selected that note automatically.

Just try and get used to few of the keyboard shortcuts and you’ll be all set. Most of them are pretty similar to what you do everyday, like going to the search/address bar in your browser (Firefox, Chrome)

Synchronize natively with Simplenote

The latest addition that made NV a super note-taking app is its ability to sync with Simplenote. Simplenote (view it in iTunes) is a simple to use, free note-taking app for the iPhone.

Open Source

Notational Velocity is Open Source and is distributed under a modified BSD license. It is currently hosted on github.

You can get the source;

$ git clone git://github.com/scrod/nv.git

Download/Install

Visit Notational Velocity and Download the NV.

muCommander is a Freeware but you can donate if you feel good about it.

Here are some of its cool features;

• Virtual filesystem with local volumes, FTP, SFTP, SMB, NFS, HTTP and Bonjour support.
• Quickly copy, move, rename files, create directories, email files.
• Browse, create and uncompress ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ISO/NRG, AR/Deb and LST archives.
• ZIP files can be modified on-the-fly, without having to recompress the whole archive.
• Universal bookmarks and credentials manager.
• Multiple windows support.
• Full keyboard access.
• Highly configurable.

muCommander is available in 18 languages – English (US & UK), French, German, Spanish, Czech, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian, Romanian, Italian, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch and Slovak.

Download muCommander (it even has a portable version).

Along with the new Amazon S3, Transmit have added “Copy and Preview Remote Web URLs” with which you can Select a remote item, hit copy: instant URL.

Select Amazon S3 in the Protocal drop down selection. Setup your Amazon S3 login with your correct Username (Amazon S3 Access ID) and Password (Amazon S3 Access Secret Key).

Do not forget to set the Read/Write access in the Preference Panel, else you will have to do it manually. In Transmit > Preferences > Transfers – select the “Set permissions on upload” and “Edit” it to your choice. I would suggest the option of “Read: World” and “Write:Owner”.

As for Coda, it is now imperative that it will inherit what Transmit can do and we might soon be able to upload files directly to Amazon S3 from Coda.

Bug: There is a bug with the current release of Transmit 3.6 – it cannot read folders created earlier by other applications. It won’t even recognize them as folders. Panic is working on it and a bug-fix release is expected soon – Transmit 3.6.1.

Note: You can sign up for an Amazon S3 service through your Amazon account.

When I shifted to Apple Mac recently, I was looking for an alternative which should be at par with either FeedDemon or Newsgator Inbox. Well, my first option was NetNewsWire. I have been evaluating it for the past one week and I am extremely happy with it. However, before finally taking the decision to buy it ($29.95), I decided to study and see what are the other alternatives (preferably a freeware) that I can get if not as kick-ass as NetNewsWire but comparible enough.

Read further to know which one will cost you, which one is free and of course the best and free RSS Feed Reader. I have listed them in reverse chronological of my choice (so my choice is the last one).

PixelNews ($25)

The screenshots of PixelNews was itself bad enough for me not to go further to try it.

PulpFiction ($25)

PulpFiction cost $25 and that very reason drove me off already. I decided to read the features and find them not even close to NetNewsWire. If I had to buy, I would add the $4.95 and buy NetNewsWire itself.

NewsFire ($25)

NewsFire have something called the smart folders which seems to do cool stuffs, it is not that bad looking either, you can search within your subscriptions easily and save the same. It has the ability to subscribe to podcasts too. The first letdown is of course the price, it will cost you $25. Morevoer, I never found a way to properly organize the items! There is no option for synchronization or archiving the feeds.

Squeet (free)

Squeet is not really a standalone RSS Feed Reader but can deliver feeds to your email. However, it is not that good and its inability to group feeds was a real letdown. Like a mail list subscription, it can though get you a delivery schedule in the form of a digest or mail you as and when it happens.

Vienna (free)

Personally, I feel that Vienna is too simple for the Mac. It lacks many customization features which I really needed like, separate refresh intervals for my subscriptions, my own custom labels and ability to get podcasts easily. However, Vienna is free and if your requirement for an RSS Feed is not that high, this is the solution for your mild requirements.

Shrook (free and my choice)

Shrook took advantage of the widescreen display which is in vague these days and has that Mac’s Finder feel. Despite being free, this was closely comparable to NetNewsWire and has the ability to sync it online on Shrook’s server. However, their online interface is not that upto Newsgator Online. A sweet surprise was its ability to detect (or was it just with NetNewsWire?) the presence of NetNewsWire on my Mac and update its feeds directly from NetNewsWire complete with the Folder structure.

It has the ability to sync podcasts with iTunes. It even goes ahead by not only copying the audio, but Shrook downloads the text content of all your feeds to read on your iPod’s screen, complete with links to access the audio. I am yet to experience this but Shrook claims that new items appear on your desktop just five minutes after they were published, quicker than any other news reader. This is down to Shrook’s sophisticated Distributed Checking mechanism. Each time one copy of Shrook finds a new item, it tells the central server, which tells all of the other copies, including yours.

So, the winner for the best and free RSS Feed Reader is Shrook.

Note
This does not yet mean that I have totally shift to Shrook, I will be analysing it against NetNewsWire till it expires (I have 3 more weeks from the time of writing this article) and decide which one I should stick too. The freeware status of Shrook have charmed me a lot though.

My Final Choice
I went with NetNewsWire.