Last year I tried a feed reader called NewsFire. I installed it at work and it was far too insane to run at work. I gave up on feed reading shortly thereafter.

When I got my iBook last fall, I decided to use a free newsreader, Vienna to see if I couldn’t have a more manageable feed experience. Vienna isn’t bad, but I decided to give NewsFire another try. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s fast in its pull down of a lot of feeds and makes getting through all that info relatively painless. It’s a cheap app, but it will stay my default news reader.

I don’t like reading blogs through feeds as much as I like looking at links, news and a few Mac software update sites and NewsFire fits my reading style perfectly. o

About 13 years ago, I purchased a great set of utilties for the Mac called Now Utilities. All of them were overkill, but there were a couple that saved my life day in and day out. They had a great dialog box add-on that gave open/save dialogs huge boosts in functionality.

It looks like PiquantMenu might be the Now Utilities of today. I haven’t had a chance to play with this utility much, but it looks like even if a fraction of it is useful, it’s gonna be a great addition to power-users’ machines. And it’s universal.

Apple Matters writes it up here. o

Since using Quicksilver, any Mac I work on feels naked without it. This freeware application is a must have for anybody who wants the speed and power of doing things from the keyboard. Even if all you use it for is an application launcher/switcher, it will save you time.

Here’s a useful Wikipedia entry that explains the application.

Here are a ton of tutorials to get you started on your path to better computing.

They have posted some initial thoughts and speed tests over on CNET.

Here is a sweet utility called Textpander that uses simple keystrokes to type out user-defined chunks of text. Uses might include email signatures, addresses, salutations, date/time stamps and other text fragments. It’s a universal binary as well.

Here is an excellent collection of free, open source mac apps from browsers to FTP clients to RSS Newsreaders and more.

This is a highly recommended, FREE font management app that utilizes a speedy UI and can handle thousands of fonts. This should be a boon for anybody employed at an agency or studio with gobs of fonts. And it’s a blurbomac must have. Plus, it’s a universal binary, so you brave souls who have Intel inside can manage your fonts as well.

Download here.