leopard being released today

OK, For a while I resisted. I told myself that I wouldn't be one of those sad individuals who's go to an OS launch and buy the new OS just because. Well now it seems I've stooped to a new level, I'm going to be one of those sad individuals. Leopard will be in my paws in a few hours... Hopefully I'll smile more than when I successfully put Vista on my machine.

I'm not going to do a review like EVERYONE ELSE who has both a mac and a blog. I'll spare you all...

automator

Just a quick note to you mac users, once again the other day I was blown away by some standard mac features, this time it was by the little OS X robot called Automator.

I had some music backed up, a double disc-set and I needed to rename all the files, to prepend them with the singer's name. I could have sat and clicked through and taken 8 minutes (pfff, not likely), I could have written a shell script (but I don't do that much) - so I tried automator. It was easy, and I was done in under 3 minutes. Most of the time was figuring it out. I did it again to show someone and it took me seconds...

So, check out automator, one of the little things jammed into a mac which helps with mundane repetitive tasks. After all, repetitive tasks are what a computer should be good at!

Some download-able scripts are available here. Or use the built in steps and play around...

billings

I've stumbled upon some awesome software for the Mac-equipped own-business user/ freelancer/ developer. It's called Billings, and it is a time management and billings management system. It works so well and has allowed me to become more professional in my time-keeping and billing, and at the same time the half hour estimate and invoicing tasks have been reduced to a minute or two.

It's also quite motivating for a freelancer to work and see exactly the time being spent. I want to have integrity as a foundation of my business, and this product helps me do that.
The best is, it only costs 74 Canadian dollars, which means it's already paid for itself in the time I've saved in my last 5 invoices!

I get a kick out of supporting smaller lesser known software companies/individuals if their product is good and worth the money they ask. This is definitely worthwhile. In my books, it's up there with amazing software like Textmate, Yojimbo, ConceptDraw Project, OmniOutliner.
Nice work guys, thanks.