Guten Tag. Sorry, that’s used up my feeble German language skills. It’s always fun to be linked to in other languages it makes you feel all interwebnetty and loosely joined so a hearty welcome to those coming from MacGuardians (a rather impressive number of you in fact). I do indeed talk about OS X a fair ammount although it’s a mere facet of what I’m interested in.

Fun OS X things that have caught my eye today:

• A new version (1.1) of the collaborative text editor Hydra. This release adds more cool features for programmers without sacrificing it’s essential simplicity and flexability for all text bashing needs. And dude, it’s free.
• A new version (1.0.3) of NetNewsWire, the essential RSS reading and blog posting software. The main banner is the inclusion of ‘Combined View’ that puts the titles and posts together for a more ‘webby’ experience. It’s good but needs some significant rendering speedups to be useful. Excitingly on the horizon is integration with WebKit, the Safari rendering engine. You’ll have to pay for the full version but it’s well worth it and if you’re cheap the free edition is great too.
• I’m re-ripping all my CD’s from mp3 to AAC. This is because I have too much time on my hands. Much agonised standards thinking convinced me that AAC is just as ‘free’ as mp3 and until Apple support Ogg a better solution. Plus it’s always good to have the extra space from the savings due to using a cleverer audio codec.
• The kittens are starting to overcome their suspicion of the TiBook, they circle it warily springing away when the fan comes on and occasionally pattering across the keyboard. Soon they too will be addicted to the cutting edge design and usability cool of the Mac (although PPC Linux is cool too)

Hope that satisfies you.