1. NYTimes – This app courtesy of the New York Times makes it super easy to browse through the paper. I especially like the browse by photos section. Articles cache for easy offline (airplane) viewing.

2. Locly – Awesome for finding out what’s nearby when you travel. I’ve tried a few other apps of this sort, but Locly is the best. The current version allows you to search for: Flicker Images*, Local Twitters*, Wikipedia Articles*, Local Events, News from outside.in, Restaurants, Pubs, Cafes, Shops and Supermarkets, Taxi Firms, Films and Movies, Museums*, Hotels, Banks and ATMs, and Gas Stations. I starred (*) the ones I use Locly for the most.

3. Wikipanion – I like to reference the Wiki a lot, and this app makes it a much more plesant experience than going to Wiki via Safari. It’s a must have.

4. Sol Free – Every iPhone needs a good solitare game, and this one is the best free app available. There’s a paid version of this app, but the free one comes with a few styles of solitare including the classic “Klondike Deal 3″, which is really all you need to pass the time.

5. Shazam – I had this app for awhile before I actually used it, but when I did I was amazed! It listens to the music that’s playing around you, and then tells you the name of the song, artist and album. Shazam easily picked out “Bad Up Your Betterness” by the Presets in a sushi restaurant in Austin, and B.I.G.’s “Hypnotize” from radio in the car.

6. MiniPiano – A one-octive mini piano, plain and simple. Sounds great and plays easy. Unlike other piano apps, you can slide your finger down the keyboard to produce a glissando effect without having to press each key individually. Fun for kids!

7. TwitterFon – Everyone (including me) uses Twitterific, but here’s a shout out to another app I use called TwitterFon. It’s easily just as good as Twitterific PLUS it lets you Search for tweets (even based on your current location), so it’s easy to see who’s tweeting around you.

8. Chess – This app lets you have a game of chess with another iPhone-based player. Play someone sitting right next to you, or someone around the world. I had been looking for a free chess app for awhile, and this one takes the cake.

9. Pandora – Pandora is totally awesome. Enter a musician or band name and Pandora will create and endless stream of music from that artist as well as music by other artists that share the same genres. It’s completely commercial free (except for a small on-screen ad), and the music plays uninterrupted. Vote each song Pandora plays thumbs-up or thumbs-down and Pandora will customize the music it plays. It’s a great way to find new music. And it even sounds great over a 3G connection.

10. Showtimes – The mission of this app is to show you what’s playing at nearby movie theaters. Showtimes’ interface is super easy to navigate and includes results from multiple theaters, movie ratings, summaries, and trailers. Great when traveling and when at home.

Honorable mentions:

Video Poker – simple and fun!

Tangrams – 70 puzzles in this holiday edition.

Mobile News – AP newswire, includes local search.

Hanoi – the deceivingly difficult game I love to hate.

Blanks – fun word definition game.

FlyCast – streaming radio of all sorts (how I get WEFUNK on the road).

For the past few weeks at the Ithaca Farmer’s Market, we’ve noticed a new stand with a delicious-sounding name: The Piggery.  I like Pig (meat) and I like locally-raised food, so I knew we had to check it out.

Anyway, we made our first purchase there on Sunday: two pounds of tenderloin and a couple of bratwurst.  Last night, we rubbed the tenderloin in salt and fresh cracked pepper and tossed it on the grill.  Man, was it amazing.  The Piggery raises some good pig.  I’m sure it helps that they treat them well, and that they eat pumpkins. The meat was tender and naturally juicy, without any hit of that spongy texture that most store-bought tenderloin has.  The flavor was stronger and fuller than store-bought stuff as well.

So if you dig on pig and live near Ithaca, you should check it out.  I’m hooked.

Part of our musical inclination leads us to discover the wide variety of music new and old out there. I like to call it our musical education. And I have learned about way more music in the past few months than at any other time in my life. Keeping our musical selection lively in our office keeps our office going, for sure.

The best is when you discover a new song that you just can’t stop listening to. This doesn’t happen every day. Tyler acquired this great song on iTunes for free no less, “Time to Pretend” by MGMT, found on Oracular Spectacular. Immediately we were obsessed, playing it over and over (later realizing we weren’t the only ones). What is it about this song? First off, the beginning keyboard melody was inspired by the dance of the band’s pet praying mantis! Very cool sound. The lyrics in this song are quite ridiculous and involve a lot of mocking of the music culture and themselves.

This is our decision to live fast and die young
We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun
Yeah, it’s overwhelming but what else can we do
Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?

Why at the same time strangely uplifting:

But there is really nothing, nothing we can do
Love must be forgotten, life can always start up anew

The song is loud, intriguing, and addicting. The video is amazingly creative and goes all out and there is a 3D version!! Fun!

MGMT, started by Ben Goldwasser and Andrew Van Wyngarden’s from Wesleyan University, have a website that is kind of whack. You can enter a keyword to search images and then an image matching the keyword appears as the background for the site. It also has some crazy color changing roll overs. More goodies – the song “Electric Feel” (my current favorite) features a user interactive video where you can change the background and foreground images.

She got the power in her hands to shock you like you won’t believe
Saw her in the Amazon with the voltage running through her skin

If you want to have some fun, check these songs out, as well as others done by these talented musicians, just don’t blame me if you can’t stop listening to them!

Amir Bar-Lev directs this thought-provoking documentary about a precocious 4-year-old artist whose abstract works have drawn critical comparisons with modernist greats such as Kandinsky, Picasso and Pollack — and whose talents have already profited her more than $300,000. Is her gift with a paintbrush just an illusion, or is she truly an artistic visionary trapped in the body of a child?

Inspiration or manipulation??? I won’t reveal to you what happens because Amir does a wonderful job of telling the story as it unfolded… but let’s just say it’s not so pretty at the end. Amir gives a balanced take on the events and leaves you as the viewer to decide what really happened. And it’s the kind of movie that you just have to talk about immediately after watching it. Admittedly, I was also really intrigued because of the local proximity of the story.

So add this right to the top of your Queue, this is a must-see documentary!

1. Little Snitch

I’m the kind of person who just likes to know when my computer is accessing the internet. Especially when trying out new software that I’ve never used before. Little Snitch is awesome because it alerts me any time a program on my computer wants to access the internet. In such a case, a little pop-up alerts me to the program that is attempting access along with the URL and port # of the attempted request. From this pop-up window you can choose to allow or deny the request. Now I feel safe knowing that I’m in control of my computer’s access to the web.

2. Toast

I couldn’t live without toast for burning CDs and DVDs. The latest version of Toast Titanium includes a special “fit-to-disc” option that will re-compress dual-layer DVDs on to a single regular DVD. This option alone makes it worth Toast’s $80 price. Pair this with a copy of Handbrake (see below), and plenty of hard drive space, and you’ve got the best Mac OS tools for making legal backup copies of videos that you own.

3. MacTheRipper / Handbrake

Spot #3 is shared by two great DVD-ripping programs that each have a distinct strong point.

MacTheRipper makes easy work of ripping DVDs to iPod and AppleTV compatible formats. Just pop-in your DVD, select the tracks you want to convert, tweak the default settings if you want to (I rarely have to), and your tracks will be re-compressed in your desired format.

Handbrake is an essential tool for making whole DVD copies. I use Handbrake to copy the DVD’s VOB folder to my computer, then I use Toast Titanium’s “fit-to-DVD” option to burn the video to a regular single-layer DVD. I tend to scratch things easily so I use my backup DVDs so my originals won’t get all dirty and scratched up.

4. Text Wrangler

Text Wrangler is the best text editor available for Mac, hands-down. Some web developers like Komodo, but Text Wrangler is less-bloated, faster, makes it easier to handle multiple documents, and it’s free. It’s definitely the preferred text editor here at our shop (6 out of 6 designers use it!).

5. Suitcase

There is no better application for managing fonts on your Mac than Extensis Suitcase. Suitcase allows you to group your fonts into sets (I’ve grouped my fonts by themes such as “Serif”, “San Serif”, “Grunge”, “Script”, “Art Deco”, etc). Browsing font sets by typeface is easy and there’s a general keyword-capable search box for finding specific fonts. Suitcase is fast for managing lots of fonts (I have over 11,000 managed by Suitcase). I couldn’t imagine designing without it.

Suitcase also comes with a font auto-activation plugin for the major Adobe design applications that will automatically load up fonts that are needed for a specific document… Just open the document and all the appropriate font sets are instantly activated and available to use. Nice!

Casey (pictured) and Katy were the quickest to toss everything off their desks an get their new iMacs up and running. Not that unwrapping and plugging in the one power supply cable, keyboard and mouse and hitting the switch takes more than 45 seconds. We all gathered around to watch the way-too-over-the-top Apple welcome video and then remembered that there were five of us (Molly was out of town country) and there were five iMacs. So we all started moving.

What then followed was eerie silence punctuated by occasional mouse clicking and quick, short gasps. Katy was already zooming around, waiting for us on iChat and Casey had the spinning-pinwheel of death while trying to migrate his old Mac’s data (I’m sure there will be another post on this drama later). I plopped the 24″ beast on a spare table in our cave and waited. Patiently. Here’s essentially what I had in front of me (too busy to document things at this point):

Yeah, okay, it looks nice, and it is shiny, bright, smooth, whatever… but the 24″ model is gigantic. I wasn’t even unsatisfied with my previous non-widescreen 15″ glossy monitor, but I realized that I could never go back.

Then Katy video chats me. And I no longer have an excuse to get up and go see anyone in the office. Maybe. But even though this technology has been around for several generations of Macs now, it’s new to us, and we love it.

Of course shortly after startup I’m prompted with about 20 software update requests which I grudgingly proceed with, only to have to reboot, which I learn is fine because it takes all of 30 seconds. Wow.

After that everything is kind of a blur. I do remember occasionally blinking and nearly missing my bus home.

* * *

So skip ahead a few days (to today). I’ve been using the iMac for a full business-week now on projects ranging from interactive Flash construction to logo and web design. And some important Photo Booth sessions (all project related). Let me start with the gripes:

I still can’t get over the size and clarity of the display. After 5 days of use though I did notice a few smudges and fingerprints so I decided to try out the cleaning cloth that came in the box. Or at least I thought it was a cleaning cloth. Had I seen this video first I might have gone about things differently, but I thought “hmm, a nice smooth black cloth, perhaps I can simply wipe down my screen.” I pulled my hand back in terror as half of the fabric seemed to be left on the screen. And yet I wiped again to get rid of it, only to leave more particles on the screen. Not cool. So of course I resort to blowing on every inch of the screen until it is once again spotless. Ugh.

This next one is more of a love/hate sensation: the keyboard. I was more than a little exciteed to use this modern marvel only to become more than a little disappointed in the on-keyboard USB hubs. That initial “nifty” feature is now the one major annoyance of my new iMac life. The picture here is deceiving as it appears the USB jack is flush up against the side of the keyboard, but in fact it is set in about half an inch or so. This might look prettier, but it 1) is a pain to quickly plug something in without fumbling around (which I might hopefully improve at with time) and 2) flash/jump drives with even a little bulk either have to bend in order to fit or simply don’t fit at all. Not cool.

The remote. I’ve never used front row, and after trying it (and accidentally connecting with my Boss’s MacBook Pro in addition to the new iMac) I’m not impressed. There seems to be a bit of a lag time on the button press to screen response, and even after I synched-up the remote up with my machine I can’t really get into it. Maybe it’ll come in handy during all of those Keynote presentations I’ll be creating.

The last gripe is a small one, but again, is has to do with input jacks. I’m all for the sleek, unblemished design but does not seem practical to have all inputs on the back of the machine. This has always been a mac problem, but for someone like me who is dependent on the firewire and audio-in plugs it is another thing to fumble around with. But it gets weirder. Because the screen is SO big, I like to put more room between my eyes and the display. I’ve pulled my keyboard/mouse back as far as I can on the pull-out drawer, and it still feels close. This then requires some serious stretching of all cables to the back across my already limited space. Clearly, not a bad complaint to have, so this more of an annoyance than anything else.

Now on to the praise (that’s it, really, only a few minor complaints, most of which are related to my own obsessive compulsive tendencies rather than anything else):

I’ve never seen such great image quality on a Mac. Never. This has redefined my way of looking at a computer all day and even allowed for another level of detail in my design. Though we made the mistake of downloading and sitting through the HD trailer for Beowulf on my machine, it was a beautiful waste of time.

This puppy is fast. Maybe it’s all that Intel stuff that I’m won’t pretend to understand, but it seems quick. The quicksilver G4 that I had been using was pretty tricked out, and now I can hardly imagine going back to it. Going home to use my 12″ powerbook is almost laughable now (w00t 12 minutes of fully-charged battery action!). Everything just feels faster, and so of course I feel more productive. But those minutes in Photo Booth have been adding up fast!

The Mighty-Mouse! I had been using a previous generation that was slightly heavier and less sensitive. The new pure-white mouse is still something I can’t imagine other people living without. Though I’ve accidentally activated Exposé on a number of occasions, sideways scrolling and custom button programming rules. ‘Nuff said.

* * *

I’m sure both of these lists will grow as time goes on, but if anything, they will mostly be relative to my own preferences and quirks. Check back for part 2 which will likely cover some more completely subjective opinions!

Thank you.