There are times when it would be embarrassing for me if the contents of my Firefox search box were made public.

The following is a list of gadgets, services, software and such that had a significant impact on me in 2007. Mostly it’s just stuff I like, in no particular order.

• Amazon Kindle - Goofy looking and flawed, but has revolutionized how - and how much - I read.

• Garmin nüvi 660 - GPS and on-the-fly driving directions made simple. Indespensible after the first time I used it.

• Tinderbox - Rediscovered in 2007. Still the most usefull app on my Mac.

• Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M - Last minute addition makes scanning and storing all sorts of paper documents simple. Add DEVONthink Pro Office and go paperless.

• Think - Simple app that helps minimize distractions, when that’s what you need.

• Drobo - Simple, expandible and redundant storage. More

• iPhone - It’s not just a phone, but you knew that

• Uncluttering - The process of just getting rid of shit is liberating. More to come.

• Jira/Confluence - Issue tracking and knowledge capture using these tools from Atlassian is (slowly and sometimes painfully) changing project management at Fusionary (yes, for the better, don’t argue with me).

• AeroPress - Manual, simple, small and cheap. Makes delicious coffee. more

• IMAP in Gmail - Gmail, now with any mail client you like (like maybe the iPhone).

• Amazon MP3 Store - I have very little use for the iTunes Store now. Took me completely by surprise. More

• Twitter - Started out as a nifty gimmick. Now it’s an integral part of how I learn and communicate.

Overall a pretty damn good year I think.

Mike Lee wants to buy you a (toy) Lemur. Just donate $100 (or more of course) to the Madagascar Fauna Group and he’ll do just that. I (technically, Fusionary) just donated, mostly because Mike asked so damn nicely. And this, from another post, clinched it…

Seriously, if I have to read another story about how David Pogue ate a burrito, and it gave him gas, and when he farted it sounded kind of like “subnotebook” from a so-called news organization that didn’t notice that, right now, the Mac community and and its developers are making a huge fucking difference in Madagascar, I’m going to punch someone in the balls.

So check out Club Thievey. And donate if the mood strikes you.

There’s nothing better than knowing, in the first few minutes of a film, that you’re about to see something wonderful. It just happened to me with Once - a documentary style, sparse, completely fantastic musical. Seriously one of the very best movies you’ll see this year. Or wait a couple of days and it will be one of the best movies you’ll see next year. I fell in love with it. Bet you will too.

A whole series of great 70s-ish studio portraits. Hilarious.

I’m logged in to Twitter all day, every day (twitter.com/jackbaty). It’s become an important part of my workflow, or whatever you call what I do these days.

That being the case, a good desktop Twitter client is important to me. I’ve been using Twitterrific since shortly after I learned how to spell it. Twitterrific is a very nice OS X app that looks good and works flawlessly for the most part, which is more than I can say for Twitter itself lately. My desire for playing with new software brought me to Snitter. Snitter was the first real Adobe Air app I ran for any length of time, but it crashed and behaved badly on my machine. Uninstalled it. (This could very well be fixed by now, but I haven’t tried it recently.)

Today some folks were twittering about another Adobe Air based client, Twhirl. You know me, I had to try it at once! Grabbed the latest Air Beta and fired it up. Nice stuff: multiple Twitter account handling, themes, search, etc. I thought I was on to something. Then I tried using it and that’s where things started to go wrong. First thing I noticed is that the window would jump out from underneath the cursor whenever I clicked anywhere on the app. Not good, but what finally killed the experience for me was the text rendering. I’m a pretty forgiving guy when it comes to fonts and such, but the text was rendered terribly.

I experimented with a few different fonts but they all looked wonky. Does anyone know if this is an Air thing or is it something specific to my install? I can’t even read that. Text handling doesn’t feel right either. For example, selected text is black rather than my system’s highlight color. Dealing with Twitter’s 140-character-at-a-time limit makes these issues less of a real problem, but still. Oh and Air really needs Growl support.

I mentioned earlier on Twitter that Air apps “don’t feel right.” The above is a brief explanation why.

As I left the Adobe conference a few months ago, I said that “Air is a game changer,” and I still believe that. Over the past months, we’ve been building a number of Flex apps at Fusionary and so far the results have been outstanding. Flex apps may have some challenges to overcome, but improving the user experience in a browser is a lot easier than improving upon that of native desktop apps. I’m looking forward to leveraging web work on the desktop. Someday.

As for Twhirl and Snitter, they’re great early attempts using Adobe Air. I like that they’ll keep the pressure on Iconfactory to improve Twitterrific. The problem is that I’m not going to use them day to day just because they’re Air apps. They have to be better apps, and they’re not - yet.

why can’t I go insane
the way other poets do?
why not blame them for this mess?
why not find the same excuses
and follow faeries into the darkened woods
where we all move about freely
and rhyme?

“What the hell is this, then?” “f I didn’t know better
I’d say it was poetry.”

Well, that’s exactly what it is, I say.
Especially since you don’t know better
anyway.
It may not look like poetry
unless, of course
I wrap each
line
like this.

Then who’s to say?

My little web site here can now be reached via the domain copingmechanism.com. Just because.