One Thing Well

A weblog about simple, useful software.

You can follow along on Twitter or via the feed. Don't hesitate to get in touch. Sponsor the site.

Shuu.sh

Shuush is… a web-based Twitter reader that displays the updates of the people you follow in relation to the frequency of their tweets. It aims to amplify the people that don’t usually get heard, and scale back those with frequent updates.

FluffyApp

A Windows client for the CloudApp web sharing service.

Via Finer Things in PC.

On Now And Next

A ‘glanceable’ for your iPad or Kindle that shows what’s on now and what’s coming up on BBC Radio, in the style of Ceefax.

Breevy

Breevy is a text expander for Windows that helps you type faster and more accurately by allowing you to abbreviate long words and phrases.

It’s compatible with TextExpander for the Mac and iOS, including snippet synchronisation.

markdown-preview

Preview local or remote Markdown documents in Chrome.

Ribbot

Create your own forum with user reputation and voting, in the style of Reddit or Hacker News.

PopClip {Sponsor}

Many thanks to PopClip for sponsoring this week on One Thing Well.

PopClip is a clever little utility that brings iOS-style copy and paste to the OS X desktop, popping up when you select text to offer the usual cut, copy & paste plus dictionary lookups, spellcheck web search and URL-opening.

As a confirmed keyboard lover, I worried that PopClip would get in my way. In practice the app is wonderfully unobtrusive, and clever enough to stay silent if you’re selecting text using keyboard shortcuts.

In fact, after a week with PopClip, I find myself reaching for the Magic Trackpad more and more: checking the definition of a word, opening a plain text URL or searching for a phrase with PopClip is much faster and, dare I say it, more fun than hammering out a sequence of command key combos.

Add some handy options under the hood—an application blacklist, the option to turn off PopClip features you don’t use—and you have a polished, well-thought-out utility that brings one of the most useful features of iOS back to the Mac.

You can buy PopClip for $4.99/£2.99 from the Mac App Store.

If you’d like to sponsor a week on One Thing Well, get in touch.

fizsh

FIZSH is the Friendly Interactive ZSHell. It is a front end to ZSH. It provides the user of ZSH with interactive syntax-highting and Matlab-like history search. It also has a both short and informative prompt.

As the name suggests, this adds a healthy dose of fish to zsh.

Vifm

Vifm is a ncurses based file manager with vi like keybindings. If you use vi, vifm gives you complete keyboard control over your files without having to learn a new set of commands.

Works on Linux, Windows, and OS X.

Twitter RSS Feeds

This might be common knowledge, but it came as news to me: it’s still possible to subscribe to Twitter users via RSS.

Here, for example, is the @onethingwell feed:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/onethingwell.rss

Update: Reader Joe suggests a simpler solution:

If you use Google Reader, it’s even easier. You can add a twitter RSS feed using the add subscription button. For example, to add onethingwell, you’d just click add subscription and type in http://twitter.com/onethingwell

Growl 1.2 for Lion

A patched version of the popular “growl” notification system for Mac OS X, which compiles cleanly under XCode 4.1 and produces binaries for Mac OS 10.7 “Lion”.

Worth a look if you prefer the old, pre-App Store Growl.

blockdiag

Generate diagrams and charts from simply-formatted text files.

See also:

Twitter RSS Feeds