One Thing Well

is a weblog about simple, useful software (on any platform).
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MobileDL

A very useful bit of kit. Set it running on your Mac, Linux or Windows machine, and it will keep an eye on a specific SimpleNote note—add a URL to that note, and MobileDL will download the file it points to.

So, if you come across a nifty desktop application while browsing on your ‘phone or iPad, make a note of the download link, and it’ll be ready to check out when you get home. Or tell your Bittorrent client to watch your MobileDL download folder, and launch downloads remotely.

Add a file organizer like Hazel to the mix, and things get really interesting…

Via Minimal Mac

Q10

A simple, full screen text editor for Windows. It’s portable, so you can keep it on a USB stick.

Thanks, Jimi

A Simple Python Web Server

If you have Python installed, you can quickly serve up HTML files from any directory with:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

dwb

dwb is the latest addition to the growing list of minimal, WebKit-based browsers for Linux. As well as being lightning fast, dwb lets you arrange web pages in the style of a tiling window manager and is controlled with vim-like keybindings.

DamnVid

DamnVid lets you download videos from YouTube, Vimeo, &c. and convert them into a variety of useful formats, quickly.

It’s open source and available for Linux, OS X and Windows (though I’ve only tried it on Ubuntu).

Thyme is a timer for OS X. It’s as simple as that.

Thyme is a timer for OS X. It’s as simple as that.

growlnotify

growlnotify is a command-line tool to post Growl notifications.

I’m not a big fan of notifications, but growlnotify comes in handy if you’re running a shell script on your Mac that will take a while to run, and don’t want to babysit it.

For example, the script that deploys my jekyll-powered weblog includes the following:

growlnotify Weblog Update Complete -m "jekyll, git and rsync have done their stuff"

Pino

Pino is Twitter and Identi.ca client for Linux desktop (actualy, for any OS, that has X11). It’s simple and fast.

Via @nathanrhale

Chromium App Mode

You can run Chromium in ‘app mode’, with no URL bar, toolbars, &c.

chromium-browser --app=http://onethingwell.org

Handy as an ad hoc SSB.

A simple application for OS X that takes a character delimited list, and removes duplicates. I’d use sort -u and vimdiff to achieve the same end, but it’s nice to have a GUI sometimes. Thanks, Luis

A simple application for OS X that takes a character delimited list, and removes duplicates.

I’d use sort -u and vimdiff to achieve the same end, but it’s nice to have a GUI sometimes.

Thanks, Luis

Simplenote HTML

An HTML5 web app aimed at Android users that lets you read your Simplenote notes. (Developer Tom Insam describes it as ‘an early hack’, so you might want to read his weblog post before signing in.)

espeak

eSpeak is a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux and Windows

I use it in conjunction with µtimer to remind me to do stuff, in the style of Pester.

Bitflu

Bitflu is a free BitTorrent client. The client was written in Perl and is designed to run as a daemon on Linux, *BSD and maybe even OSX.

Downloads are managed through a web interface, or via telnet.

Search and watch videos from YouTube on your Mac in a standalone player. Cathodique uses Quicktime as opposed to Flash, so using it to binge on YouTube won’t kill your laptop battery or set the fans spinning. It goes fullscreen, too.

Search and watch videos from YouTube on your Mac in a standalone player.

Cathodique uses Quicktime as opposed to Flash, so using it to binge on YouTube won’t kill your laptop battery or set the fans spinning. It goes fullscreen, too.

TrashMe

TrashMe will help you in the uninstall procedure: drop an application on TrashMe and it will find related files for you, so as to delete everything.

See also