Florian Hollender | floho.com

I don’t know about you, but I tended to have evaluated software for extended periods of time. Listening to the news, they say 35% of the software in use worldwide is pirated. So what made me start buying software? The move over to a Mac. Instantly, I was facing a selection of application that was way smaller than for the Windows-world, but also far better selected (at least it did appear so). So I started to look for software that could solve my problems. Most of it was free anyway - I love free software - but some little apps cost me money - and I have not regretted paying for any one of them, except… well - for one. It was the first app I bought -

Alarm Clock: iRooster — Now don’t get me wrong - the software is a great idea, I love the slogan (”turn your Mac into a $2000 alarm clock.”), even the logo - but it fails in its core competency, and for a alarm-clock-replacing-software, this is reliability. I have had the software fail on me too many times, and the developer did not manage to ramp up the upgrades fast enough to give me any more hope.

From then on, though, every buck spent was a winner!

Spam Filter: SpamSieve — has solved my spam problems almost immediateley. It is a great little app that works flawlessly, and after you have given it some emails to eat (and learn), it is really good at finding spam. Connected with the Growl-notifications, I now live almost as happy as John C. Dvorak (”I get no spam”) with less cost and effort than he does. SpamSieve integrates with all major email apps and costs $25. Thirty days free trial available.

Game: Uplink — the first game I bought for the Mac, and hell, this one is fun… give you are a geek and like the idea of playing to be a computer hacker. I just love the feel the game has, the urgency, the gameplay that is broken down to 2D graphics, the dark atmosphere… I played it once while on lunch break at a job, and I think I scared a manager because he thought I was breaking into the company’s system. Buy it for $25 at Ambrosia Software (PPC CPUs only).

Outlines: OmniOutlinerPro — this one is fairly known. It comes in a basic version on every new mac, so try it out. I started taking notes in university with it, then export them to dynamic HTML and put them online for my fellow students - they liked it, and I for sure like it, too! Especially once brought together with the add-on Kinkless to get a smoothly working GTD (”Getting Things Done”)-system that syncs with iCal. You can directly record audio into an outline, integrate a multitude of files… a pretty mighty tool. For $69.65 it is not really cheap, but there are educational discounts available, and you can also get an upgrade from the version that came with your mac.

Diagrams: OmniGraffle — this came pretty natural. Once I had upgraded my OmniOutliner, I started drawing a lot of stuff in OmniGraffle (the version that came with the Mac). Soon I looked up what new features were available in the newest version - and they were pretty convincing (although I can’t remember what it was that made me buy the upgrade right now). OmniGraffle is great for drawing diagrams, organigrams, sketching stuff - for me it replaces visio, or what I would do with visio if I was using a PC. It runs $79.95 in the standard version, but as with OmniOutliner, upgrades are available from $29.95. Oh, and did I mention that Omni lets you test-drive both apps for unlimited time but with limited items? They really do.

Backup: SuperDuper! — I am a sucker when it comes to backups. Last week, I decided to do something about it, because it would be a really huge loss to lose all data on my powerbook. The last time I had done something similar to a backup was when I burned my documents-folder to DVD… five months ago. So I went out, bought an external firewire drive, and got on the search for a backup software that would make my life safer without making it more complicated. SuperDuper! is exactly that. It makes a bootable copy of my harddrive, and then does smart updates - so it only replaces files that have changed. On an automatic schedule that I set. So now all I have to do for my backup to be perfect AND up to date is to have my PowerBook on at 9:30pm (the time I scheduled the backup for in the moment) - the rest goes automatically. This is better than magic, for $27.95. Even better, the software with basic functions (full backup, but not the “smart” stuff) is absolutely free!

Now this is like digg.com vs. digg.de (now yigg.de after some confusion) taken to the next level.

The new kid on the block is Studiverzeichnis.com (Studiverzeichnis translates roughly into “students directory”). It is a community website for German students - you log in, you set up a profile, you find people from your university, there are interest groups, a message system, etc., and you can see who is befriended with whom. Basically, it is like facebook.com.

Wait - it is really a LOT like facebook…. just compare the frontpage of both websites:

As far as I can tell (I’ve been using studiverzeichnis.com for a week now and have been occasionally looking into facebook before) studiverzeichnis offers all the basic functionality that facebook does, but facebook knows some more tricks, like photo galleries. Still, I wonder if it was necessary to copy the layout of facebook to that extent  - that somehow takes the genuinity out of studiverzeichnis, and that is a shame, because Germany really needs a good adaption of the facebook idea. What do you think?