Perhaps you’ve played around with subethaedit or moonedit, but wished for more features, a cleaner interface, or better cross platform support. Gobby does a decent job of addressing most of these issues while adding builtin chat and better per-user customization. The major downside is the complexity of getting it running, it’s not trivial, in fact it’s easier to get running on linux than it is on windows or Mac, but they’re working on that aspect of things and Gobby is well worth a look if you’re interested in collaborative text editing.

Oh yes, I do love playing the role of irresponsible tech anarchist. Does your IT manager frown on the use of instant messaging at work and block it at the firewall? Or are you sitting in an internet cafe, public terminal in a library, or someone’s else’s computer and they don’t have your favorite IM client installed? If any of these circumstances apply to you, chances are you’ll take to meebo, an ajax-powered, web-based instant messaging platform that supports AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and MSN. Free, simple to use, relatively bug free and a really nice interface. Not much more you could ask for. Just make sure you’re using a modern, standards compliant browser, firefox being the best choice.

Here’s a handy little applescript that puts an icon on your finder’s toolbar. Click on it and you invoke a terminal session in the location you’re currently looking at in the finder. If that description makes no sense to you, you don’t need this, but if you spend a good bit of time monkeying with things in the terminal you’ll find this to be very useful.

I’ve commented on the issue of interface clutter repeatedly on this site – modern apps spawn windows in multitudes, and even with a 20″ screen it’s almost impossible to keep things organized, leaving users to click around, mutter, minimize, tab switch, and curse as they try and find the right window that contains the piece of whatever project they’re working on at the moment. While no mainstream OS has an ideal fix for this problem (and really I think we need a new interface paradigm to solve this, though I’ve yet to see anything I like in this regard), things like my beloved quicksilver come close, and Macosx’s Expose helps tremendously. The good folk at Otaku Software have brought most of the features of Expose to win32 with their topdesk utility. It’s not free, but $9.95 is about as close as you’re going to get to free and this really is a tremendous productivity booster once you get used to it.

Vienna is a very promising free RSS reader for Macosx. It’s got your typical 3-paned interface, which you can set to three vertical panes or the more traditional 1 left, 2 stacked on the right interface you see in things like mail.app or outlook. It’s a little rough around the edges, especially in the interface department (lack of command keys being my chief complaint) but it’s small and fast and has two really great features – first, it’s pretty simple to re-style the visual appearance of the feeds using html and css. Second and even better is the ability to create what it calls ‘smart folders’ – these are meta-feeds which are created by parsing the contents of all your feeds and creating a new one based on a very comprehensive set of filters. This is a feature I love in FeedDemon, and Vienna’s implementation is superior. To give you an example of how this works, in FeedDemon I have a filterset that watches for any occurrence of a set of terms related to diabetes, and every day I look over the output it produces, allowing me to take in at a glance all the research that’s been published on the subject plus every mention across the so-called blogosphere and in the mainstream press, every day. The usefulness of this can’t be overstated, and Vienna is one of the few RSS readers to add this feature – to my knowledge netnewswire is the only other one on the mac that has this. If you’re on a mac and haven’t paid for netnewswire yet, this is well worth checking out. More generally, if you’re not yet using rss to help you absorb info more efficiently, you’re wasting your own time. Get an RSS reader and spend a few hours figuring out how to work with it, your brain will thank you.