14 DAY TRIAL // Hello and welcome back for another overview of this week's new software for Mac. As usual, we have three new pieces of software to present to you. Since it hasn't been a very productive week, as far as free software goes, only two of the three items featured today are free.
Syrinx - Free, Fully Customizable Twitter Client
Syrinx is a fully customizable twitter client designed especially for the Mac. Developed by MRR Software, the application is seeing its first public release. Syrinx is all about efficient workflow, but also about customization, featuring bookmarks, searching capabilities, a pause feature, easy keyboard controls, and numerous customization methods (color, sound, functionality).
When new tweets arrive, bookmarks are colored according to the customizable bookmark color, accompanied by a sound, while the number of bookmarked tweets is badged on the dock icon. Syrinx's searching capabilities allow the user to look for specific tweets, or to see if their name has come up in a certain context. New tweets get pulled down (so you don't miss the new ones coming in), but they won't fly away until you're ready to resume the read.
Hitting the spacebar you will be able to advance the bookmark one tweet at a time, or you can use Enter / Return to reply to the currently selected tweet, while all the other popular actions are bound to the keyboard.
Besides letting you change your timeline background colors, or your own status background and the bookmark color, Syrinx also offers several built-in themes, such as Apple, Dragobah, Hoth, Tatooine, Yavin, and, of course, a Custom theme. It also helps to stay up to date with every tweet if you choose a system sound to notify you when new tweets have arrived. Syrinx can also be set to check for updates on a regular basis. You can tell it to update itself faster, or slower, depending on the number of tweets you regularly receive. This feature is connected to Twitter's "habit" of lowering its rate limits when the servers become overwhelmed or during heavy load periods, Syrinx includes this useful option to dynamically adjust its request rate to stay under any request limit. Therefore, the application will automatically space out your remaining requests for the hour.
Syrinx is available for free download HERE. The application requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later and is a Universal Binary. MRR Software is also accepting donations, even though it has decided not to charge for its software.
Reference Tracker - Writers' Tool
Reference Tracker, as its name implies, is a very useful tool for writers, researchers or students using a Mac. The academic reference manager and research tool creates documents that store all the citations and references in an essay, research project or book. Simply give Reference Tracker the book's ISBN and it will fetch all the details on the Internet!
Reference Tracker automatically creates Harvard formatted reference lists to insert into your writing whenever you need them. However, if the ISBN is not enough, you can just type keywords into Reference Tracker's built in publication search that will get a list of matching results, which are ultimately added to the reference list. Reference Tracker can pull all the details on a book over the web with just one click, and if you have an email you need to reference, the program can pull all the details from Mail.app just as well.
Malkinware's program also uses an intelligent, formatted list importer which can also read Microsoft Word or RTF documents. It can pull all the references into your Reference Tracker document, or import BibTex (.bib) and .ris files generated from websites or other referencing software.
One of the most impressive features of the academic reference manager is its ability to send your formatted reference list directly to the end of your word processing document. The dynamic 'Send To' menu will show you a list of your open documents in Word and Pages and you can append your formatted list to the end of an open document, or create a new document with the contents of the list.
Although Reference Tracker is at its first public release (version 1.0), the research tool already introduces new features as well as fixes. Some of those include a new 'Send To Word Processor' feature, to send formatted lists to open Word or Pages documents; new Importing features, to import Reference lists from word processor documents, BibTex and RIS files; new Reference Types: Conference Proceedings and Broadcast; fixed spacing in formatted references.
A 21-day, full featured trial version of the reference manager is available HERE for free download. Requirements call for a Mac with an Intel or PPC processor, running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or higher.
Currently, Malkinware is generously offering Reference Tracker at an introductory price of $29.95. If you want to benefit from this 35% discount, you must buy the software by September 30th.
Time Machine Buddy - Organizer for Time Machine's Backup Logs
Time Machine Buddy is a (Leopard) tool for those who constantly back up their systems. Buddy organizes and displays the systems logs generated by Apple's Time Machine backups, showing what is happening behind the scenes, for the backup in progress, or any previous backups, and ultimately helping you stay more organized. The widget only reads the system logs, thus it will not interfere or disrupt any Time Machine processes.
Developed by Bluedog Technologies, this useful widget polls the system logs for backups every 15 minutes. If a backup is active, Time Machine Buddy will poll every five seconds until completed. Since Buddy it is a Dashboard widget, if you close the Dashboard all polling will be stopped. You can manually trigger a refresh by mouse clicking the refresh button.
Bluedog Technologies notes that Time Machine Buddy currently has at least one known issue, namely the fact that multiple manual backups may appear in the same message window if triggered immediately after each other.
You can download Time Machine Buddy HERE.
