Ommwriter is a Mac word processor with a bit of a gimmick. Like one of my favorite writing apps for the Mac, WriteRoom, Ommwriter goes full-screen, with a minimal interface and a focus on avoiding distractions. Ommwriter is even more extreme, though, adding a calming background and soothing music to the mix, and restricting your control over text formatting to a bare minimum to reduce fiddling.

The good: that fiddling-reduction thing really works. You can make your text larger or smaller, and choose between three fonts, but that's it. It keeps you away from the controls and focused on your words. Also good: there are 7 different musical selections, and the option to turn the music off altogether (which I recommend you exercise). The default background is quite attractive, but you can switch to basic white if you don't like it.

The bad: your only options for saving your Ommwriter docs are plain .txt or Ommwriter's own format. I suppose that's in keeping with the word-centric theme of the app, but sometimes a .doc comes in handy if you're sharing with an Office-devoted friend or colleague. Also - and this is clearly a matter of taste - the whole zen schtick feels a bit hokey to me. I'm all for removing distractions, and Ommwriter succeeds in that regard (except, perhaps, when it comes to the music) but I prefer the plain black screen and more robust formatting capabilities of WriteRoom.

Google Translate just got a lot better, with a nice, clean new look and several new features. The first thing you'll notice is that you no longer have to click to translate. Translate now works instantly, as you type. If you're trying to translate something into a language with a non-Roman alphabet (like Chinese, for example) Google will also show the phonetic pronunciation underneath the translated characters.

If you're translating into English, you've got an even better option: you can hear an audio pronunciation of the English translation. This feature is awesome, and I'm looking forward to a time when Google inevitably implements it for other languages, too. There's a new feature for English-speakers, too, though: if you type in the phonetic, romanized version of a word from a non-Roman language (Google cheekily gives Fake Steve Jobs' trademark sign-off, "namaste," as an example), Translate will attempt to show the proper characters in the original language.

You'd think that Google's purchase of FeedBurner a few years back would have meant that FeedBurner stats would be easy to track in Google Analytics. No such luck so far, but Analytics can now track at least some FeedBurner info, although the process isn't very obvious.

If you want to see how many people click through from your FeedBurner feed to your site (no subscriber numbers yet - sorry!) here's how:

In FeedBurner, go to the Analyze tab of your settings. Make sure the "Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics" box is checked. Then, in Analytics, go to "All Traffic Sources" or "Campaigns." Use the search box to search for "feed" or "feedburner," and you'll see your Feed Clicks. Google suggests you select "Ad Content" from the segment drop down in the traffic source data table, so you can see which feed readers your various visitors are using.

According to ReadWriteWeb, more detailed and easier-to-find stats are on their way from Google, so FeedBurners users have plenty of new info to look forward to.

1. Selective sync. Ability to choose which files or folders get sync'd to which computers.

2. Watch any folder. Sync folders outside the My/Dropbox folder (thus essentially replicating the functionality of SugarSync). This would be sweet, though I wonder how it would affect the current simplicity and performance of the app.

3. Share folders without forcing other members to lose space. I'd be interested to see how they handle this one. It could open up loopholes for vastly expanded storage space for groups of people.

4. Email files to Dropbox. Use an email address to upload files to your dropbox space.

5. Mac resource fork support. Perhaps the most cryptic of the requests. The resource fork is essentially metadata attached to the file that helps the Mac OS understand the file better. It defines things like custom icons, window sizes, menu definitions and the like. It is also how Mac OS can do extension-less file names. These things are generally stripped by backup programs (like Dropbox). This would be an extremely useful feature for Mac users.

It frustrates me that so many different services have a calendar function, and yet it's still a pain in the ass to make sure that my personal calendar is up to date. More often than not I find myself manually creating events using copy-and-paste, instead of the event being automatically created for me by whatever service I'm using.

If you happen to be a Facebook Events user, a utility called EventSync can help you keep your iCal calendar application on your Mac up to date with your Facebook events. It's smart enough to allow you to choose to sync all events, or only those that you have accepted (amongst other options). Development is active on the utility too, and Hawk Wings reports that version 2.0 will include the ability to display the flyers and images associated with the Facebook events.

EventSync is donationware for the Mac platform.

Tracking how much time you spend on a project is often a pain, and there are a lot of complex software solutions - both web-based and downloadable - that are more confusing than helpful. Yast, on the other hand is painfully, stupidly easy to use. Pick a project, click and drag on the timeline to indicate when you worked on it, and then enter a note about what you did. That's all. Seriously.

If you want to keep track of your projects in real-time, you can click the play button next to a project to start working, and then click stop when you're done. Two clicks? Even easier than a click and drag! Yast color-codes your projects and keeps track of your total time spent on them, automatically. You can zoom the timeline in and out to make selecting the right timeframe easier. Other than that, Yast has no settings to speak of. If you need anything more elaborate, you'll have to look elsewhere. If you want a bare-bones time tracker that just works, Yast is it.

I can see the conversation now:

Open Source Advocate 1: 'So, dude, we really should do something about this Godawful UI. I mean we tried our best to imitate Microsoft but it just... isn't working out.'

OS Advocate 2: 'There must be some other way... some way we can avoid paying any kind of skilled user-interface master to actually develop a sweet-ass interface.'

OS Advocate 1: 'I know! I KNOW! WE'LL MAKE A MOUSE! A homebrew mouse with enough buttons to map EVERY function to it! We'll simply do away with the usual interface! GENIUS!'

OS Advocate 2: 'Er... OK. Stop waving your Perl manual around like that. You're starting to scare me.'
...

Slashdot are reporting that OpenOffice.org has a new mouse -- the succinctly-named OpenOfficeMouse. Manufactured by WarMouse (the awesome naming never ceases), this behemoth has 18 buttons, a scroll wheel and, get this, an analogue joystick. You couldn't make this stuff up. It has macro support, storage for up to 63 profiles... 63!

I know what you're thinking: OpenOffice can't possibly fully-utilise this beautiful piece of (patented) technological mastery. This thing is for gamers.

Getting your desktop situated "just so" following a reboot can be a hassle. As with so many other Windows annoyances, there's a handy little application which can help.

Cache My Work was created to tackle the task of restoring your windows following a restart. Launch the app and a list of your cacheable programs is displayed - you also have the option of re-opening all your open Explorer windows. Check off what you want restored, click save, and reboot.

Once Windows is up and running again, Cache My Work's preparations make your programs reappear. It's a simple but effective little app - all it really does is zap a few lines into your registry under the Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce key.

You'll still need to re-open your files -- except, of course, in apps like Firefox where you have the option to restore your previous session automatically.

While the project hasn't seen an update in just over a year, it still works nicely - even on WIndows 7 (both 32 and 64-bit builds).

One of the slick visual elements of Google's Chrome browser is pin tabs. They're those compact tabs that're only as wide as a favicon, and they save a ton of space in your tab bar. You could point out that Firefox doesn't have this feature, but I'd give you the Firefox fanatic's standard answer: there's an add-on for that! For Chrome-style mini-tabs in Firefox, grab the Pin Tab extension.

Pinning a tab using ctrl-click shrinks it and moves it to the left of your tab bar. A pinned tab is preserved across all sessions, and you can't accidentally upset it using the address bar. If you enter a new URL while a pinned tab is selected, that URL opens in a new tab instead. You can pin tabs by dragging them to the left of the tab bar, and unpin them by dragging them to the right. Pinned tabs save a ton of space, since they're several times smaller than regular ones, so this add-on is ideal for those who have dozens of sites open at once.

[via gHacks]

UPDATE: The developer of this add-on seems to have taken it down for right now.

If you're a Mac user who's considering giving iPhoto a try, and you're also a fan of sharing photos on Flickr, you might want to give FlickrImport a try. On its face, it's just a utility that imports your Flickr images into iPhoto, but there's more to this little gem than meets the eye. It preserves photo info, including EXIF and TIFF metadata.

Even better, FlickrImport works for more than just your own account. You can also use it to import photos from your contacts accounts, as long as those photos are visible to you. If you have more than one Flickr account, for some reason, you can add yourself as a contact and import from both accounts that way. One caveat: FlickrImport doesn't play nicely with Snow Leopard. To make it work, do a Get Info on the app and check the "Open with Rosetta" box.

Distraction is the enemy of focus. If you work at a computer all day, the possibilities for distraction are limitless. One way to stay focused is to use the technique of a firmly regimented working period followed by a short break period that I first came across at Merlin Mann's 43 Folders site. His technique suggested using 10 minutes of work followed by 2 minutes of rest, but the recently popular Pomodoro Technique suggests using 25 and 5. Whatever periods you use, the cross-platform Adobe Air based Focus Booster application is just the timer you need to keep you on task.

Focus Booster is a tiny timer that allows you to set a work and rest period, then away you go. You can focus entirely upon your work knowing that a rest period is coming soon, and you can check out your Facebook / Twitter / blog comments / whatever it is you fancy when the time comes.

Tired of accidentally closing important tabs in Firefox? Tabberwocky, a useful tab-manager add-on, lets you protect a tab, open a duplicate tab next to the original, and lots more. Tabberwocky can move the 'close tab' button to either side of a tab, highlight unread tabs, retain a tab's history when you open a link in a new tab -- and that's just the beginning! This tiny 25kb add-on has a list of options about a page long.

Tabberwocky's main competition is the popular Tab Mix Plus add-on, which offers very similar features. What Tab Mix plus has that Tabberwocky still doesn't is the session manager, so you can save and restore sets of tabs and windows, even after a crash. Tab Mix plus has been known to slow down Firefox's performance on some systems though, so Tabberwocky might be a lighter alternative to try if you've been having problems with TMP.

[via ghacks]

Have you ever received an iWork file created in Pages, Numbers, or Keynote on a Mac, and not had any way to deal with it? Next time, try changing the file's extension to .zip, then unzip it with your favorite zip utility. Inside you should find a PDF preview document containing a nicely formatted version of the document in question.

It seems strange that Apple doesn't promote this fact more, as it's a real usability win for iWork users that want to share their documents with non-Mac users. Wouldn't it be nice if Word, Excel, and Powerpoint did this?

[photo by *keng]

Afloat is a handy little plugin for your Mac that gives you more control over all the windows you've got open. Once installed, Afloat adds some new options to the Window menu in most applications, allowing you to do some neat tricks. Here's a rundown of the options, which almost all have keyboard shortcuts:

The keep afloat command assigns a window to stay on top of all others. Alternatively, you can pin windows to the bottom of the stack, at desktop level. Window transparency is adjustable using either a slider or keyboard shortcuts. Afloat allows moving and resizing from any part of a window if you hold down cmd+ctrl - just grab an edge to resize, or drag from anywhere to move.

If you use Spaces, you can use Afloat to make a window appear across all Spaces, so you won't lose it when you switch. There's also a neat overlay feature that makes your window transparent and unclickable, so you can use it as a guide while you work with whatever's underneath - I can think of some fun design applications for that one. Afloat also has a hotkey to locate the file associated with the current window, which is something the OS X Finder could probably use as a standard feature.

It's not that Afloat adds essential functionality to the OS. In fact, it's probably overkill for most people, but just about every Mac user should be able to find one feature to like in this handy little plugin.

Four years after the service opened to the public, popular web-based task manager Remember The Milk is finally out of beta. What does that mean? Nothing really.

The company isn't going to start charging for access to its core services. And the developers aren't done adding and refining features. It's just that after four years, the Remember The Milk team decided the product was probably robust enough to remove the beta label... you know, kind of like Google did with Gmail not too long ago.

Of course, companies like Google and Remember the Milk have stretched the meaning of the beta label beyond any semblance of recognition. Once upon a time, if you were using a beta product you knew it was a pre-release version that hadn't been extensively tested and which may be unstable. These days, alpha is kind of the new beta, although some companies still release public and private beta versions of software that are still untested and unstable. Since there's no regulator tasked with enforcing alpha, beta, and other labeling rules, the words have kind of lost their meaning.

Still, congratulations to the Remember the Milk team on reaching four years!