Software you should use

In the past few months i’ve found new ways to do things, and found new things to get. I thought i’d talk about some of the neat things I use to get through my day that maybe people arn’t really all that aware of.

RSS Feeds:

I love this technology. It’s been in use by bloggers for a while, but that’s not all that useful. What is useful, however, that real news sources supply these feeds now. I found this piece of software called Sharp Reader, it’s a typical RSS Aggrigator. There’s a few different ones out there, but I liked how this one looked and worked. Anyway, the idea behind RSS is someone like Yahoo supplies a file that’s updated everytime new news is put up. Your RSS program then detects that change and puts that updated news article in a list for you to read. You never search around looking for headlines, the headlines come to you. Yahoo has feeds for everything they have (headline news, entertainment, sports, etc) and it’s now the only way I read legit news. On top of that many other sources supply feeds. Places like The Register, Slashdot, Engadget, etc all supply this stuff. I know now when new Treo news is put up by Treobits, when new Palm software is put up by PalmGear, and when Wired magazine supplies a new article. Without opening a web browser. PS: TheCabin has an RSS feed.

Another discovery is really a very cool one. It’s a new idea called “Podcasting”. The idea of podcasting is people record audio files that consist of anything. Most are talk radio type things, talking about technology. Some play some music with it. It’s your own radio show, and there are some very good ones out there. Adam Curray from MTV has a great show called The Daily Source Code that he puts up every day. Along with him shows like “The Engadget Podcast” and “The Dawn and Drew” show are some of my favorites.

The magic behind this is again RSS. People put up RSS feeds that consist of each Podcast they do. Your Podcasting program detects when a new show has gone up on the net and automaticly downloads it for you. So you’re ready to listen to a new custom radio show whenever you like. The best software for podcast downloads is IPodder 1.1. It even has a directory of podcasts in the program you can chose from. Very easy. Very entertaining. Put these on your ipod, treo, mp3 player, audio cdr.. whatever. It’s better than mainstream radio.

If you all havn’t yet, switch to Firefox & Thunderbird for web browser and mail client. There’s no reason not to, and i’m serious. Thunderbird can even read RSS feeds (see above).

And to finish things off, for those of you with a Palm PDA and can get online with it, i’ve officialy switched to ChatterMail for my Treo email client. It supports the IMAP IDLE command, so the second an email comes in it gets delivered to you. No more polling… that’s the old skew pop3 way, who needs that! I’m also currently testing The Causerie IM Client that does all the IM protocols for work purposes. The Oronova guys would like to communicate via IM when at other clients. So I figured i’d go the next step and go mobile with it.

Ok, that’s my update on software you should use. Enjoy!

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