Here is a list of ten apps I use on a daily basis (both web and desktop apps). The main system I’ve been using for a while is a unibody MacBook, so many of the applications on the list are mac-only.

Mint

Mint is a site-stats program that promises to give a “fresh look” at your site. Many of you are probably familiar with mint. I use it a lot for tracking visitor habits and to see stats from this blog. I’ve installed lot of peppers, which add extra functionality  like Secret Crush, User Agent, Feedburner and Visits Differ. Be aware that more peppers means more javascript code loading when someone visits your site, which leads to slower page loading. Mint costs $30 (no subscription or year-by-year costs). All updates until the next major version (which will be version 3) are free as long as most of the available peppers (about 90% of them). Keep in mind that mint is self-hosted, which means that after you buy it, you have to install it on your hosting server.

Safari

I’ve been using only Firefox for almost three years now, but recently switched to Safari, which seems to run faster on my MacBook. Safari lacks the extensibility of Firefox, but its clean layout alongside with fast page loading are huge pros. The only thing I miss is Google Toolbar which is not available for Safari. Plus I am now used to Safari bookmark management and it will be a hard time for me to make a switch again.

WordPress

WordPress is probably the best piece of software I’ve ever came around. Free, 0pen-source, bringing tons of new features with every major release. I use it on a daily basis for managing this blog, update plugins, read comments and clean spam. I’ve tried some time in the past to use other software for blogging, but it lasted only for about two days. After using WordPress for about two years, I feel very familiar with it, and I cannot even imagine my online life without it.

iTunes

iTunes has become my main music player. I love the options it offers for organizing music. Most of my albums have full ID3 tags including cover arts and genres. I use iTunes also for managing movie trailers, movies and for syncing my iPhone and my iPod.  What I love in the last version of iTunes (version 8 ) is the grid option which is the way I usually use to navigate through my library.

Things

Before Things I’ve never used a GTD application. I’ve read lot of reviews on Things application after the recent Macworld 2009 expo, so I decided to give it a try. Things is the best to-do management application out there. I downloaded the trial version (which lets you use the app with full functionality for 15 days) and I bought a license just after 4 days of trial use. I am so excited with the features of this app, that I will write a separate post reviewing the app alongside with its companion product for the iPhone.

Transmit

Transmit is an ftp client by Panic. It offers great capabilities and is the only ftp program I use for managing the files of this blog. Transmit offers drag and drop interface which makes file exchange between your mac and your server a piece of cake. It supports ftp and sftp and integrates well with Panic Coda, the well known editor.

Coda

Coda is a text editor by Panic. Although it is called a text editor it offers much more like terminal, svn capabilities, css, even books and in general everything that a web developer needs.  I use it for editing the php files of the blogs, manage css files (I use also CSS edit for this purpose) and of course for html editing. When I need to edit a file on Typpz’s server, I find the file using Transmit ftp click, ctrl+click>edit with Coda, and after editing cmd+s to save it directly on the server. Coda costs $99 and worths every penny. I find it better and much more easy to use than Adobe Dreamweaver which costs much more. Both Coda and Transmit are mac-only apps.

Xcode

Xcode comes built-in in every Mac. It is a great IDE. I use it on a daily basis for practicing with the iPhone SDK. I also use it as a simple text-editor for java and c programs I write for my studies. I write the programs in Xcode and I prefer to compile them using the Terminal. In general Xcode and the other development programs that come with every Mac, offer everything you need for developing applications for Mac OS X using cocoa, java and objective-c.

iPhoto

I use to snap large amounts of photos each day with my camera. Right when I am back home I plug my camera to my mac and import them to iPhoto. iPhoto offers exactly what I need and use: tagging, album creation and most important it is easy to use. For professional users there are also Apple Aperture and Adobe Lightroom.

Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop needs for sure no introduction. I use it daily for editing images for this blog, editing my photos and for designing layouts for web sites I design. 

Next to come is a post about apps I use on a daily basis on my iPhone.

As you may have noticed, I have changed the Typpz Blog theme. Now I use Simpla theme. I choosed it because its light, clean with pal colors and meets my needs. The drawback of this theme is that it does not support sidebar widgets which means that it does not take advantage of WordPress 2.3 or older versions with the widget plugin installed. Although it is very easy to make it support widgets (widgetize it) and use it as every up-to-date WordPress theme. Lets see how (if you dont like the manual way you can download Simpla Theme widgetized at the end of this post).

Widgetizing the sidebar

Open the sidebar.php file located in simpla theme folder with you favorite editor on in WordPress admin panel, delete everything it has and paste the following code:

<div id="sidebar">
<ul>
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
  <li id="pages">
    <h2>Pages</h2>
    <ul>
      <li><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/">Home</a></li>
      <?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li id="categories">
    <h2>Categories</h2>
    <ul>
    <?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&optioncount=1&hierarchical=0'); ?>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li id="links">
    <ul>
    <?php get_links_list(); ?>
    </ul>
  </li>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>
</div>

Save sidebar.php and then create a new file, name it functions.php and paste the following code (be carefull, functions.php should contain only the code below):

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
  register_sidebar();
?>

Your theme is now widgetized which means that in your WordPress admin panel, in presentation tab you can drag & drop widgets in your sidebar.
Widgetizing the sidebar caused a CSS probem with the doted lines used in the sidebar sections (there is an extra nested <ul>). You can easily fix it by modifying the following code in style.css file just after the #sidebar rules: Find the lines

#sidebar ul li{
    border-bottom:1px dotted #ddd;
    margin-bottom:0.3em;
    padding:0.3em;
}

and change them to:

#sidebar ul li{
  margin-bottom:0.3em;
  padding:0.3em;
}
#sidebar ul ul li{
  border-bottom:1px dotted #ddd;
}

Your theme is now ready to run and use every of the WordPress 2.3 features. I do not like the page titles used by Simpla (Typpz Blog>>Blog Archives>>Post Name). I want just the post name. To do that you have to open the header.php file, find the line with the following code:

<title>
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?>
</title>

and change it into:

<title><?php if(is_home()) {
echo bloginfo('name'); } else { wp_title(''); } ?></title>

Adding a Header Image

To add a header image (like Typpz.com blog here) instead of the blog title, open header.php file, find the <div=header> section and change the code in it to:

<h1><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/"><img src="URL" alt="logo" border="0" /></a></h1>
<p class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></p>

where URL put the location of your header image!

Other fixes and addons

If you write long posts you probably need a “goto top” button at the end of your pages. Open index.php file, find the line <?php endif; ?> and paste the following just below that line:

<p align="right">
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>/#">TOP</a>
</p>

As I have posted you can display the WordPress tags under each post.

Download simpla theme widgetized! Simpla is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, which means that you can use Simpla widgetized for free and just give a link back to Phu and me !
After you download the theme, you’ll need to extract it to your /wp-content/themes/ directory. Then log into WP and activate the theme from within your presentation panel. Both Simpla and Simpla Widgetized use valid XHTML and CSS!

Download Simpla Widgetized Theme

After nine months with this theme, I think its time for a CSS reboot. The new theme will be much simplier than this and much more light which means less javascript, cleaner and minimal look, stylish icons and less time to load. You can see some screenshots in the image above to take a look on how Typpz Blog will look in few days. The theme is customized, widgetized and ready to go, but I have to extremely check the plugins to ensure maximum compatibily before I launch it so I am patient .

Favicon is the shortcut icon that is shown next to the url of a website or next to site’s name in browser tabs. You can see our favicon in the screenshot above. To create a great favicon you should consider these:

1. Select the image you want to use for your favicon and trim part of it so you have a square part of the image (for example if your image is 450x400px trim 50px so it is 400x400px).
2. Resize the square image you want to use as favicon to 16x16px.
3. Save the shortcut as .gif file as it is the most browser friendly format for favicons.
4. Name your shortcut favicon.gif and upload it to your root folder as some browser recognise the file named favicon as shortcut icon by default.
5. For best results and for having a favicon compatible with all browsers that support shortcut icons place the following code anywhere between your <head> and </head> tags:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="URL" />
Replace URL with the path where you stored your favicon.

The sidebar of our blog theme uses a javascript script which gives each user that visits this blog an option to see the sidebar widgets in the way he likes, or even close them. To see what I mean check the video and try it by yourself.

As we love web standards, we did not use the code that Youtube offers for embedding videos. This code contains the embed tag which is non-standard and does not validate as xhtml. If you want to embed a youtube video in your blog or site use this

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="http://www.youtube.com/v/moviecode" width="400" height="326"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/moviecode" /></object>

The moviecode is a code found in each youtube video adress and is after v= until the first ampersand (&). For example in this URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmHHjUZPyMY, the code is xmHHjUZPyMY. Using this code Typpz blog is still using valid XHTML.