Despite the fact that it's been bought out by Microsoft, http://www.foldershare.com is a pretty righteously excellent little gizmo for syncing files between a laptop and a desktop, and it's cross platform.

It means when I'm out writing (and have wifi), every time I make a change to the file, it gets synced to all other computers (in my case only two, but if you've got an automated backup server, it could go there too).

For writing stuff I'm still using OpenOffice, though I recently moved over to Novel's ginormous distro largely on the strength of its .docx import filter. Some of the folk in my writers group occasionally forget and upload stuff in that blighted format, and it's nicer to be able to translate it myself than rely on yelling at them. The Novelbloat version of OO also comes with 4 billion fonts, which is sorta neat too, I guess.

I briefly tried StarOffice. It's spellchecker didn't think 'fucking' was a real word so I fucking deleted it.

Another bit of recently discovered glory is Evernote, now in Mac flavor as well as PC. It's sorta, kinda like Onenote, but... Um. It's not Microsoft. I know I at least intended to show it to you at the VP party. Whether or not I actually did... I'm not sure.

Offhand, I can't recall what IRC client Sharon is using on the Mac. Snak, maybe? Dunno for sure.

You mentioned foldershare. I don't think you showed me ever note as "Here is Evernote" was that it when you showed me the outline thingy?

I always have to train office programs, since so many of my terms of created for each story. So far NeoOffice looked the most feature complete from a "easy transition" perspective.

My excel data munging is my only worry with any of these. At least with OS X you don't have the idiocy of the registry to FUBAR things.

Evernote is indeed what I did the outline thing with.

It's got some super-neat features, like the ability to do text-string searches on images. As in, it does passably advanced OCR to index strings within images. It isn't perfect, but it's shockingly good.

It'll also neatly archive local copies of web pages (and everything is tagable, because that is the era we have entered). It does the usual drawing type stuff Tablet users get used to, but it can also do the 'you are drawing a circle, badly, let me fix that' trick.

And then it syncs it all up with your Evernote account in the sky and you can share it with other people or view and edit it with any web browser.

I can't say much about Excel. It is an awful lot like a math thing, and I was apparently stabbed by a calculus as an infant. I've got tons of antibodies that attack any math the moment it's introduced to my system.

I briefly tried StarOffice. It's spellchecker didn't think 'fucking' was a real word so I fucking deleted it.
Right on.

Instead of OpenOffice, you may want to use NeoOffice. It has an Aqua interface. I don't know if OpenOffice for the Mac has an Aqua interface yet. I've moved to Nisus Writer Express. However, the only reason I use any word processor is to generate RTF files, so I'm not actually recommending it. I do all of my actual writing with TextWrangler. (It's just fine. But I don't ask a lot of my text editor. Just the ability to search and replace regexps. If I were doing any actual programming on my Mac, I'd probably want some flavor of emacs.)

I haven't used any firewall tools other than the one built into Apple's control panel. (Basically, I just disallow everything, because I never access my Mac remotely.)

The only Mac related sites I follow right now are macrumors.com and Daring Fireball. I think they're both reading. The former consolidates rumors and news. The latter has interesting commentary (as well as aggregating interesting links).

There are lots of niggling UI details that behave differently among X11, Windows and Aqua. However, since I use all three on a regular basis, I now have them all confused in my head. (I think what gets me the most right now is that the buttons which control window actions are in different places in each UI.) I have backspace/delete issues regardless of what platform I'm on.

I tend not to use utilities to modify the UI, so I'm not helpful there.

There are some... interesting impacts from the firewall perspective. I trundled over something called WaterRoof the other evening that looked promising.

I'm a severe disappointment to all my programming friends... I can analyze like crazy and poke holes, but writing code? Alas, dyslexia dissolves intent quickly. Plus, I like visuals... but effective visuals, where visual tells me more than the plaintext alone would have.

Part of this experiment is to prove the use case for the parental units so I can stop supporting them 24x7 for idiotic Wintel complications.

I'm all for migrating parental units (and the like) over to OS X. It's just that much less stress for everyone. However, they'll need new hardware.

(I understand why Apple doesn't want people to run OS X on non-Apple computers. I do wish they'd allow people to run OS X in virtual machines though.)

re: virtualized mac os on a hw hypervisor?

can you say gateway to apple land??

Dude. Neo Office looks very nice!

I think I tried a demo of Nisus Writer back before the earth's crust cooled, and I think I remember liking it.

There was a time, long, long ago, when laptop computers were monochrome and their screens were completely legible in bright sunlight. In those halcyon days I had occasion to steal Sharon's Powerbook and use WriteNow to pretend I knew how to write (no one will ever see those few things, they have been safely destroyed by datarot). I think I looked at Nisus Writer as a potential replacement for the beloved WriteNow.

I tend not to use utilities to modify the UI, so I'm not helpful there.

Generally you should avoid this in OS X. There are a number of toolkits out there that enable you to mess with the core OS X UI, typically because some users want to emulate some behavior they had in OS 9 and below. And almost every time, this makes the OS melt down at some point.

So I started writing you a long comment about mac tips and tricks and software, but then decided it would be better as a blog post. Clearly I need more blog fodder.

http://www.goer.org/Journal/2008/04/mac_tricks_and_tips_and_apps_that_are_real_good_an.html

Scrivener looks really interesting, and it's been on my "to investigate" list for several days. I'm usually really skeptical about writing tools, even if the interface is very slick. I like text-based formats like LaTeX and DocBook.

But a little digging around on the Scrivener site reveals that Scrivener can export to LaTeX, and it can also save in an XML-based format, so that you can use it with version control. *That* piqued my interest. I'm going to give it a try, and if it's good, I might just be changing my toolchain.