Blogging Tips

I have to admit it, even though I am a Mac user, I tend to be something of a cheapskate when it comes to my software. It isn’t that I am opposed to paying for software but that, even on the Mac, there usually is a great solution available for free of charge.

However, there are at least five applications that I’ve fallen in love with and have gladly paid for, either full price through their stores or as part of one of the Macheist bundles I’ve purchased.

In the end, these are five applications that are well worth their price if you have a need for what they provide.

Tweetie

There are countless Twitter apps available for the Mac including many of the most popular, Tweetdeck, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop. However, Tweetie has quickly become my favorite on the Mac.

The problem with Tweetdeck, Twhirl and many others is that they run on the Adobe Air platform. While they are fine applications and do some very interesting things with Twitter, they also tend to be memory hogs, especially after running for many hours. However, a Mac-native app like Tweetie tends to be more gentle on the system and, even after a full day of operation, usually needs less than 50 megs of RAM.

Best of all, Tweetie is a robust application that is both easy on the eyes and easy on the brain. Though it lacks a true multi-column interface, it makes it easy to move between replies, messages and the main timeline easily. One can also break searches into a new window to follow keywords of interest alongside your regular feed.

Tweetie is free and ad-supported, but is also well worth the $19.95 to remove the ads.

Free Alternatives: Tweetdeck, Twhirl and Seesmic Desktop are all great apps. But you can also just run Tweetie in ad-supported mode if you want.

Flow

File transfer can be an ugly business but Flow makes it beautiful. With the ability to access FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, WebDAV, and MobileMe servers, Flow can get your files into just about any server you’ll run against.

However, where Flow really shines is in how elegant it makes the process of managing files on a remote server. You can use droplets to upload your files without even opening the application, you can edit files directly on the server with Flow, which is very handy for editing WordPress configuration files, and Flow can even automatically copy the URLs of uploaded files to your clipboard, making it very fast for sharing links.

Though there are many file trasfer apps for the Mac, Flow is by far the most elegant and effective I have tried. Though other paid FTP apps, such as Transmit, may be better known, Flow is the one that has worked best with the protocols I need and my particular workflow.

Flow costs $29 and offers a free 30-day trial.

Free Alternatives: Cyberduck is a free alternative to Flow that works reasonably well. However, in my case, it seemed to have issues with Amazon S3 that prohibited me from using it.

Snaps Pro X

I take a lot of screenshots when I blog. Though there are many ways to get good screenshots of sites, Snapz Pro X makes it easy to get precise screenshots quickly.

Snapz Pro X allows you to grab your entire screen, just one window or a selected area. Your area selection can be a specific size, measured in pixels, an aspect ratio, which is useful to ensure you get a perfect square, or any dimensions you want. Snapz also makes it easy to scale images, create thumbnails and even add a watermark.

Snapz also offers a video recording tool that lets you perform video captures on your screen, including the ability to record audio from your microphone. However, this feature of Snapz is somewhat lacking compared to other applications. Instead, where Snapz really shines is its ability to grab precise still images quickly.

Snapz Pro X costs $69 and is offers a free trial that expires after either 15 uses or 100 days. The trial also places a watermark over your captures.

Free Alternatives: Skitch is an app I’ve talked about recently and still highly recommend. However, it is only free during its beta phase. I’ve begun using Skitch more and more due to its editing and upload abilities. However, Snapz ability to “freeze” the screen and do exact-dimension screenshots makes it an app I keep around and still use regularly for the shots Skitch can’t quite get.

Sound Studio

Macs come with GarageBand, a robust and powerful audio editor that is great for podcasts. However, much of what GarageBand does is on autopilot, for those who want more control over their podcasts or other audio recordings, they need a better-targeted audio editor. For that, Sound Studio is a solid choice and was a great find in a recent Macheist bundle.

In addition to the standard array of filters and modifications, Sound Studio makes audio editing easier and faster by letting you edit a podcast as you are listening to it, rather than forcing you to stop, make the changes and then go back and resume listening. This can be very useful over long podcasts where you are removing background noise that could not be filtered out.

Though GarageBand does a great job for most podcast and sound editing, for those that want more control, and more options (especially in terms of export formats), Sound Studio is a very good choice.

Sound Studio costs $79 and offers a 14-day free trial.

Free Alternatives: As mentioned above, Macs come bundled with GarageBand, which is very powerful and works reasonably well for most editing. However, those that want more control without paying may prefer Audacity as it has many of the same features as Sound Studio and is open source.

ScreenFlow

One of the areas of blogging I’ve tried to get into more and more is screencasting. However, most applications for recording video from the desktop are clunky, difficult to use and not very feature-rich. However, Screenflow provides a robust, recording app with a powerful movie editor to make the entire process of recording and editing a screencast very simple and fast.

What ScreenFlow does is capture video from your desktop and/or Webcam as well as audio from your PC and/or microphone. It then provides an iMovie-like interface to edit what you captured. You can add pans, zooms, overlays, text, highlights and more to your video without leaving ScreenFlow. You can also bring in other video and audio from your hard drive to add additional content to your presentation. When you’re done, you can then export your video into QuickTime format for easy uploading to YouTube or other video sharing sites.

ScreenFlow is a rare combination of power and simplicity that makes it ideal for creating professional-quality screencasts. Though it is easily the most expensive application on this list, it is well worth the price if you plan on taking even a modest number of movies of your desktop.

ScreenFlow costs $99 and offers a demo version of the application for free.

Free Alternatives: ScreenToaster will allow you to record your desktop for free and you can use iMovie to edit your videos together.

Bottom Line

When it comes to my blog and my business, I tend to favor free applications whenever practical. However, the greater focus is on finding the applications that do to the job the best at a reasonable price. Though there are many areas where I use free applications over their paid counterparts (EX: I use Bean over Microsoft Word or Pages), it is because the paid apps do not offer enough for me to justify their price.

However, even when you love free software, there are still times where a paid app can justify its cost and, in those cases, I’ve found it to be much more cost-effective to go ahead and buy it than try to limp along with something that isn’t working as well.

After all, time is the most valuable commodity any of us have and, if we’re going to do something regularly, the ability to do it faster and better is almost certainly worth at least a little bit of coinage.