I found out about these clipboard managers the first time I went to an iOS Workshop held at my undergraduate university. The software developer for Apple showed us how to create an application from scratch with the help of one of these clipboard managers. He had all his code snippets saved onto his clipboard and he would step through the changes every fragment of code did to our application and he did it with great ease using a clipboard manager. Otherwise, he would’ve had to have the finalized source code in which he’d be copying and pasting out of but thanks to his clipboard manager, he preloaded his entire code into snippets one by one so he could access them with ease.

I couldn’t figure out which one he used but that is when I found CopyPaster. It has a neat UI which simply captures all your items in your clipboard for future use.

I’ve been using it for awhile and fell in love with it since. I’ve used it mainly for programming purposes whether it be for PHP, LaTeX, R, SQL, and more. It’s increased my productivity as I tend to store all my frequented code fragments in my clipboard for future use. That way I don’t have to dig through my document to figure out how to create that table I formatted so well in LaTeX a few sections ago.

CopyPaster includes the following features:

• Copy and Paste many file formats
• Seamless Quick Look Integration
• Access the clipboard manager with a single keystroke
• Integrated inline search to find your item fast
• Paste data with a single mouse click
• And more being implemented

It currently runs at $1.99 on the AppStore. If you don’t like the price, you could also check out Clip Menu.

CopyPaster

You might be asking, but doesn’t this sound a lot like RSS? To be honest, it does and it performs a similar function to the app Reeder (iOS) but it does it differently. Pulse doesn’t label itself as a RSS reader because many people have a hard time understand what an RSS feed is. I’ve tried explaining it to my friends but many don’t seem to give it a chance because it sounds too technical. Pulse decides to take a different route by creating a layer on top of RSS to provide an even better reading experience for its users.

So for those wanting to find a better way to devour content over the internet, you should try out Pulse. You should always find something of interest as they pull content from many popular sources from all types of categories.They even have a featured section so you could discover new sources.

What’s most interesting is why this application was created. Akshay Kothari and Ankit Guota were inspired to create this application because of their frustration of reading the news on mobile devices. So they developed this application in a ten week course at Stanford University and since then has been a best-selling application. Shouldn’t this give us some inspiration to create something of our own to see where it could take you? Stop thinking about the what if we does this, and simply do it. You’ll never know how far it’ll take you.

Pulse

Source: Blender – Features

Blender’s Gallery of Content

Still not impressed? Check out their Blender – Art Gallery and take a look at a video below created in Blender. Also be sure to check out my iPhone Development Flickr set where you can see my creations in Blender.

Overview of Blender

For those wanting to get into 3D modeling, animating rendering, or making films, Blender is a great place to start. Sure, the UI isn’t that intuitive in the beginning, but once your check out the tutorial videos found on their website, you’ll learn that learning the keyboard shortcuts is your best bet. Just have patience and let your imagination do the work.

Blender
Blender – Art Gallery
Blender – Tutorials
Blender – Features
iPhone Development Flickr set
SIO2 3D Game Engine

So how does it work? Simply run the Wubi installer, enter a password for the account, choose some basic options, and click “Install”. Yes, it’s that simple. It’s not going to take any modifying of your partitions or boot loader. It just works like any other application. Yes, it’s that simple. If you don’t like it, simple uninstall it like any other application. Best of all, it’s free.

I’ve used it and to be honest, it’s great. Wubi is hassle free and extremely easy to use. Like mentioned, it’s extremely easy to uninstall and no need to worry about something going wrong.

What to know about Wubi

Below are somethings that you should know about Wubi before you try it out.

• Read the Wubi FAQ if you want to know how it works and answers to many of your questions
• To make it easier, pre-download the ISO and save it to the same directory where Wubi is extracted. That way, the installer doesn’t need to download it every time you run it.
• You can force Wubi to use a 32-bit verison of Ubuntu if you follow the previous step
• All you need is 256MB of RAM and an 1GHz or faster Intel/AMD processor is recommended for optimal performance. Installation requires 5GB. Bought your computer within the past 3 years? You should be fine.

This is where Shift It came along. Simply download and install, and with the help of these Shift It Hotkeys you’ll be snapping windows left and right!

After downloading this great utility software, I’ve been using it everyday as it allows you to organize your workspace with a few simple key presses. Come to think about it, I probably eliminated the use of needing to resize windows since Shift It allows you to resize windows to half, full, and even a quarter of your screen.

Download Shift It for Mac.

For those of you using Firefox and haven’t heard about Personas, now might be a good time to start.

I recently started using them and they add a nice touch to your browser. By simply going to the Personas website, you can simply glide over the wide variety of available “personas” and see the instant change (*w/plugin). There are quite a bit of categories so you are bound to find something you are interested in. Once you are satisfied, simply wear it with style. If you aren’t satisfied, you can even make your own, or make Talk Binary one mind you.

Below is a video that explains this to you since lots of people like seeing stuff explained with sound and moving pictures.

Features of Dropbox

Below are some of the features I enjoy using it for. If you want to see the full list please visit Dropbox Features.

• 2GB of online storage, which can be increased through referrals
• Up to 100GB for paying customers
• Works on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers
• Allows you to share folders or files with people to start collaborating on projects
• A “Public” folder that lets you create direct links to your files to share with your friends
• Access your files online as well as upload, delete, rename, etc
• It’s secure
• And it’s also mobile too

Impressions of Dropbox

When I lost my USB Hard Drive, I hated the idea of having to go buy another one. Instead, I found Dropbox. Ever since then whenever I need to access something across multiple computers, I drop it in my Dropbox and better yet, I could access it online. Best of all it’s very easy to set up across multiple computers. With the added bonus of sharing folders and files, and even creating links for files for your friends to access, I couldn’t ask for anything better. Best of all it’s free so you have nothing to lose.

Updated: Added video on Dropbox

Dropbox

Create a virtual machine using VirtualBox

Virtual Box is a powerful open source x86 virtualization that runs on Windows, Linux, Mac and OpenSolaris. It supports a large number of guest operating systems such as Windows XP, Windows 7 RC, Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Fedora, and Red Hat. VirtualBox is free as well as many linux distributions. So if you haven’t tried any, I’d recommend you doing so.

In simpler terms, Virtual Box allows you to run another OS on top of your currently existing one. If you wanted to try installing an OS without the hassle of dual-booting, or even wanted to install another OS to do some programming since maybe Windows isn’t the best for you, then virtualiziation is one way to go. There is also no way you can harm your computer so its risk-free. If you corrupt a guest OS, simply delete it and try again.

VirtualBox Features

• Guest Additions for Windows, Linux, and Solaris – Allows you to install software inside the OS that improves performance. Just recently the guest additions allowed users running Ubuntu to run the Visual Effects, which is nice.
• Shared folders – Access folders from the host in the guest machines
Virtual USB Controllers – Connect a USB device and your virtual machine will recognize it, including USB Flash Drives.

For more features visit Virtual Box Features.

How to start

If you want to start, simply download Virtual Box and an OS. I’d recommend Ubuntu since thats probably the most user friendly (or so I think). If you want something else, hit up DistroWatch. Once you have that, setting up Virtual Box with the OS is pretty straightforward. I’ll add a tutorial later on for those who still need help.

My Usage of VirtualBox

I use Virtual Box to create my own programming environment. I personally use Ubuntu but I have also used other linux operating systems that can be found at DistroWatch. Since I run a dual monitor setup, I usually have Windows 7 running on my left monitor while Ubuntu runs on my right monitor in the case I need to program and attend to my other needs such as IM or music player which are still running on Windows.

When I run Ubuntu on my Macbook on the other hand, I simply run it full screen and within the virtualized machine I run my music player, IM client, and have my programming environment set up so I don’t have to be switching back and forth since running another OS requires quite a bit of resources.

Final Impressions of VirtualBox

For quite some time now, I’ve been using Virtual Box nearly every day and haven’t had a complaint. It’s stable, free, and relatively easy to use. If your interested in virtualizing, I’d recommend you in trying this out.

Virtual Box

Recently, I was looking at source code over the internet and had trouble looking at the entire code in one window without having to create another just to see the entire content of that page.

Hoping there was a “split window” add-on for Firefox out there similar to emacs or vim, I began my search and found Split Browser. Split Browser allows you to split your browser window however you like. You can split your browser in order to see more of the current page without the need of having to open a new window which I thought was great. A preview of it in action is below.

Using Split Browser

Simply install Split Browser. Then to “split” your screen you can choose to split through the menu, by right-clicking, clicking the popup-buttons that appear on the top/bot/left/right of the screen, or even drop a link to the edges of your screen.

Overall

So far I think it’s great. It’s easy to use and allows you to split your browser to your hearts content. My only complaint is that it’s not “very” intuitive to use at first, but once you get used to it, it should work out fine.

Beejive is worth the $9.99

Sure, $9.99 does sound like a lot. Considering I don’t have a texting plan, I didn’t mind forking over the money. I was skeptical at first but it comes with a great variety of features.

• Connect to Facebook, MySpace, AIM, Yahoo, Hotmail, and more…
• Desktopish type of application – Comes will all types of features you’d expect out of a desktop application
• Apply themes to conversations and the application itself
• Push notifications alerting you of new messages
• No lag and minimal crashing
• Easy to switch over to conversations and preview last message your buddy sent
• Overall, feels slick and sexy. Even the icon looks good on my home bar
• Vertical and Horizontal typing. Your current typing in progress is displayed on a transparent bubble which optimizes your chatting viewing area.

So if you are looking for another instant messaging application on the iPhone/iPod Touch, try out Beejive. So far its been the best looking and working instant messaging application I’ve used.