faf : Mark McCall

September 25, 2009 in Favourite Apps by David John

When it comes to home automatic and domestic gadgetry advice there really is only one website to turn to and that is Automated Home. Home automation expert Mark McCall has been running the website since 1996 and kicks off  our new series entitled : Five Apps Friday.

1. Google Notifier [Free]

Increasingly my life is in the hands of Mr Google.  The mighty search engine itself, GMail, GCal, GContacts are all the things I use many times a day, every day in life.

While it may not be a “good thing [tm]” for one company to have all my stuff, these powerful and free services make my life easier. Google Notifier sits in the menu bar and gives Growl notifications of incoming emails and upcoming Calendar appointments. [Link]

2. Spotify [Free - £10/Month]

By now everyone knows about Spotify, the great free (or pay to remove ads) music service that lets you stream tracks from its huge online catalogue.  Unlike Last FM you can choose the actual track you want, save playlists and share music with friends.  To be honest it all seems to good to be true! [Link]

3. JBidWatcher [Free - Donate]

If you spend any time on eBay these days you’ll know most auctions are now a 10 day advert for a 20 second bidding frenzy.  In order to have a chance you need to become a “sniper” too and I use this great free Java based tool. [Link]

4. Jaikoz [£15]

Another Java app, this time an audio tag editor .  The app trawls many online DBs and automaticallty recognises even files with no tags – correcting them and adding artwork etc.  You can correct huge collections with ease with this app. [Link]

5. iPlayer Downloader [Free - Donate]

A superb free app that allows your Mac to mimic an iPhone and so enable it to download DRM free video from the BBCs iPlayer service.  Even though the files are small, the videos are very watchable on the Mac as well as being in the h.264 format the iPhone expects, so easy to upload to your phone too without the need to re-encode. (Note: you must have a UK IP address for this app to work). [Link]

Take Part

If you  like to take part in the Five Apps Friday series then why not get in contact. The applications can be either OSX based or iPhone and all we need is a 620 pixel wide (landscape) photo and a png screen shot of the apps in a row. All we need is your five favourite applications and why…….