It’s been quite a week, full of escaping puppies, poor health and fuzzy brain. But while I haven’t had a lot of success at coherent writing, I have been abe to surf the web, play with software, listen to podcasts, and explore a few new computer activities.
One of the ongoing problems I have is that 2Gb of RAM isn’t really enough in my MacBook Pro. I’ve been watching Activity Monitor closely for the last few weeks and find that some of my favourite applications seem to slowly grab more and more Real Memory. Chief culprits include Eudora, OmniWeb, MarsEdit, Launchbar. All are invaluable to me. From time to time I relaunch them to clear the memory.
Having the Activity Monitor window open all the time also brings home which applications are made for Intel and which are still PowerPC. It may not actually matter, but I’m just the kind of person who’d prefer all my applications to be made for the chip I’m using. The main holdouts have been Eudora, Meteorologist, Snapz Pro X, and, until recently Copy Paste X.
I’ve been using various versions of Copy Paste X for years now and couldn’t live without multiple (editable) clipboards. I also used the yType feature to help correct spelling and to save me keystrokes: I’d type mz[space] for example and it would expand to my email address. Other, longer, chunks of text were also tied to two- and three-letter triggers.
Nevertheless, Copy Paste X wasn’t optimised for Intel, and recently I started having an odd problem with the floating palette disappearing. Rather than troubleshoot, I thought I might look around for alternatives. After some experimentation I seem to have settled on Jumpcut and TextExpander.
Jumpcut
Jumpcut is free and open source. There’s not much to say about it, except that it seems to work just fine. I’m happy so far, and will probably stick with it for a while. The clipboards aren’t editable, but it turns out I didn’t actually edit clipboards very often and can live with a quick paste into my text editor for whatever needs doing.
TextExpander
TextExpander turns out to be very efficient, user-friendly and much easier to work with than yType. Moreover, it’s possible to download files of ready-made shortcuts, such as the TextExpander HTML Snippet file, making it even more useful.
After working with it for a very short time I paid up, and I’m a very happy user. The only downside is that I keep expecting it to work when I’m using Internet Explorer or Flock in Windows (via Parallels Desktop). Darn it, but it doesn’t!
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If LaunchBar “eats” your memory you might want to give Quicksilver (http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/) a try. It’s free and more than replaced LaunchBar for me. In fact I’d say it’s the one application I really can’t live without …
Oh, forgot to say: It allocates approx. 25MB of memory.
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