Like most Macintosh owners, I use iTunes and iPhoto a lot. In addition, however, there are two additional applications I use (or recently started to use) that follow the same general user interface as iTunes or iPhoto. Both are powerful applications in their own right. And for my money what makes them better is due in large part to the common look and feel. These UI designs include the configurable menu on top, the list of critical information and folders on the left hand in a panel that is light gray/blue, list of stored items in the default top pane below the menu bar, and a bottom pane that displays items specific for what the application is designed to show. Double clicking on an item then removes the top pane, filling the entire window with the item. I suspect this is due to common developer's tools and programming libraries provided by Apple and takes advantage of specific GUI components (Cocoa, Carbon, whatever, it works). Whatever it is, I like it. These applications are Papers from mekentosj.com and NetNewsWire now free from NewsGator.
Papers
Papers is an application written by a couple of young scientists (Alexander Griekspoor and Tom Groothuis) in the Netherlands while they were post docs in a cell biology lab. It's main purpose is for creating a library of PDF files, complete with important metadata and complete citations, and is primarily designed for use by scientists as a repository of journal articles. Citations can be imported from several on line resources including PubMed, the Web of Science, Google Scholar, and several others. A variety of documents can be imported, although the predominant use is for PDF file storage. Once imported, complete citation data can be automatically 'matched' to the PDF file by either using the DOI number, or via a variety of built in on line searches, such as an author search of PubMed. Journal articles can in turn be matched to existing citations through a built-in Google search function, which more often than not finds the appropriate PDF, usually on the publisher's web site. The entire library including the PDFs are searchable via a subset of Spotlight indexng, with built-in filters, such as title, author, journal, keyword, etc. PDFs can be read in a window, or a click of a button will open the PDF in full screen mode, like iPhoto. One can organize papers in a variety of collections. Articles can be added to collections manually or by the use of smart folders, which collect appropriate papers based on keyword AND/OR filters, much like smart folders in iTunes. Finally, it can import from or export to EndNote citations via XML files. Papers was an instant hit in my laboratory.
It's a powerful application and is Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard) only.
NetNewsWire
NetNewsWire is an RSS News aggregator originally authored by Brent Simmons and now owned by NewsGator. I had tried using this when it was still a 1.x release but then had little use for it. Lately I've been using iGoogle as my RSS aggregator, but since NNW is now free, I thought I'd give it a new look. First, second, and third impressions have been favorable. It's fast, can synch subscriptions and articles between more than one computer (via .Mac or through a free NewsGator account), and uses the Safari web rendering toolkit to display complete web pages within the news window. Articles or snippets of articles can be selected and automatically sent to a blog editor (such as MarsEdit), complete with appropriate link and citation. While I'll still use iGoogle as my browser home page, since most of my web reading are news sites I see myself using this more and more.
OK, there's a couple more I should mention. MarsEdit (orignally written by Brent Simmons and then further developed by Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software) which I'm writing this with and mentioned above), and the Leopard Finder window also follow these guidelines. All in all, I truly appreciate the consistency. In fact I may just have to buy MarsEdit once my 30 day evaluation period expires.
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