I love using a Mac. I also love shortcuts and the vast array of shortcuts that Mac apps provide (especially Textmate).

What I don’t love is the fact that every application has its own shortcut for similar tasks.

For example

Switching windows or views:

Granted they’re all fairly similar, but it’s still a huge annoyance. I don’t see why one way is better than the other and why developers couldn’t have stuck with one combination.

Are we in need of a Mac shortcut standard?

Favorite unified shortcuts (most set by the operating system):

Other annoyances

It’s all good and dandy until you’re accidentally focused on a wrong application (Mail, Adium, others) and same shortcut brings up a Fonts dialogue, which is then not closable by Cmd + W shortcut because it’s not actually a window. UGH!?

Kevin Rose’s Pownce has made quite an impression on the blogosphere and surprisingly (sarcasm), two Pownce related articles made it to the frontpage of Digg yesterday. But does it bring anything new to the table? In other words, how does it separate itself from Twitter, a much more popular service?

First of all, Pownce has everything Twitter does. You can add friends and expand your social network. Having done that, you can begin spreading the love via short messages. Pownce even has a client app built on the Adobe’s AIR framework (formerly Apollo), which might I add, is well made both aesthetically and functionally.

A successful idea expanded

Instead of simply posting short 140 character messages, you can now post links, events and even upload files and music. Even still, the best innovation about Pownce is that you don’t have to send your updates/links/files to everybody (like on Twitter). You can select specific people and even groups to distribute your messages to.

The above features alone make it a viable competitor to Twitter. Other companies have come and gone (think Dukudu which joined TechCrunch Deadpool), but none have really innovated on Twitter’s idea, they simply copied it. Pownce though, manages to keep it simple, yet add quite a bit of functionality to make their product stand out.

Negatives

Unfortunately, my invite to Pownce was flagged by Gmail as ‘spam’. Apparently pownce@pownce.com has a negative connotation about it. Or perhaps Gmail, like a 13 year old boy, couldn’t keep it in their pants. Whatever.

Another negative is that default notification settings have everything turned on, from friend requests (manageable) to new message notifications (totally unacceptable). I’ve only added a couple of friends and in a short amount of time, received a ton of emails notifying me of updates. This explains the spam flag on their email. Thankfully, these settings are super easy to adjust.

What I’d like to see in the future

The client application for Pownce needs improvement. While it’s off to a great start, it doesn’t come close to Twitterrific’s simplicity and unobtrusive existence. I don’t like small apps like this to be in the Dock, they just take up space. I’m not sure the AIR framework can support this though, so I don’t know how Pownce can make this happen.

Monetization

Unlike Twitter, Pownce has a clear plan to make money: ads. They’re pretty unintrusive and blend right in with the rest of the website (design-wise).

If you’d like to try it out, reply here as I have some invites.

The reborn Reinvigorate web application is a complete web statistics software package that lets you track multiple websites for free.

But if you’re tired to constantly login to check who’s currently on your website, they have a new solution for you. Today the company introduced a new feature: Live tracking with a desktop application called Snoop.

Snoop keeps an open asynchronous connection with the Reinvigorate server and keeps you up to date with everything currently happening on your websites.

The small desktop app supports custom event triggering such as a purchase, new sign up or comment creation and is available for both Mac OS X and Windows (XP & Vista).

Some drawbacks

While it’s an interesting approach to user tracking, the application lacks some basic features

• No option to remember account information. Must re-enter each time.
• No timestamp in the application itself.
• Snoop keeps a small icon in the menu bar that shows the icon of the event currently occurring, but when clicked, doesn’t focus the main window.
• Shows a unique session name of the visitor, but doesn’t give a summary of their current visit.
• Double-Clicking the referrer doesn’t open it up in the browser.

Summary

Even though it could be improved (and I’m sure it will be), Snoop is a great introduction to live desktop coverage of your websites.

Today is an exciting day for Windows web developers are earlier today Apple announced the release of Safari 3 beta for Windows.

Finally, developers can see how their websites render on the WebKit engine that Safari is built on.

While WebKit has been available on Windows for a long time (one simply had to compile the source on Windows), this public pre-compiled browser with the Safari name will be great for marketing as it’ll go mainstream fast (thanks to Apple)

Brushed metal look

Steve Jobs announced that with Leopard’s release in October, brushed metal look will be history and OS X will have a unified look at last.

Surprisingly, Safari for Windows will still bear the look a lot of you despise.

Below is a screen of Youtilize.com loaded on Safari for Windows (Click for bigger image)

Camino. Mozilla Power, Mac style

Above is the title on the Camino’s website. It’s short, yet to the point and gets the message across.

Simply said, today’s release of Camino can really give Safari a run for its money.

And no, I’m not talking about the wonderful site designed by Jon Hicks. I’m talking about the new, long-awaited (15 months to be exact) features of the new Camino 1.5

• Spell Checker
• RSS Feed detection
• Session Saver
• Pop-up Blocker
• Better Tabs
• And more

Cons

What’s still lacking in both Safari and Camino for me is the lack of debugging ability for front-end code (JavaScript).

I think after having worked so close with Firefox’s Firebug, I simply can’t imagine working with any other debugger.

Rendering

Camino is a Mozilla family browser which means it’s based on the great Gecko (1.8.1) rendering engine.

Still, it may be every developer’s wet dream, but it’s slower than its competitor Webkit, a native Mac engine.

Having said all that, I’m still sticking with Firefox 2 for now.