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I’ve been trying to write another grant proposal recently (a seemingly Sisyphean task for academics), but I ended up a bit stuck. It was a collaborative idea that a colleague and I sketched out last year, but which — for one reason or another — ended up on the back-burner for a while. I was really struggling to pull it together. We had plenty of ideas, but I was having trouble rearranging and grouping them into a sensible structure and seeing gaps that needed to be filled. Finally, I decided to blow the dust of my copy of Tinderbox and try that.

I wish I’d done it earlier. I used to use Tinderbox a lot for writing notes and organising ideas¹, but newer, shinier applications have come along, and I’ve gradually turned to them. But Tinderbox is still a great tool, and it really excels at visual brainstorming. If you open a map view, you can just hammer out short notes containing all your ideas, then group them into similar themes later. With a linear outliner (a view which Tinderbox also has), you end up worrying more about where stuff should fit than what the important ideas are.

Once I’d got all the ideas down, I made some adornments (‘sticky notes’ on the page to visually group notes), and started moving notes around, first into similar ideas, then dividing them into aims, questions, hypotheses, techniques and random things to remember. Once that was done, I moved back to the linear outline view, and tidied things up, fleshing out the outline a bit as I went. It was really effective, and almost fun²! While Tinderbox can export notes quite easily as text (or HTML or XML), I probably won’t bother to do so in this case, because I was just using it as a tool for thinking rather than writing. I’ve started to write the final document with the Tinderbox outline view open to guide my writing, and it’s working really well.

¹ I even constructed, managed and wrote this weblog with it when I first started blogging. ↑

² Something which can make grant writing even almost fun is a miraculous tool, in my opinion. ↑

As regular readers will know, my nom de keyboard of ‘bsag’ and the title of this blog both refer to the look which comes over someone’s face (usually male) when I exhibit signs of knowing something about technical matters (see my About page for more details).

I had a classic example of BSAG earlier this week when I had to contact some heating engineers about our boiler. We’ve dealt with these particular people before, and they are great: they are nice guys, do good work and charge a reasonable price. However, they really don’t seem able to handle the fact that — while neither Mr. Bsag and I are experts on heating systems — I know a bit more about it than my husband. I started to explain what I thought the problem was, but they asked if they could speak to Mr. Bsag. I could have put my foot down, but since I’d dealt with them before (an experience very similar to those experienced by Arabella Weir’s ‘Invisible Woman’ character on the Fast Show), I knew that it was a losing battle.

So I handed the phone over, and we had a farcical exchange where the heating engineers would ask Mr. Bsag some technical question on the phone, he would ask me, I would answer, and he would tell the engineers what I’d just said. It worked out OK in the end, because they came and fixed the problem (which was indeed a faulty control board, as I’d thought), but it would have been a bit easier if they’d actually believed that I knew what I was talking about. Sigh.

I was quite excited about the prospect of Automator when it was introduced, because it offered the prospect of being able to write quick scripts to solve little workflow problems, without having to know much about AppleScript. I can code in a number of languages (not brilliantly, but enough to get by), but for some reason, I find AppleScript quite difficult. It looks enough like English that you’re lulled into thinking you know what you’re doing until you get tripped up by some odd syntax. Anyway, Automator allows you to cobble together pre-built building blocks, recorded actions, and little shell scripts (in Python, Perl or Ruby as well as bash and other common shells) so that you don’t need to write Applescripts if you don’t want to.

Despite this convenience, I haven’t used Automator quite as much as I’d thought I would, partly because applications like Butler lets you do a lot of things you might use Automator for, but in a more accessible way. However, there are occasions when a nicely crafted Automator workflow is very handy.

Mr. Bsag often has to send photographs or scans of his prints to galleries, and they often insist on a 300dpi TIFF. He stores these images in iPhoto, and while you can certainly export as TIFF, I haven’t found an easy way to change the DPI (though you can do it in Preview in Leopard). However, you can change the DPI property of an image using the commandline tool, sips, as well as lots of other handy things. But Mr. Bsag wouldn’t be comfortable with a commandline command, which would bring it back to me doing it for him, and I’m lazy. Enter Automator!

I made a quick workflow (see an image of the steps here) which gets the selected items in Finder, puts a dialog box to say what it is going to do an allow an escape, runs a Ruby script which calls a sips command on the arguments to change the DPI and convert to TIFF, then speaks a confirmation of how many files were converted. I made it into a Finder plug-in¹, so that Mr. Bsag could just export his chosen images from iPhoto to the desktop, select them, then use the contextual menu to run the script. It seems to work fine. For common tasks like this where you want to batch convert some files to a standard format, Automator is ideal.

¹ The documentation for Automator says that if you make a workflow a Finder plugin, you should remove the first ‘Get selected Finder items’ step. When I did this it acted as if nothing was selected. With the selected Finder items step in place, it counts each selected file twice. Weird. In the final plug-in, I hacked around this by simply dividing num by 2. ↑

I got a bit tired of the tangle of USB cables under the shelf on which I place my laptop, so I decided to make myself some kind of sync station to tidy things up a bit. Being lazy, I wanted to get a container to house the USB hub and the bulk of the cables which wouldn’t require much modification. I spotted a ‘vanity box’ in one of my favourite shops — Muji — which looked as if it would be just the job. It’s a semi-translucent plastic box, with oval cut-outs at the side which act as handles, but also allowed me to route the cables through them without drilling or cutting any holes. I bought a lid to go with it, which has a handy lip on it, so that it stops my USB-connected items falling off the top.

I’ve got a Belkin USB hub inside, which I raised up on four cut up pieces of rubber (by which I mean eraser, North Americans!), as it gets very hot resting on the bottom. The semi-translucency of the box helpfully allows the LED lights on the hub to shine through, so I can tell if there’s any problems with a peripheral, but it hides the worst of the clutter. Also inside the box is the USB receiver for my Logitech S530 wireless keyboard and mouse — it seems to work fine like that. On top of the box, I placed a small USB card reader, and used bulldog clips to hold the cables in place. I’ve still got a few USB ports free on the hub, so I can always add a few more cables or peripherals in the future if I need to, but this serves my needs for now.

I’m pretty pleased with it — not bad for just over £5 for the materials. There are few notes attached to the image on Flickr if you want to know what’s what.

I’ve finally signed up at last.fm. I don’t know why I resisted for so long, but the increase in the numbers of full tracks that they feature was certainly an encouragement . I do sometimes listen to the radio stations at work when I’m away from my main iTunes library, but I’m mainly interested in it as a way of discovering new artists. A ‘similar artists’ station turned up ‘Iron & Wine’, who I had never heard of before. I liked him (yes, it is just a ‘him’ rather than a ‘they’) so much that I bought ‘The Shepherd’s Dog’ recently, as you can see from my recently scrobbled tracks.

It’s also interesting to look back at your listening habits. It isn’t completely characteristic of all my music listening, because I also listen to CDs on the stereo downstairs, but I seem to oscillate between fairly random playlists of a wide range of my collection and intensively listening to a few albums straight through. I’m in the latter mode right now, it seems.

I haven’t really done anything with the social side of last.fm yet (if you’re on there and think you might enjoy my musical tastes, do point me to your username), and I wish that the player integrated with iTunes rather than using a standalone player, but otherwise I’m liking it a lot.

For a while now, I’ve been using a great programme called Papers to organise PDFs of journal articles along with their associated bibliographic metadata. I use the terrific BibDesk for the output side of references (formatting references into citations and a reference list in manuscripts), but I didn’t find it so helpful for gathering, organising and reading articles. Papers, on the other hand, specialises in just those kinds of tasks.

You can do searches within Papers itself for articles, using a selection of the scientific databases like PubMed or Web of Science. You can also select a PDF you’ve downloaded outside of Papers, and try to ‘match’ the paper (using the same databases) to download the associated metadata. This is fantastic when it works, because it avoids a lot of tedious, error-prone typing of information.

My workflow is like this; I subscribe to various journal alerts for the areas I’m interested in, and get regular emails listing new articles, with links to the article online. If any of the articles look interesting, I visit the link and download the paper to my downloads folder. If I don’t have time to deal with the papers at that moment, they stay in my folder for a while. Then, when I’ve got time to process them, I drag them into Papers to import them. Papers renames the files in a consistent way, and also moves them to a particular folder to keep everything tidy. I used to have to then match the papers to download the metadata, a process which sometimes failed for particular journals, or for articles which were only recently published. However, in Papers 1.7, there’s a miraculous new feature which somehow automatically extracts the metadata from either the PDF or from the web site you downloaded it from on import. It’s tantamount to magic to me, but however it works, it’s a stunning feature and saves quite a bit of manual work.

Once the papers are imported, I flag them all, and can then view all my ‘To Read’ papers with a smart folder collecting together flagged items. As I read each one (the full screen PDF viewer within Papers is really nice), I tag it with appropriate keywords, then drag it into specific folders depending on whether it’s useful for a particular project I’m working on, or as a reference for a specific module I teach). I also drag it into a ‘For BibDesk’ folder, which I periodically export to BibTeX format and import into BibDesk, so that forms my canonical list of references.

You can also generate a papers:// URL for each reference, which when clicked, opens the reference in Papers. That’s useful when you’re writing notes on a paper in a text editor, and want a quick way of opening the original. It’s made the whole process of keeping up with the literature a lot easier.

Following the sad demise of our espresso machine, we were looking around for a cheap and temporary method of making nice coffee. We have a cafetière, but we’re not keen on the kind of coffee it makes. We seem to end up with bitter coffee, with lots of grounds and sediment in the bottom, and they are a pain to clean in the morning when you’re in a rush.

A while ago, I saw an article on the Aeropress, and thought at the time that it looked quite nifty. Faced with the dire prospect of a lack of nice coffee while we find out how much we’re going to be charged to repair our machine, I thought I might as well get one. Even with the massive markup of all US-made goods bought in the UK, it only costs £25 or so. There are all kinds of rave reviews for the Aeropress on the Internet, but I decided that even if it only made OK coffee rather than great coffee, £25 would be reasonable for a very portable coffee maker that we could take on holiday with us.

We got our Aeropress last week, and I’m really impressed with it. It’s well made (very sturdy, with high quality plastics, so there’s little chance of breaking it), and it does indeed make very good coffee if you tinker a bit. It’s basically a very large syringe, with a perforated filter cap (lined with one of the supplied paper filter discs) rather than a needle tip. You put the coffee grounds into the outer cylinder (placed on top of a mug), measure hot water into the plunger part, tip it on to the grounds and stir for a short while. Then you slowly and steadily insert the plunger and push down, so that the air pressure built up forces the water through the grounds. When you’ve pushed the plunger all the way down, it compresses the grounds into a compact puck. You then unscrew the filter cap, depress the plunger fully, and the coffee puck pops neatly out into the bin (or compost bin, in our case). The clever design means that almost no grounds are left in the unit, and you can rinse it under the tap very quickly to clean up.

The beauty of it is that you don’t need to steep the grounds for very long to extract the maximum amount of flavour, and the paper filter stops any grounds from making it into the cup. What you end up with (if you do it right), is a very smooth, but very full-flavoured cup of coffee. We usually made Americano coffees with our espresso maker, by topping the espresso up with water, and we do the same very successfully with the Aeropress.

I mentioned earlier that you have to tinker about with it a bit. The makers supply detailed instructions which are a good starting point, but everyone has different taste, and uses different types of coffee, so you might find that you need to experiment a bit. This — of course — is actually a massive selling point to any kind of geek, so I had fun with that part.

We have a coffee grinder, and I found that using a slightly finer grind helped, as did stirring the grounds and water for about 20 seconds rather than the recommended 10 seconds. But I like my coffee quite strong, so your mileage may vary. Anyway, it’s great fun, makes good coffee, and only requires ground coffee and some way of heating water. We’re considering getting our espresso machine repaired and selling it, then using the Aeropress full time.

I was interested by a piece on Gizmodo reporting that Leica — rather than releasing brand new models of their digital rangefinders — are offering a service whereby they will upgrade the components of your Leica M8. Given that the M8 costs $4795 (body only — sheesh) that’s probably just as well.

It’s rare enough these days to find companies making products which are repairable at all, so it’s great to see some enabling not only repair, but also upgrades to the features as technology advances.

We’re having problems with our espresso maker at the moment, not much more than a year after we bought it. We’re going to try get it repaired (it’s a Krups model) because I hate the thought of the financial and ecological waste of essentially throwing out a product so soon after we bought it. We’ve treated it with care (cleaning and de-scaling it regularly, using filtered water in the tank and so on), but we do use it at least once a day. It seems really difficult to find home appliances that are actually built for frequent use, unless you buy one intended for commercial use.

So, the Stevenote is over for another year, and some very interesting stuff was announced. The MacBook Air is a really stunning design, I think. I love the way that they emphasise the weightlessness of it¹ by tapering the edges of the case so that they are not actually sitting on the surface of the desk. It makes it look a little as if it’s floating. Of course, there’s a compromise for losing the weight and shrinking the thickness so the specs aren’t as good as the MacBook Pros, but I think it fits its intended niche pretty well. Though it’s gorgeous, I don’t want to buy one. Correction: I want to buy one, but can’t justify a need for it.

I was also very interested in Time Capsule. As it happens, I was in the process of thinking about getting more external storage, possibly Network Attached Storage, to enable me to back up all our computers using Time Machine. Our existing discs are getting a bit too full for comfort, and would be better employed to store music or to hold bootable clones of the drives. Time Machine is brilliant — one of the best features of Leopard in my opinion, and while I thought I’d only use it for backup, it has saved my bacon a couple of times when I deleted files unintentionally. Anything which makes that process even more transparent and effortless would be a great thing. I don’t currently have 802.11n wireless in the house, and Time Capsule seems fairly decently priced for the capacity offered.

I’m also intrigued by the iTunes Movie Rentals. We have a LoveFILM subscription which we enjoy, but it has a number of drawbacks. The somewhat random nature of the order in which you receive the DVDs (depending on availability) means that you often end up with a pile of very serious, depressing films when you actually feel like watching a light comedy. It’s also not very spontaneous because of the postal delay, so if you find that all you’ve got when your parents come to visit is a batch of incredibly sweary films (for example) you’re a bit stuck. Finally, we intermittently have trouble with scratched discs (something I’ve ranted about here before). When our player hits a bad scratch, it tends to jump back to chapter one. This means that we watch films with one eye on the DVD counter, so that if it does its skipping act, you can at least laboriously skip forward through the chapters to just after the point where it failed.

If (when rentals appear in the UK iTunes Store) there is a good range of films (including foreign language films and independents), we might well ditch our LoveFILM subscription and just rent-as-we-go: for our level of usage, the price would be about the same.

¹ OK, I know it’s not literally weightless — 3lb (1.36kg) is not nothing, but it’s pretty light. ↑

Sometimes, being a female geek is good fun: some of the problems and pre-occupations of the majority of male geeks simply do not apply. I was reminded of this when I was browsing the SlimDevices forum and came across a brilliant thread where people post photos of their SqueezeBox nestled in among the rest of their hi-fi equipment. Looking at (and listening to) other people’s systems fascinates me almost as much as listening to my own system, so I was glued. Anyway, one of the contributors asked another why his speakers (designed for stand mounting) were sitting on the floor, and was told that he hadn’t been able to find stands with a high enough W.A.F. Those of you who are hi-fi buffs or display their geekery in other gadgety fields will know that W.A.F. stands for Wife Acceptance Factor.

To quote Wordspy:

wife acceptance factor n. In an object, especially an electronic device, that normally appeals only to men, the qualities or features added to or modified in the object to make it acceptable to women.

And there’s a further explanation:

The reality is that most traditional hi-fi equipment has been designed to appeal to male tastes, and consequently, more typically resembles scientific tools and industrial test equipment than your average home furniture.

You see, that’s a problem that I just don’t have. Not only do I not have a wife (or a problem with H.A.F.), I positively love equipment supposedly designed to appeal to men. Show me something that looks like an oscilloscope or is fashioned out of a huge, hand-machined lump of aircraft-grade aluminium, and I’ll get the urge to pay someone lots of money for it. Of course hi-fi equipment should primarily sound good before anything else, but the W.A.F. refers to the appearance of an object, how expensive it is, or how difficult and inconvenient it is to use. All of which (apparently) women object to.

W.A.F. (or the mis-perception of it) is probably responsible for all those gadget manufacturers who think that if they make their gadget pink (or cover it with diamanté), 90% of the female population will be falling over themselves to buy it. They are wrong. Instead, I suspect that the majority of W.A.F. related conflicts arise because women who are not interested in hi-fi don’t want their husbands spending half of their income on ruinously expensive stuff (and what the stuff is hardly matters in that context), or their living room to be filled with large lumps of metal and cables.

Me? I love big lumps of metal.

Happy New Year, everyone! I know I’m a day late, but what’s a day between friends?

I’ve taken a couple of extra leave days, so I’m not back at work until next Monday, and I’m enjoying just pottering around, and trying to shake off a weird bug I seem to have picked up. I had one of those days today where you start off with the intention of fixing one small thing, and end up putting a whole host of things right by accident.

It started with my long-disconnected SliMP3 player. When we moved into our new house, I didn’t get around to connecting up the SliMP3 player, for a number of very dull reasons, but partly because I didn’t have a long enough Ethernet cable. (I know: it’s a classic GTD situation of not having the right next action written down…) It’s only taken a year, but I finally got around to finding a cable and fixing the other impediments and hooking that sucker up. They are beautifully simple devices, so the configuration was fairly straight-forward, except that I’d forgotten that in the interval between last using it and now, I’d converted most of my iTunes library to AAC format from MP3. My player can’t transcode AAC on the hardware (I believe some of the new players can do it), but the server software can convert AAC on the fly to MP3 and play that. Except that I needed LAME installed, so all I got was a ‘Can’t play file’ message. After a quick install of LAME all was well. Except that the horrible distortion I’ve noticed intermittently in my audio system downstairs was really ruining my enjoyment of listening to the SliMP3.

So I decided to see if I could track down the problem. We have a very noisy mains electrical system in our house, and the boiler controller is a particularly bad source of noise. I’d assumed when I heard the distortion before that it was the boiler switch, but today I was listening with the heating system off, and it was still distorted. I checked cable connections, tightened speaker terminals and swapped out power strips, all to no avail. Just when I was beginning to despair of being able to find the source of the problem, I noticed that when I listened with my ear to each speaker in turn, the left was producing all of the distortion. Checking the speaker cable to that speaker carefully, I found that the insulation had cracked, exposing the wire. Aha! Fifteen minutes of pottering in the garage looking for my wire strippers, and some cutting back of the cable, and the distortion had gone. Now I could sit back and listen to my SliMP3 player.

But now I noticed that there were huge numbers of mislabelled files cluttering up the artist listing, making it hard to chose the artists I wanted to listen to. I then felt compelled to go into iTunes and clear up the database, getting rid of some temporary files, and naming everything properly with the correct metadata.

By the time I came downstairs to finally listen to my distortion-free, nicely organised music, it was time for tea. Seriously, where did the day go?

Ever since I discovered LaunchBar (several years ago now), I’ve felt that any Mac (indeed any computer) without a launcher triggered by abbreviations is broken. Once you get used to hitting a hotkey, then typing a few characters to find anything on your computer (applications, files, bookmarks, address book entries and so on), having to browse file system hierarchies feels positively 20th Century. I cut my launcher teeth on LaunchBar, then switched to the dashing and rebellious newcomer, Quicksilver. Quicksilver is somewhat more powerful than LaunchBar in some respects, and is extensible with plugins, but with great power comes a certain amount of complexity, and it can be difficult to remember exactly how to use all of the features. For example, there is a great image manipulation plugin which you can use by feeding it a file and a string of commands (for example to change a TIFF file to a PNG and resize it to particular dimensions), but I don’t use it often enough to remember how to format the commands, so I have to look them up. Again. I’ve also found it slightly unstable at various times, so I’ve tended to switch back and forth between LaunchBar and Quicksilver, pulled between the conflicting forces of stability and excitement.

Since installing Leopard, I’ve been almost tempted to revert to using Spotlight as a launcher, because the speed has improved enormously. But it’s still the Scooty Puff Jr. of launchers, so I can’t quite bring myself to do it.

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Back when I lived in Oxford, I used Mailbox as my broadband provider. They weren’t the cheapest around, but they were really reliable, and had the best customer support I’ve ever come across. It seems incredible (not to mention quaint) to say so now, but when you phoned them for support, a real human would answer the phone immediately. No pressing 4 divided by the number you first thought of to report a fault, or being robotically reassured ad infinitum that my business was very important to them. Shocking isn’t it? It got better though, because once your call was answered by a real human, they would quickly and efficiently solve your problem, without being patronising. I once had a problem with connecting to their broadband service (which turned out to be a BT-produced problem rather than Mailbox’s fault). I called them in the evening, and the guy on the other end explained very clearly what I needed to do to fix it. I followed the instructions, which worked perfectly, and settled down to surf and email. About half an hour later, the phone rang, and to my utter amazement, it was the engineer guy — wait for it — calling to check that the instructions worked correctly. It doesn’t get much better than that, in my opinion.

When we moved to Birmingham, the house we rented already had a Telewest broadband account, so we used that, shifting to Zen when we bought our house, because Mailbox had become rather un-competitive, price-wise, with other providers. In retrospect, I’m glad I made that decision.

In 2005, Mailbox was acquired by 186k.com. I know this because even though I had stopped my broadband account with them, I kept them as registrar for the two domains I had registered with them when I had an account. Gradually, all my interactions with them became inefficient and impersonal, not to mention more expensive. But inertia is a powerful force, and I stuck with them in the name of minimising hassle and disruption. I feel like an idiot for doing that now, because it has cost me a lot of money and more hassle than transferring my domain earlier would have done.

A couple of weeks ago, a Tracks user alerted me to the fact that the DNS for rousette.org.uk was pointing to de-comissioned DNS servers at TextDrive (thanks, Sean!). I’m fairly sure, thinking back, that I asked Mailbox to change the DNS entries a long time ago, but to be sure, I asked them again, only to be told that they were already pointing at the new servers. However, whois still showed the old records. Caching of DNS records can complicate matters so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I still suspect that they didn’t do the update properly, leaving the old server references along side the new ones.

That was the last straw, and after doing a search for reliable registrars, I settled on Gandi. They have been really efficient, and I now have a nice web control panel for administering my domains. The first thing I did, of course, was the set the DNS records straight, and wasn’t overly surprised to find that the whois record updated to reflect correct DNS information almost immediately. I realise that domain registrations are probably something of a loss-leader for companies like Mailbox, and that it doesn’t make financial sense for them to continue to act as the registrar for customers who no longer have a broadband account with them. But even so, I was paying for the nose for not very good service. They were charging more than seven times what I am paying with Gandi now, and they charged me an arm and a leg to allow me to transfer the domain too. Even Nominet charges half the price of Mailbox for domain transfers. I wish I’d done it sooner, but my domain renewals and management should be a lot easier and cheaper from now on.

I’m trying out Flock (a ‘social web browser’) following a recommendation from Martin Polley as a way of integrating ma.gnolia bookmarking into the browser. My timing was poor, because there’s a problem at the moment with posting bookmarks to ma.gnolia from Flock because of a temporary problem at ma.gnolia’s end. However, I tried it out with de.icio.us, and it was a pretty seamless process.

I’m not quite sure what to make of Flock. Martin said that it’s a kind of love it or hate it thing, and I can see what he means. If you use a lot of social software (flickr, social bookmark sites, facebook and so on), the integration features are pretty good. You can even blog direct from Flock, which is what I’m doing right now (all being well…). I also like the Web Clipboard, which lets you drag on links, text and images, then drag them on to other services or into a blog post. I can see that if you use Flock for everything, it’s really handy to collect everything in one place for easy posting.

But.

The interface isn’t bad, but it’s pretty cluttered after you’ve been used to the minimalism of Safari. It also seems slower to render pages, and seems to like popping up endless warnings about popups, available feeds and so on. I also wish that there was a way to view my Google Reader feeds in the Feed sidebar — you can use the button on the navigation bar to save feeds to Google Reader, but there’s no built-in way to view them.

I’m going to play around a bit more with it, but I suspect that I’ll probably go back to using Safari, Cocoalicious and MarsEdit for posting to my blog.

Blogged with Flock

I’ve been using ma.gnolia for my online bookmarking for a little while now, and the non-private bookmarks appear automatically in the sidebar of this site. I like ma.gnolia a lot, but I’ve had a tendency to use it mostly for bookmarks that want to publish on this blog, and largely in a write-only way. Part of that is because it always seems like a bit of work to log in to ma.gnolia and search through bookmarks for one that I’m looking for. So for sites that I’m marking for my own use — ones that I know that I’ll want to refer to later — I tend to use Safari’s own bookmarking feature. But that means that I lose the tagging capability, and I have to look in two places if I can’t remember where I saved something.

There are plenty of desktop bookmarking applications which access your de.icio.us bookmarks, but not so many for ma.gnolia, being a relative newcomer. However, they publish an mirrord API which (as the name suggests) mirrors the de.icio.us API. This means that you can use many of the desktop clients intended for de.icio.us, as long as the software lets you specify the URL of the API. So I’ve started using Cocoalicious, which is a very nice Open Source de.icio.us client. The trick seems to be to enter the API as follows:

http://your_username:your_password@ma.gnolia.com/api/mirrord/v1

and then enter a single space for both your username and password when prompted. The rating star system in Cocoalicious doesn’t link up with the rating stars in ma.gnolia, but everything else works perfectly. It’s a very nice bit of software — it’s pleasingly simple to add links via a bookmarklet in your browser, but also very fast to find what you want by text in the URL, description or by the tag. Now I’m saving all my bookmarks (private and public) in ma.gnolia, and accessing them using Cocoalicious.