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If you’re looking for a great new way to organize your mounting pile of digital stuff, StickyBrain is just the swiss army knife you need. It provides an out-of-the-box experience,with tools you will find using more often than usual. StickyBrain is your universal note manager. Use it to store all of the miscellaneous information that doesn’t fit neatly anywhere else. It makes it easy to find and access your notes from any application.

I do a lot of work on my Mac. I also collect a lot of information that’s sitting in a lot of different places and formats. Tidbits from websites, emails and saved IM sessions. This info includes design ideas and tips, advice on finding a good doctor, online, receipts, passwords, schedules, etc. I’ve been struggling to develop a good system to keep all this stuff organized and useful, but my struggle ended when I installed StickyBrain from Chronos.

The focus of StickyBrain’s function is to be a powerful information collecting and organizing assistant. StickyBrain organizes notes in a mail-like interface. Folders and subfolders can be arranged in a side drawer any way the user sees fit, while notes are listed in the top pane and their content displayed below. Notes can easily be opened in their own window by double-clicking.

It comes pre-packages with a wide selection of notes. This helped to introduce the possibilities of StickyBrain’s purpose — it’s not another note app for those random phone numbers and address you collect.

Moving beyond basic notes and folders, StickyBrain’s true versatility shines in its ability to easily collect information from almost any other app in OS X and send it back out to almost any other app.

StickyBrain is your universal note manager. Use it to store all of the miscellaneous information that doesn’t fit neatly anywhere else. Throw all your notes and other information into it, then use the powerful note viewer to retrieve anything with just one click. Imagine life with all your digital notes — from reminders and alarms to pictures, URLs and text — instantly organized and searchable! You can increase productivity, save time, and gain unprecedented control over your information.

Try the free 30-Day full-featured demo and see if StickyBrain 3 is useful. If you decide that it’s right for you pay the $39 fee and never look back.

Pros: Full featured notes application with excellent Mac OS and other application integration. And you gotta love the intuitive way it lets you keep track of all the minutiae.

Cons: Interface is a bit overwhelming at first. Product Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3 or later.

5 out of 5 dog cows

Adam Curry is accepted by most podcasters as the leader and founder of the podcast movement, and he wrote the introduction to this book. ’Nuff Said.

Ok, I probably should say more than that. The book Podcast Solutions will probably be recorded by future podcasting generations (those in the first half of 2006) as the bible of podcasting.

Author Michael Geoghegan takes you through absolutely every detail of podcasting, with the assumption that the reader has only basic knowledge on the subject. The book’s sections are logically divided into key tasks in creating your own podcasts. The sections are short reads with quality summaries that put each particular task into the overall podcasting picture. Sometimes in technical books, the chapters are so dense and long, you forget exactly what you are reading about! Every aspect of podcasting is covered, from where to find podcasts all the way through publishing and at the end he includes ways of making money via sponsors and affiliate programs.

In most sections,Geoghegan gives you good/better/best suggestions on software and hardware. That approach is very handy, because he gives you a shopping list to start off with, and then gives you the shopping list you need when you out-grow the equipment. When showing examples of a particular concept, the author varies the software and hardware combos he uses and provides ample screen shots to illustrate what he is talking about.

My only major complaint is that Geoghegan does get extremely technical in certain places on how to get the absolute best podcast. It went over my head pretty quickly in some sections, because I didn’t have the advanced software and hardware he was talking about. However, I think you can safely ignore some of his suggestions to start off with and then as you become more serious and spend the money for the professional equipment, you’ll want to know all about “RMS normalization” and “De-esser.”

Best of all, the book includes a CD that contains almost all the software mentioned in the book. Sure you can download the programs from the Internet, but books with a cd (a throwback to an earlier day) when books came with software and software came with manuals is a very nice touch.

Overall, an outstanding book on how to create and distribute a quality, professional podcast.

Pros: Covers every step of podcasting, assuming nothing, and leaves
you absolutely confident you can do this yourself. It comes with a CD too,
a rare find.

Cons: Gets a bit too technical in certain areas, but you can safely skip those parts until you become a serious podcaster.

5 out of 5 dog cows

Finding a podcast book today is like trying to find a book on this years football season, the information is too new and too much in a state of flux. Given those restrictions, Bart Farkas gave it a noble effort in his books Secrets of Podcasting, but this book doesn’t quite provide what the title indicates. For obvious reasons, his writing style seemed like a blog that was turned into a published book. The structure lacked a consistent flow and jumped from place to place. He included interviews with many of the key players in the podcasting world,that were interesting, but not relevant to the content being discussed in the chapter.

In his efforts to be thorough, I found Farkas wasted valuable space talking about information that wasn’t very helpful and was probably out of date by the time the book was printed. Reminding me of the sketch in the movie Airplane! where the guy talks about the earth cooling, dinosaurs, and Mercedes Benz, Farkas actually discusses the invention of the home computer and Internet! An example of this information overload is the fact he spent 30 pages talking about every podcast agregrating software out there for Windows, Windows Mobile, Linux, and Mac. That’s a bit over the top. I would have rather he named three or four ones he liked than giving me a dizzying array of options, especially since most people are probably going to use iTunes. The same over-attention to detail was his anaylsis of mobile MP3 players. He listed every popular one on the market and gave a description. Hardly a secret, especially since they were old versions and models! With iPods having 70% of the market share, why go on from there? It’s podcasting, not MP3 casting.

Ironically, the chapter on creating podcasts is significantly shorter than the introduction of podcasting. Farkas doesn’t even get to creating a podcast until you are halfway through the book. Again, we are faced with too many choices in software and hardware. When he finally gets to the instructions of creating the podcast, he uses both a Mac program and a Windows program and gives great step by step guidelines. Here, his thoroughness really pays off, but creating a podcast is only half the equation.

In the last section, Farkas drops the ball and doesn’t explain enough about how to distribute your podcast via RSS feeds. This is the shortest section of the book. There is no step by step guide. Not even the dizzying array of software like in the other sections of the book. Maybe he ran out of time, but why run the ball down the field, and then fail to make the goal?

This book is a good overview of the podcasting universe and perfect for someone who might ask, “What is a podcast”, but if you know what a podcast is and understand the basics of recording audio content, look elsewhere for a book on the details (see my review of Podcast Solutionsfor a book that picks up where Secrets of Podcastingleaves off). Hardly a book about secrets, more appropriately it should have been titled Podcasting for Beginners.

Pros: Great overview of podcast options and ideas to create your own podcasts.
Cons: Skimps on details of how or what to do after you create your own podcasts. Bores you with lots of details on software and hardware options that are out of date by the time the book was published.

3 out of 5 dog cows

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