As you may have read, we’ve started using Basecamp and Backpack from 37signals as our productivity tools of choice to manage the projects inside MacStories. We’ve also paired them with some 3rd party tools suck as Spootnik and Headquarters to further enhance our workflow, and we’re very happy with them - we think we’ve found the best way to keep us organized and access our tasks from anywhere, be it the desktop, web or iPhone.

The other 37signals product, Campfire, was too much tempting to not give it a try, and so I decided to create an account and see whether  it could come in handy. Sure it did, but combined with a Mac app called Propane.

Read on to find out why.

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One of the greatest thing about Cocoa technology is the system wide color picker: I can’t even remember how many times that thing came in handy while working, and that’s even people who can’t stand it. Come on, the color picker is great. And if you don’t know yet, it’s extensible: you can install plugins into your Library/ColorPickers folder and enjoy the revamped tool with additional functionalities. There are some you should definitely check it out, like the Hex Color Picker, the Developer Picker from Panic, or the one that lets you choose palettes from the Adobe Kuler community.

The only thing I can’t really stand about the picker is that you can’t use it as standalone app, as it’s closely bound to applications that have a color picking feature built in. Well, actually there’s a way to invoke the Color Picker at any time, but it requires Applescript and I’m sure many of you guys don’t wanna mess with it. Today I’m going to talk about something way simpler instead, is called Spot Color and it’s a simple app that enables you to use the Color Picker at your pleasure.

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I’m not a web designer by any means, but simply someone who is interested in the beauty of code. Being a big fan of HTML and CSS, I decided to learn a thing or two when I decided to craft my own WordPress blog. It’s not particularly fancy or make use of any cool CCS3 effects like Mike Matas’ new site, but it’s a step. I’m not at the point yet where I can drill out code or figure some (okay most) things off the top of my head, so I often reference a lot of code that I reuse or edit for my own purposes. I learn a lot through the myriads of tutorials that are available online. All of this eventually leads to Snippets, which I love to death. Finally, instead of having to reference bookmarks shoved into a desktop folder, I can store and save code in a beautiful desktop library that makes acquiring code incredibly easy to do.

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Though many people say you don’t need to do any kind of maintenance on Mac OS X, I’ve gotten used to run a couple of applications every two weeks or so to keep my Mac clean and healthy. Mac OS X is a great platform, but this doesn’t mean it can’t become slower over time, especially because of caches, logs and undeleted preferences. Did you know that when you trash an application, it leaves many stuff behind it and that if you don’t use a dedicated app uninstaller (like AppZapper) that stuff will remain there for good? Imagine that stuff being a bunch of 200MB cache folders and you get the idea. This applies for caches, system logs, binaries, unused language files.

Fortunately, there are some apps that enable you to perform maintenance tasks thus deleting that unused space, and I think CleanMyMac from MacPaw (which we previously reviewed here) is the leading app, powered by a great UI and a large set of features. Today I’ll take a look at the new kid on the block, MacKeeper, which aims at keeping your Mac healthy and clean, but comes with other additional functionalities that could really make it stand out from the crowd.

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I think Youtube is one of the websites where I waste most of my internet free time. I bookmark videos (especially music videos), watch rare and unreleased live performances of the artists I like, laugh at those compilations of internet memes, which never grow old. Together with Wikipedia, Youtube is a huge time waster, and since they rolled out the HTML5 playback beta feature, it’s even less memory consuming and stable to me.

But if Wikipedia has some dedicated clients (for iPhone, just check out Articles), the same doesn’t apply for Youtube: it’s quite difficult to come up with original ideas for a Youtube specific application other than allowing the users to download videos and let them browse videos as thumbnails in a grid.

Cathodique is an app I stumbled upon two days ago, it’s new, and it’s got some nice features that made me keep it in my Applications folder.

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If you followed the latest MacHeist nanoBundle 2 happenings, you should know that Loren Brichter (atebits) teamed up with the MacHeist team to a) include Tweetie for Mac in the bundle and b) offer the possibility to enter the beta of Tweetie 2 as soon as it will be out. This thing alone made the MacHeist double their sales in two days. As you can guess, Tweetie 2 for Mac is one of the most anticipated apps of 2010, and the user base is literally going crazy to put their hands on Loren’s newest creation. But on the other hand, there are many users who got tired of waiting months and months to have a Twitter client which supported - say - native retweets and lists, so they changed their default application from Tweetie to another one. And in most cases, the “another one” is Echofon for Mac.

I never tried Echofon before, but I decided to give it a spin after all this talking about the Mac version being good, stable and faster than Tweetie. Let’s see what the kid’s got.

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We’ve done our fair share of window management applications here at MacStories. SizeUp, Mercury Mover, and Zooom/2 have all entered the market in hopes of improving how you interact with your Mac’s windows. And they’re all equally interesting, because they incorporate similar shortcuts while going about resizing and moving in completely different ways.

Today’s application, WindowFlow, adds a new element to the mix that could replace the infamous ⌘-Tab.

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We’ve been writing a lot about Basecamp recently, and how this 37signals product changed the way we organize our tasks and projects for MacStories. I personally use Omnifocus to keep my local database in sync with the online service through Spootnik, but there’s a variety of other tools we use, like Radar, Headquarters and now, Freshlog.

Freshlog is a Mac application that enables you to take a screenshot, comment it and upload it to Basecamp. I gave it a 3 days spin, here are my thoughts so far.

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