Remote Buddy, the do-it-all remote program for OS X, has reached version 1.7.1. I haven't taken a look at this app in a long time, but they've come a long way, baby-- a few months ago they added support (via AJAX) for the iPhone, and that has added a whole new universe of functionality to controlling your computer via a remote unit. If you haven't seen it lately, check it out.

The 1.7.1 update fixes a few bugs in the AJAX module, adds a warning if you don't have an Airport Express setting correct, and adds a newly rewritten driver for Front Row control. And this is all in addition to last week's big release (1.7), which added a ton of new stuff-- almost a complete rewrite of the AJAX remote, and compatibility with a ton of new programs, everything from ComicBookLover to VoodooPad.

Very impressive. Applications like this are what make it so great to be a Mac user. Remote Buddy is available for 19.99 € or as a free 30 day trial version over on their website.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Just about a week after its release, Acorn (Gus Mueller's sparkling little image editor) is looking a 1.0.1 release dead in the face. Mueller hasn't updated it officially yet, but he has released development builds of both VoodooPad and Acorn over on his site.

The newest Acorn release will include a JPEG compression/quality slider when saving, as well as a number of bug fixes (everyone loves those, right?). If you want to try it out now, you can hit the dev build, but the rest of us will be happy waiting for an official release I'm sure.

Mueller has also created a wiki just for Acorn, and it's got a few nice tips and tricks, a plugin section, and a writeup on the Acorn file format. It's pretty barebones at the moment. but hey, it's a wiki, and it just started. Give it some time (or some contributions of your own), and it'll likely soon be an invaluable guide to all the Acorn users out there.

Chris at Trichech.us has written up a short guide (and included a useful little AppleScript) on how to run GTD in VoodooPad, the get-it-down quick application that we love so much here at TUAW.

Basically it revolves around a series of tags-- if you have a task that needs to be done in a certain context (such as home or office, or even as specific as "at the computer" or as general as "thinking"), you just tag it with @ and then whatever the tag is. When the script is run, it grabs all of the tagged lines, and combines them all on one page, so you have an at-a-glance look at what needs to be done where. And you can even date items, and see them placed on the "Actions" page as well.

The big problem with me and any GTD plan is just that I tend to be so picky-- if a system doesn't work exactly the way I want it to, I tend to get lazy and start ditching it for good old pen and paper again (which causes me to fall back into the same old gaps). But Chris' system looks solid enough to use without a lot of configuration, and yet adaptable enough that I can shape it to my own mind. If you've got VoodooPad (and if you don't, why not) and you're on the hunt for a GTD system, give it a try.

[ via Gus Mueller ]

As I am finally wrapping my head around just how useful Gus Mueller's VoodooPad can actually be, I'm getting more interested in tinkering with how it can be extended and made to do my bidding. Dubbed as a "garden for your thoughts," VodooPad is a great place to jot down ideas, lists and notes with a wiki-like document format that makes it dead-simple to link one page to another. Out of the box VoodooPad comes with a lot of great features, but Gus also maintains a VoodooPad plug-ins page with a number of add-ons for making VoodooPad do everything from adding some handy keyboard shortcuts to more complex abilities like rendering math in your documents and allowing plug-in authors to use Python for writing VoodooPad plug-ins.

At the top of my list, however, is the HTML Tools plug-in which allows you to preview the current VoodooPad page as rendered HTML, Textile or Markdown, as well as copy the text you've written as HTML (with styling attributes and all) or Simple HTML with just the plain markup. It's a handy plug-in for anyone who, like me, prefers to compose blog posts (or of course websites) in desktop software in order to take advantage of all the power Mac OS X has to offer, then simply copy and paste the blog post as HTML into their blogging engine or CMS. This Simple HTML feature needs a little work, however, as it isn't creating entirely proper HTML just yet. Lists, for example, are created simply with <br> tags instead of actual <ul> and <li> tags, but it could do the trick for those who aren't exactly trying to pass every HTML validation test available across the web.

The VoodooPad plug-ins are provided for free, though some of them are still PowerPC-only. Demos of the $29.95 VoodooPad are of course available, with a $49.95 VoodoPad Pro version that offers a few key features for power users, as well as a free VoodooPad Lite version for those who don't need quite as much.

Matt Webb likes VoodooPad, the desktop wiki application from Gus Mueller, but he does not like his data to be bound up in a proprietary format. So he's cooked up a bundle for the powerful TextMate text editor that allows him to create a plain text wiki. Basically the bundle allows you to create a main page in a project directory and then hyperlink to plain text files within that directory as the wiki pages. Furthermore, as Merlin Mann points out, this works perfectly with Quicksilver's plain text append and prepend actions. So if you're a plain text fan looking for a way to wiki, Matt's bundle is worth a look.

[via MacDevCenter]

The interview train just keeps on chuggin', and this time we have Gus Mueller of Flying Meat Software, developer of VoodooPad, FlySketch and FlyGesture, on board. Just like the other interviews I've done with Brent Simmons, Wil Shipley and Paul Kafasis, Gus had some great thoughts to share on the Leopard delay, whether to develop software for one specific OS, words of wisdom from a Nintendo game developer and how Apple's past behavior can hint at the possibility of the iPhone opening up up to 3rd parties sometime in the future. Amazing fact from this particular interview: Gus's mobile phone just turned 7.

Read on for my interview with Gus Mueller.

Oh so sweet. My favorite catch-all notepad and organizer, VoodooPad, has been updated to version 3.0 today. I fell in love with VoodooPad about two years ago when I started a new job and needed to start keeping track of a huge variety of different kinds of information. I started dumping everything I could into the program--scraps of technical support information, dates and details of computer repairs, website URL's, coworkers' phone extensions, serial numbers. I didn't really know right away if VoodooPad was going to help keep all this stuff organized, but after awhile I noticed that I started to rely on the software to track down that information that otherwise would have been misplaced. I also started to notice connections between information that I might not have otherwise made.

VoodooPad sports a number of new features including tabs, searching improvements, support for big documents, and new filetype embedding. There's also support for Mac OS X's PDF framework so you can print a PDF straight into VoodooPad.

VoodooPad Pro is a new edition to the family that has several advanced options for power-users such as encryption, triggers, metadata inclusion, and a built-in web server to facilitate collaboration between VoodooPad users.

Other programs, like Yojimbo, have popped up recently to serve as the same kind of catch-all, but I remain faithful to VoodooPad, my first love. It saved me from the growing rat's nest that was StickyBrain. Mojo, indeed.

VoodooPad is a great app that is basically a personal Wiki. Now, I have never really gotten the hang of tracking things for myself in a Wiki, but Michael McCracken is crazy for VoodooPad and he shares some tips about how to get the most out of the app.