It took me a while to get round to reading Blackberry Wine by Joanne Harris. In fact I remember starting it once and it not grabbing me straight away. I have enjoyed the other Joanne Harris books that I have read, but I must say that I really loved Blackberry Wine when I read it recently.

On reflection it was the combination of having moved to another country myself and the experiences gained writing our Almerimar Life Blog but I found myself turning the pages with either a smile or a sense of don’t do that!.

I read The Road with a element of apprehension after a couple of people had told me it was depressing.

Before I read it I checked put what Amazon had to say about it:

Sometimes I can only dream about how good the iPhone is! You see living here in Almerimar I really don’t get to use it to its full advantaage:

• I don’t commute to work
• The marina is 5 minutes away and that is where I do 90% of my business and socialising in Spain
• I know pretty much every bar and restaurant owner by name
• I can’t remember the last time I went shopping for anything other than food, or online

Tags ($29) from Gravity Apps could well be the answer to a lot of peoples prayers, but at the same time it could be ‘yet another’ addiction/distraction that will keep you occupied for hours, but not really achieve that much for you!

I love the idea of Tags, but I hate them at the same time!!! The idea of having every file, photo, email, and folder Tagged is extremely appealing, the thought of having to do them all, or even worse have some Tagged and some not as you start using the application brings me out in a cold sweat. But that is me, and my compusive need to have everything sorted straight away.

Things ($49.95) is a pretty cool application for keeping track of the ‘things’ you need, or want to do. The advantage that it has over a number of other GTD type applications is that it will sync between your Mac and iPhone/iPod Touch (although not across multiple Macs and your iPhone/iPod Touch yet), and is very easy to set up.

If PathFinder is a cult application in the Mac community, then Toast ($99.99 or $149.99 Pro) is truly iconic.

I have mentioned before how much I love Toast but with Toast 10 Pro they have certainly raised the bar even higher!

The latest version helps greatly enhance and extend Mac OSX and iLife applications with a broad range of additional capabilities for creating, sharing, and enjoying personal digital media content.

When I first got a Mac I thought that the Finder was so much better than anything I had ever experienced on a Windows PC it never dawned on me to consider an alternative. Over the years Apple have fiddled a little with it (Cover Flow for example), but basically have left it well alone.

While this may well be OK for the majority of users, the more experienced Mac users have long bemoaned the lack of a more ‘powerful’ Finder substitute that would allow them to assign colours to labels, change the Font size, unlink the toolbar and sidebar, move stuff around easier etc.

Be not mislead by the seemingly minor advance in version numbers – this 1.6 release is a major jump from the previous 1.5.x releases. So be prepared for a series of stunning changes in ForkLift’s user interface, created by our dedicated crew at the workflow tuning workshop. This is a free upgrade and recommended for all Leopard users.

That is what they say over on the Binary Nights Blog the developers of my FTP client of choice ForkLift ($44.95) for the last year or so.

The Art Of Black And White Photography ($44.95) looks at techniques for creating superb images in a digital workflow:

Over the last few years, most books on photography emphasized explaining the new breed of cameras and how to master the digital imaging workflow. In The Art of Black and White Photography Torsten Andreas Hoffmann takes a different approach, as he focuses on image composition and image capture, with an emphasis on the creative aspects of black and white photography, rather than on the digital workflow.

FoneLink (39.95€ for a single license) is a frustrating application to say the least!!!

I use it with my N95 to sync with my Mail (including To Do and Notes), iCal and Address Book. It does all that very well indeed with two exceptions:

1. It hates recurring items!!! If you move or delete a recurring item in a particular week FoneLink still syncs it to your phone, and
2. It is pretty unstable i.e. it often hangs while picking up the data on the Mac and as a result often creates duplicate entries and even at times removes all the groups from the Address application

Just read four, somewhat different books, over the last couple of weeks as the summer binge continues!! We are in the middle of a exceptionally hot period at the moment. One consequence of that is that any activity based pastime (including eating!!!) needs to be done early or late, so during the day the siesta is king. This is very often a case of crashing with a book and the air conditioning on:

House Of Cards by Michael Dobbs. I remember the TV series of the trilogy but haven’t read the books. This was another ‘lucky dip’ book and I enjoyed it.

I finally got round to watching Hot Fuzz while I was away this time – on the MBP in the hotel room, which was pretty cool. The MBP was certainly a good enough way to watch the movie.

I enjoyed the movie, but not as much as I had thought I would and I think the only real reason why is that the violence was just not necessary. I know it was all sort of ‘black humour’ style but it just left me wondering what it was all about.