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So “The Daily” has finally gone live in the app store. This new app from media magnate Rupert Murdoch, sure came in with a bang. Everyone was certainly all ears on the unveiling of this supposedly killer app that aims to show the true power of media on the iOS platform. So how does the app fare after real world testing?

There will surely be many countless reviews as to the impact this app on the iOS app universe. It is a viable replacement for real world print publication? Will it be the main way for news to be consumed on any iOS device? At this point it’s hard to say for sure what the general public will do with the app, but it certainly is packaged and marketed very competitively. Throwing out all outrageous rumors about the app including the infamous 0.99 cents per day price tag, I’d have to say it looks pretty darn attractive.

I downloaded the app a few hours ago and had my fill of the content it had to offer. Certainly the promise of daily updates on everything under the sun is something to look forward to opening the app, along with the very marketable 0.99 cent weekly price tag. In my opinion this has all the makings of a runaway success story for the average user. But I would not go as far as to say it would supplant the dominant form of my news consumption on the iOS device (RSS).

Certainly the interactive and pretty presentation make an appealing argument which will probably be enough to woo the average news consumer on the IOS platform, and again with the 0.99 price tag per week (or .39.95 a year) I will probably be signing up yearly for the service myself, but it won’t outshine the personalized news approach that RSS feeds can do for the seasoned news hungry consumer.

Needing no actual application introduction here lemme share some thoughts from the jump to Skype 5.0 non beta from the previous beta build.

I actually made the jump into Skype 5 Beta a few months back and have slowly appreciated the new bolder unified look. Undoubtedly the initial Beta look was a screen hog and had too much space wasted in terms of visual design. This was even more painful in the chat screen window where it was just glaringly white all over the place. That was finally remedied by a few intrepid programers who figured out how to install custom themes for the chat window screen, called “styles”. Since then I haven taken a liking toward a chat style called “Simple”, I’d share the link where I got it but I can’t remember. Nevertheless I was happy to see that after upgrading Skype, my chat style still stayed the same, that and there were drastic improvements to all that extra space the whole Mac community was clamoring about on beta. Over all the unified interface may take some time to adapt to but presents a better user experience in the long run, that’s from personal experience.

Too bad they had removed the groups video calling on the free version (it was free for a short while when Skype was on Beta). However until Google Voice releases an official desktop application (I assume they have something in the works) Skype will be the king of voip communications.

Note: This list is by no stretch of the imagination supposed to be perceived as a comprehensive review. It is meant to introduce you to some nifty apps that I feel would make working on your computers a better place. Included in this write ups are insights on how I regularly use the apps and how they have helped me work better and more efficiently.

Geektool is a nifty little preference pane tool that let’s you run scripts to display all sorts of stuff on your desktop. There are a lot of resources online to help you get just about anything on your desktop. From todo list, calendar items, to a big bad clock Geektool will certainly spruce up your desktop. Just remember this added features on your desktop will consume some system resources, not much but for the system resource obsessed be forewarned, lol.

…And yes that’s a modified recreation of HTC’s Sense interface on my desktop c/o Geektool. I still have to tweak quite a few settings to get it to look the way I want it, and I have to make pixel movements to align everything just right, so consider it a work in progress. There’s a tutorial online for this found here.

Here’s a repository for Geektool scripts.