For you mac users, check out the MacUpdate Spring Bundle. It’s similar to the rockin’ MacHeist Bundle that was offered a month or so ago. For $49 you get 11+ great apps including Parallels and TechTool Pro. Sold.

Speaking of gems, Ruby Inside has a great post on the Ruby ToolBox.

I found a great little remote control application for use with the mac (or a pc) called Log Me In.

Though I’m fairly weened from intellisense from my .NET days, I still find myself always needing some type of reference when writing Ruby or Rails projects. There’s always a browser tab with the Rails API, noobkit, or some other cheatsheet . While cheatsheets are pretty and all, they are sometimes just a hassle to find and go it when you just need that little syntax helper. So what do I do, I cheat.

Here’s a great plugin for TextMate by Ciarán Walsh to overlay the status icon on each file/folder under subversion.

Back at Datastream we used Vault as a replacement for for Visual SourceSafe. It was a great tool. (Not living (completely) in Microsoft land anymore, I now use Subversion for all source control.) Bundled with Vault was a diff tool. It’s apparently grown up into an nice little app.

I’ve been using Bloglines for a couple of years as my primary blog aggregator. I have looked at a ton of them and, though desktop aggregators offer more features, I really prefer a web-based reader. It’s just easier to maintain what Ive read across multiple machines. Bloglines has simply dominated the web aggregator market.

When I was at Rails Conf in June, I stumbled upon a great little service for monitoring the status of your servers, Montastic This is a very lightweight, free service where you simply add URLs. The service pings each of your servers every 10 minutes and sends you an email if one of them is down.

The good ‘ole Save Page As drops the ball when trying to grab well-formed, standards based websites where most, if not all, of the images are specified in CSS. I spent an hour or so yesterday scouring the web for some tool that would download these CSS images. I found nothing.