Not too long ago, I won an Amazon Kindle while attending the CS4HS workshop at CMU (Yay Google and other sponsors!). Perhaps not surprisingly, I fell in love with reading on it. I quickly looked for all the free e-books I could, discovering sites like MobileRead and FeedBooks, with their ultra-sweet Kindle-based book browsers (Click and download right on the Kindle? Awesome!). However, their selections of recent works are certainly… lacking. Only a few authors have really embraced free e-book distribution, and while I do love Cory Doctorow, my brain really craved more.

I investigated the local library, which has been a great source of mind-food ever since we moved to Cleveland a couple years ago. Alas, they had nothing expressly for the Kindle – though they did have an e-library with MobiPocket and Adobe EPub books. I had remembered reading somewhere that the Kindle could do MobiPocket, so I decided to investigate further.

I found out that Igor Skochinsky had done some investigations into the Kindle’s handling of MobiPocket DRM, and had put together a set of Python scripts that were supposedly able to convert normal MobiPocket DRM’d files into a format readable by the Kindle. I tried them out on my own, and lo and behold, I was reading Barack Obama’s book on my Kindle, straight from the library! Well, not quite straight from the library – it made some detours on my Mac, involving some Terminal usage and some copying-and-pasting. But it was still pretty sweet!

I decided that dealing with the command-line was not something my wife would be interested in doing, and so I decided to write a little AppleScript application that handled all the tedious stuff, like running the commands. This, in fact, only ended up taking me the lesser part of an afternoon, despite having never worked on a similar project before. However, the end result was a fancy little droplet, that I could simply drag and drop a PRC file onto and get an Amazon-compatible AZW file back.

I contacted Igor, and he gave me permission to redistribute his code. So I created a logo and a Google Code project, and am happy to share it with you, readers of the world! I give you:

Mobi2Kindle!

For the Mac, there’s SCPlugin, which seems to offer similar functionality and Finder integration. Of course, there are a couple additional (and, in my opinion, poorly-documented) steps required to use SCPlugin with an svn+ssh connection. (Note: these steps worked for me on OS X 10.5, Leopard. YMMV)

1. Get SCPlugin from http://scplugin.tigris.org/ and install it. There is no need for a separate installation for SVN – SVN 1.4.4 appears to come pre-installed on Leopard.
2. Restart the Finder. I just opened up Force Quit (Command-Option-Escape) and chose to Relaunch Finder.app, but you can also just log out and log back in if Force Quit scares you.
3. Here’s the tricky part – you need to set up ssh to use key pair authentication as opposed to password authentication when you connect to your SSH server. Detailed instructions can be found here.
4. Now check something out using SCPlugin. In Leopard, this is done by right-clicking in the target directory in a Finder window, choosing “More,” “Subversion,” “Checkout,” and entering the repository URL and other information as necessary.

Now, we’ve been a “cross-platform family” ever since we were married, with a 12″ PowerBook G4 as our designated Mac, a couple Windows machines, and we’ve even used (though didn’t stick with) Ubuntu on one of our computers. This new purchase is notable, however, as it means that I will be moving my primary development work to the Mac. While I used a PowerBook for a few programming projects in college, for the most part I’ve done my work in a Windows environment.

I use a large number of Windows-only tools as part of my work, and this has me worried. Many of them are free/open source, but currently lack Mac-native versions. Some (such as KeePass) have Mac versions, but they are sorely lacking in terms of the UI – they tend to feel very “un-Mac-like” (which I suppose is to be expected of a cross-platform application). I will certainly be using either Boot Camp and some sort of virtualization software, if only for the purpose of testing rendering of websites in Windows, but I’d prefer to use native apps for everything possible.

For reference, here is the list of software that I’m going to miss.

• WinSCP
  The most perfect SFTP/FTP program for Windows.
  So far, I’ve tried CyberDuck and Fugu, both of which fall short in terms of execution and lacking key features (specifically, live “Synchronization”).
• KeePass
  A password manager program.
  This is not of the “fill out web forms” variety, but rather an encrypted database designed to hold information about user accounts of various forms.
  I’ve looked at the Apple-included “Keychain Access” application, but I like the additional features/organizational options of KeePass. I’ve also tried KeePassX – the cross-platform version of KeePass – and its interface is horribly non-native.
• Notepad++
  A very versatile text editor.
  I think I will be switching to TextMate, even though it’s not free, because it looks to be also very versatile and good at what it does. I still have to spend some more time with it before I can be sure, though.
• ToDoList by AbstractSpoon
  A heirarchical to-do list application.
  Again, there’s an Apple application that sort of does this in the form of iCal, but the implementation doesn’t have as many features (subtasks being the most noticeable).

I’m still looking for replacements for the above tools, but I’m not ruling out the possibility of “rolling-my-own” applications (or, in the case of the open source apps, using the same core but completely re-doing the interface in Cocoa). I’ve been wanting to try out native Mac development for awhile – this migration might be my chance!

If anyone has any suggestions for replacements not mentioned above, I’d appreciate them. What did you use before and after you made the switch?