Did you ever know a person in school that was into the same kind of stuff you were into, but because that person was such an insufferable know-it-all, the stuff you had in common actually drove you apart? It’s like that with me and lifehacker.com. I should be a huge fan of the content (which is about cool useful tech stuff, as long as it’s about getting something else done, not just tech for tech’s sake), but there’s something about the tone over there that just drives me insane.

And so it goes for their year-end apps list. I would link to it, but so much of it is so good (the selections, I mean, not necessarily the writing), that I have to note some of it here.

1. Parallels. LH writes “THIS is the reason any on-the-fence switchers with cash for spendy Apple hardware and an affinity for that one Windows app will make the jump to a shiny new Mac.” She misspelled “available consumer credit”, but other than that, she’s got me pegged. I wouldn’t have even considered a Mac until Parallels came out. I don’t even use it that much (I run it on my XP box, actually, so that a very badly behaving networking app only takes down its virtual machine, instead of my whole system), but the fact that it’s there lets me explore Apple’s offerings with a safety net.
2. Google Reader. LH writes “My longtime love affair with Bloglines ended this year with a switch to Google’s new feed reader, and I’ve never looked back.” I look back kind of a lot, but I did ditch Bloglines for Google Reader. I don’t think you’d go wrong with either app: Bloglines offers single-use email addresses, has more “per-feed” options, but Google Reader seems to be up more often and has some more tools for tagging, sharing, etc.
3. Windows Vista. Ho boy. See what I’m saying?
4. Google Calendar. I am not a power calendar user. While I’m capturing more good stuff in my GTD system, and making better decisions about it all, I’m not honestly that busy. I find ways to fill the time, but very little has to be done at a certain time in my life. (At work, it’s a little different.) The point is that I can’t get myself involved in the calendar vs. calendar wars on the internet right now. Comments say that 30boxes integrates better with Flickr. Seriously? It’s a poorer calendar app if it doesn’t share photos? If you say so.
5. Hamachi. A free VPN solution that apparently works very nicely. I have been obsessing about VPN / SSH / tunneling for about a month now (I’m using WiFi at Caribou, and learning more about how you can leak plain text during a GMail / surfing session), so I’ll have to look into this. (But SSHing into a home server is working just fine for now.)
6. Campfire. If someone can sit down and explain Backpack, Basecamp, Tadalist, and Campfire to me, I’ll make them some brownies. The appeal of this stuff eludes me like owning a ferret. I am hoping there’s nothing very cool I’m missing out on, because “group chat in a browser with your coworkers” sounds like as much fun as catching your finger in a car door.
7. OpenDNS. I use this, but I am no longer sure why. It, uh, goes faster? It catches phishers (reactively, not proactively), but seriously. Maybe I was having nameserver problems with my ISP. Either way, it’s not a bad layer to throw between you and the real-deal internet.
8. Foxmarks. I can’t say either way. Bookmark syncing is a pretty hairy programming problem, but I think you’re better off throwing links into del.icio.us and hoping for the best. I just don’t sync anymore.

So yeah, overall - good list of apps that came out this year, and a couple I have to give a chance to.

I just found the most amazing thing on Bloglines. If you’ve got Google News search results, or iTunes RSS feeds, or even just a perfectionist blogger in your feed lists, you know that Bloglines is popping new results in your face every time something changes. There’s a setting, it turns out, for each feed, for “updated items”. The default is “Treat as new”, which is very wrong. The best way to handle it, except for feeds where the updates are really useful (like, let’s say, iTunes charts, where you want to know when new Pussycat Dolls goes from 8 to 6, and then to 2, and then to the number 1 spot), is to select “Ignore”.

You might laugh (esp. if you’re not using Bloglines, because this distinction will seem especially petty, or if you really like Pussycat Dolls, and then your laughter is the nervous laughter of acknowledgement), but this was getting to be a serious problem. 37 news sites might carry the same AP story, but any time any of them twiddles a headline or corrects the punctuation, the whole Google search pops to the top of your notifications. I went so far as to unsubscribe from a few feeds, because the blog authors would touch an entry twice an hour for two days. They probably didn’t even know they were sending new notificiations to everyone, but that’s the state we’re in with RSS at the moment.

And if you’re not using Bloglines, get an account today, for the love of god. Stop clicking on your bookmarks to see if sites have changed. Totally 1998.