On XP for years and years I’ve used a bit of software called Oubilette to securely store the password details of the 1001 sites that I’ve logins on. It’s a superb bit of simple software which has never ever missed a beat. When moving to a new machine looking up passwords becomes one of the things you do most regularly since, whilst it’s easy to the move the majority of stored passwords in Firefox across to an another machine, there are always some that don’t make it across the export/import boundary. Hence the requirement for “an Oubliette” for OS X … since I need to have a single secure repository that I can open on my multiple systems. The good news is that there is an answer and it’s an excellent one!. KeePass is an open source password safe application and furthermore it’s been ported to run on various operating systems, including both XP and OS X. And here’s the clincher … it’s got an import plugin on XP from Oubliette :-). So a simple import, and bit of tidying up whilst I’m about it, and now I’ve got an ultrasecure password safe that runs on both operating systems and will happily access a common file!
Ironically another thing that I was hugely dependent upon on XP came from the same guy who wrote Oubliette! It’s called KeyNote and is considered one of the best outliners/note takers out there. Superb, fast and very fully featured, it let me maintain a very effective electronic notebook for all things work and personal. I spent lots of time trying to come up with a suitable cross platform replacement. I tried things like Wikidpad which is a Python based local wiki but sharing files was a little involved given a local database approach and the UI terribly clunky. I could have used Lotus Notes, but to work properly it’d require a server based Journal database and I’ve not got scope for one of those. Therefore in the end after a bit of contemplation, I went with one of the best known freemium offerings … Evernote. Now I’m used to it, I’m a fan! It’s not as flexible or as a good at tree building as KeyNote since it’s basically a timed log of things, but it is again rampantly cross platform, and most importantly replicates data between the different machines and a web version too very efficiently. I find the client application on OS X is better than the one on XP, mostly because the OS X one helps you predicitively when tagging items, unlike the XP one which simply gives you a text field and expects you to remember your own rambling folksonomies or else end up with a random spread of similar tags!