My Favourite Mac Apps
Friends keep getting Macs and many of the software lists out there don’t seem to be fundamental enough or aren’t specific enough. So I’m giving my recommendations. I use my Mac for both programming, web browsing and other day to day tasks.
- Adium
http://adiumx.org
An IM client above all others. I cannot use any other IM clients anymore. Adium displays such sheer elegance and sleekness that everything else on earth is inferior. I use it for Jabber, MSN, ICQ, X-Fire (rarely) and Bonjour chat without issue.
- X11
Apple’s X11 is a bit odd in Leopard but it still remains an excellent implementation. Command-tabbing between X11 and Finder works perfectly and fluxbox works nicely. Installing fluxbox is a piece of cake, whether from your package manager of choice or from source.
- VLC
http://videolan.org
Obviously Quicktime sucks ass. If you believe otherwise you’re deluding yourself. VLC isn’t flawless (I’ve gotten into a few holes where I’ve had to delete the preference files) but I still enjoy playing a ton of formats without a care in the world. Once again, if you think Quicktime is a viable option for playing videos YOU ARE WRONG.
- Vienna
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vienna-rs
s
RSS. A crutch and an addiction. I like using Vienna’s in-built browser to keep my RSS browsing separate from my regular web browsing and I find that it handles my 55 (as of writing, after some culling) feeds nicely. That said, it’s very dodgy when handling YouTube clips - tends to end up using a large amount of CPU when even displaying the feeds and even more when playing.
- Quicksilver
http://www.blacktree.com/Not perfect, but incredibly powerful. It’s showing its age as of late and Leopard’s Spotlight implementation is pretty good but it has yet to equal the power that Quicksilver offers. Once I started using Quicksilver I couldn’t stop and I’m now dependant. I find it immensely annoying that I can’t relaunch Quicksiver with Quicksilver.
- Sidenote
http://www.chatelp.org/?s=SidenoteA nice little tool, not one that I use often, but I like having it to keep frequently used chunks of stuff and text that I’d otherwise forget about.
- MacFUSE
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/Essential. There’s too much cool stuff that plugs into this to ignore. The SSHfs app on this site is really nice too, although it could do with more functionality. The procfs plugin is really interesting and makes it really easy to plug scripts into things like the motion and light sensors in the Macbook Pro, along with a variety of other hardware components.
- MacFusion
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/mgorbach/MacFusionWeb/Hasn’t been updated in a while, but still cool. I use SSHfs on a laptop that I frequently put to sleep, so MacFusion remounts my SSHfs drives when I start the machine back up.
- Marco Polo
http://www.symonds.id.au/marcopolo/A very cool little app for keeping track of location switching. I move my laptop between college and home a lot and switching locations is very annoying after a while. Marco Polo switches my proxy settings and mutes my sound based on the SSID I’m currently using automatically, which saves me the headache of realising I have to reset my proxy.
- Camino
http://www.caminobrowser.orgMy browser of choice. Safari’s a bit too minimal and Firefox way too fat. Camino is nicely tweaked to fit the Mac OS and is damn fast most of the time. I started to use Camino back in the days when Firefox lacked a plugin to read location manager settings and I haven’t been able to move away. It’s just… nice.
- iScrobbler
http://www.last.fm/group/iScrobblerI’m addicted to last.fm. I know I have a problem. I dislike the official client though, so I find the minimal feature set of iScrobbler to be incredibly useful. It sends my tracks and I have local charts and that’s all I really need. Built-in Growl support replaces the need for the Growl iTunes plugin.
- OmniGraffle
http://www.omnigroup.com/applicat
ions/omnigraffle/Not something that I use daily, but still a vital little tool. Drawing
diagrams is completely painless with this tool, from dependency
diagrams for 3ba25 to UML diagrams for 2ba2 and 3ba22 to network
diagrams to gantt diagrams for various programming projects to a wide
range of generic “boxes and lines” diagrams. - Transmit
http://www.panic.com/transmit/I SFTP stuff on a daily basis and it’s generally in situations where I
need to browse the directory structure on both ends a lot. Transmit is
nowhere near as fast as Cyberduck, but the power offered makes up for
it. - Vidalia
http://vidalia-project.net/A nice easy way to get Tor and Privoxy set up on your Mac. The GUI is
nice and the connection map is informative and fun for moments when
you want to feel like you’re in WarGames or something. - TeXShop
http://vidalia-project.net/If you’re a LaTeX kinda person TeXShop will be
right up your street. It offers a nice editing
environment complete with syntax highlighting and
quick Typesetting options. To make the
installation process easier, use the MacTeX
distribution
(here),
otherwise you’ll be mucking around with installing
the components other ways, which gets really
messy. - Flickr Uploadr
http://h.yimg.com/ce/flickr/Flic
krUploadr-2.3.1.dmgI really hate the half-assed interface for Flickr Uploadr 3, but 2.3
is perfect in my opinion. Fast, powerful and free. - iStat Pro
- Disk Inventory X
- WaterRoof
