Mac Apps
It seems like a lot more people are getting Mac’s theses days (Pat just got one and Paul from work just got a new one…even my Mom has a temporary one for editing her book). So for fun I thought I’d list a bunch of applications I’ve come to love. I used a Mac for web design all through college but I didn’t switch my primary computer at home to one until a year and a half ago and now I have one at work as well. Most of the applications are free so a quick search should bring them up if you want to download. Anything killer I’m missing?
In the dock:
- Cyberduck (free FTP client)
- Firefox (browser, duh)
- Mail.app (use it occisionally just to download Gmail for offline use/backup)
- Entourage (work email)
- Adium (by far the best chat client)
- iCal (i mainly keep that there so I know the date since i use entourage for a calendar)
- iTunes
- ProTools (for the nowlikephotograph podcast)
- Adobe Lightroom (best RAW editor I’ve used)
- Adobe Photoshop (for nowlikephotos and random web stuff, it’s expensive but worth it)
- Textmate (the best text editor I’ve ever used, it’s like a graphical version of VI. best part is blogging with it or auto uploading things like the podcast xml file)
- Office (word, excel, powerpoint)
- iShowU (screen recording for demo’s at work)
- iMovie (use it with the screen recording and editing other video)
- Terminal
- Remote Desktop (nice to use for connecting to the media center and running iTunes over the home stereo)
- VMware (awesome that you can run bootcamp Windows partition and work demo’s using Windows Server)
- Cisco VPN client (for work)
- iPass (service provider for work travel)
And at the top in the system tray:
- Office calendar button
- Gmail checker
- Google Calendar checker
- Google Reader checker
- Caffeine (one click to enable and it turns off screensaver making sure the laptop doesn’t dim or go to sleep)
- Growl (universal pop-up notifier for Growl, gmail, itunes and everything else - nice since it keeps all the pop up status windows the same format)
- Spaces (i keep trying to use this but never really got in to it, i live by expose instead)
- Monitors (mainly for presentations)
- Time Machine (works great with a 320GB western digital passport drive for backup)
- Rest is standard stuff….
Other things not listed that you can’t see:
- Flip4Mac - allows quicktime to play Windows media files
- Desktop 2 Login - allows the default desktop at the login screen to match the custom one after you login (nice so you can get rid of that stupid space background that always shows up at login)
- Handbrake - best free 1-click DVD ripper
- Norton Antivirus - come on i work for them and secuity is important…
- SuperDuper! - full image backup. Time Machine is nice but with SuperDuper I can take a full system image and boot off of the backup. So if a hard drive crashes I can just run the Mac OS on the backup until things are fixed.
- Twitteriffic - I’ve been switching over to using a dashboard widget instead (twitterlex) but Twitteriffic is pretty nice too
- Quicksilver - this is hard to explain but you it’s a text launcher so you can do search or type commands without using a mouse. I use it to setup hot keys for controlling iTunes without bringing up the window or updating IM status without bringing up chat windows etc…
Downloaed Dashboard Widgets (besides the standard ones):
- Package tracker by Mike Piontek (tracks UPS numbers and notifies you through Growl when they get scanned at different locations)
- Remember the Milk - todo lists synced with the web and Gmail widget
- Twitterlex - for twitter feeds/posting
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Computer Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.