The Best Mac OS X Software Tools

An anonymous reader writes "Mac advocate John C. Welch weighs in with his list of the top 20 Mac OS X products (except Welch manages to list 22). The collection of software tools ranges from the obvious, such as Boot Camp, to the obscure but perhaps more useful — little-known apps like Peter Borg's Lingon, for creating launchd configuration files. What's on your personal list of indispensable Mac productivity aids and programming tools? Also, do you think Welch gives too much air time to built-in OS X tools at the expense of third-party products such as NetworkLocation?"

Comments

The List

[BarryJacobsen]

Ecto

Transmit

Sync Services

BBEdit

Missing Sync for Windows Mobile

OmniGraffle Pro

ConceptDraw

iChat AV

AppleScript

Script Debugger

Microsoft Entourage

SketchFighter 4000 Alpha

TypeIt4Me

NetworkLocation

Apple Remote Desktop 3

MacLink Plus Deluxe

Parallels Desktop for Mac

Remote Desktop Connection

Snapz Pro X

Boot Camp

PDF

Lingon

Workgroup Manager

Re:The List

[Anonymous Coward]

Linked version with condensed summary. I wanted to find out more about some of them. Others may benefit too.

Ecto a blogging client (but the site seems to be down: try this for more info). Shareware, $17.95.
Transmit an FTP client. Shareware, $17.95
Sync Services -- comes with 10.4
BBedit text/html editor. $125, but worth it.
Missing Synch for Windows Mobile - synchronize with PDA/smartphones. $49.95/$39.95
OmniGraffle - diagramming / flowchart program. $79.95 / $149.95
ConceptDraw - another diagramming / flowchart program. $299
IChat AV - built-in to 10.4
AppleScript, Scriptdebugger - also built-in. No link. I'm getting lazy.
Microsoft Entourage -- part of MS Office.
Sketchfigher 4000 Alpha -- a game from the great Ambrosia Software. $19.00
TypeIt4Me - keyboard macro expander. $27
NetworkLocation - automatically trigger configuration changes depending upon where you are on the network (e.g., at home, work, etc.). $15
Apple Remote Desktop 3 - control / configure Mac systems remotely. $499 / $299 (unlimited / 10 systems)
MacLinkPlus - file conversion software (e.g., from WordPerfect documents to/from Word, and many others). $79
Parallels Desktop for Mac - virtualization software (e.g., run Win XP simultaneously with OS X). $79.
Remote Desktop Connection - connect remotely to a Windows desktop. FREE
Snap X Pro - screen / movie capture. $29
Boot Camp - dual boot Windows. I'm lazy.
PDF - Portable Document Format from Adobe? What?
Lingon - tool for making launchd scripts for 10.4.
Workgroup Manager - manage local systems - part of 10.4 Server.

---
Okay, a mildly interesting list. Here's a few more suggestions:

Cyberduck - FTP and SFTP client. Donationware.
VLC - cross-platform video viewer / transcoder.
Blender 3D - cross-platform 3D modelling / rendering.
Bookends - excellent bibliography software. $99
Celestia - cross-platform real-time 3D astronomy simulator.
Plot - a, uh, plotting / graphing program.
proFit - another plotting / graphing program, non-free. $95
WordService - adds a bunch of text reformatting tools to the Services menu, making them accessible in any program. The same page has a bunch of other useful and free services.

The original article lists PDF, but no tools. While its true OS X native support makes PDF pretty easy to use, there's still some tasks that are awkward and some useful tools out there to do t

Re:The List

[MsGeek]

Yes, you can run Linux as a Parallels guest OS. You are also not wedded to XP for your Windows version...you can run Windows 2000, 98SE, 95, OS/2 or even DOS as a guest OS. Any OS that can run on Intel x86 can run as a Parallels guest OS. And it can run completely isolated from the host OS if you don't enable file sharing and Internet access. If anything, it's a superior way of running Windows if you have to do it.

Re:The List

[Daniel_Staal]

My addition: Growl - Notification manager. Free. Supported by enough Mac apps to make you wish they all supported it.

Re:The List

[Anonymous Coward]

[Shrug]
I said "e.g.". Implying there were plenty of other options of what OS you could run, including Linux, yes.

Tell from that what you like, but it's nice to have options. Personally, I've used it but it isn't installed on my Mac (it was the other guy's list), because I haven't had a need for it.

Look at it this way: although I'm sure there's a way to do it, it's alot harder to do it the other way around -- run virtualization software on Windows in order run Mac OS X :-)

Re:The List

[Divebus]

I find it quite telling that one of the most popular applications for the MAC is a program that lets you run a different OS.

If you've been paying attention here for the last year, most of the commentary surrounding virtualization on the Mac has revolved around people finally able to dump their infernal Windows machine and do everything on a Mac instead. Parallels, along with Boot Camp, is quite possibly the largest driver of Mac sales in the last year. There are a few functions not available on the Mac [yet] and Parallels lets people run those few apps they'd miss from Windows. Yes, Paralleles does run Linux. I currently know more people who dumped their Windows machines in the last year than I know remaining Windows owners - and those aren't far behind.

Re:The List

[dracvl]

Lingon

...and we all know what the KDE port of this tool would be called.

Re:The List

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you AC for posting pricing. So nice to see that the tools that someone thinks are needed will cost me.

Re:The List

[sgant]

Another missing but service I use all the time is TextExpander. It's very useful in placing things that you type all the time. For instance I have a shortcut "hhref" that will invoke "a href="http://address">description/a" so I can place a link very easily without having to type it out everytime.

Yes, TextExpander is for lazy people like myself.

The bit i like

[15Bit]

"...any language that still requires typing shows the essential failure of the computer industry to pry programming out of the hands of geeks."

I couldn't agree more. I definitely remember the idea being bandied round a few years back of high level drag and drop programming for the masses. We have Labview which does that for automated instrumentation control and analysis, is it really so hard to make a high level programming language in the same mould?

Re:The bit i like

[Watson Ladd]

Programing is hard. It doesn't matter if you use drag and drop widgets, or switches on the front board. You still need to specify what you are doing in a precise manner. With Labview it is easy because it has a very limited domain. Not so with general programing.

Re:The bit i like

[soupforare]

While not general-purpose, Max/MSP is drag and drop and it's still mostly in the hands of geeks. I'd wonder how many not-geeky musicians that are required to look at it in/through college ever pick it up after graduation?
I think it's a difference of expectation, the masses just want to pop a disc in and have something happen. They don't want to wrench on stuff.

Re:The bit i like

[Tim Browse]

If you have trouble typing, programming of any kind probably isn't going to be your thing anyway.

Re:The bit i like

[1729]

"...any language that still requires typing shows the essential failure of the computer industry to pry programming out of the hands of geeks."

I couldn't agree more. I definitely remember the idea being bandied round a few years back of high level drag and drop programming for the masses. We have Labview which does that for automated instrumentation control and analysis, is it really so hard to make a high level programming language in the same mould?

The point is: untyped languages are dangerous! They disguise programming errors. That's the reason why Fortran added "implicit none", and subsequent languages have enforced stronger and stronger typing. Any language for real programming (writing an OS, controlling a car or an airplane or a spacecraft or a radiation machine, running a communications network, etc.) NEEDS to be strongly typed, so that simple typos are rejected by the compiler instead of resulting in serious (fatal!) failures. If you're just automated the workflow on your PC, an untyped language might do the trick. But the computing industry has not failed "to pry programming out of the hands of geeks": real, serious programming is hard, and no amount of drag-and-drop or syntactic sugar or weak typing can change that.

Re:The bit i like

[MrTranscendence]

Having been incredibly productive with dynamically-typed languages, it would be difficult for me to put into words how wrong-headed and foolish your opinions are.

So, instead, I'll point out that you misunderstood: they mean "typing" as in "writing text on a keyboard with fingers".

Re:The bit i like

[Stamen]

I should start using this in interviews to weed out people like you. You are talking about dynamic typing, not weak typing.

There is static/dynamic as well as weak/strong typing.

C and C++ are weak typed, you know those languages that a lot of OSs are written in. However they are static typed. Something like Ruby is strong and dynamically typed.

And dynamically typed languages are hardly dangerous; even the often mentioned "if you make a typo it doesn't catch it" reasoning isn't even correct most the time. Pleased to be explaining it to you:

In Ruby, for example, a variable is created when it's first assigned (and you don't specify its type), like this:

foo = "Hello"

if later you use foo, but miss-type it, it generates an error:

length = fooo.length

in this case, it will complain ("undefined local variable or method `fooo' for main:Object") and catch your typo.

In addition Ruby, as an example, is strongly typed you can't just add a string to an integer:

i = 0
foo = "1"
i = i + foo

In this case i is an integer and foo is a string, you can't treat foo like an integer without an error, because although it is dynamically typed it is strongly typed.

Re:The bit i like

[kisielk]

Typing in the program and worrying about syntax and language details is probably the easiest part of programming. Developing a good design and actually engineering an application is the hard part. If you can do that, you can surely program it in to a computer.

Re:The bit i like

[Llywelyn]

Yes.

LabView is a 4GL. Not that such isn't very useful, but it is designed for a specific range of tasks.

Re:The bit i like

[1729]

I should start using this in interviews to weed out people like you. You are talking about dynamic typing, not weak typing.

Actually, I was referring to both, though I should have made that more clear. Dynamic typing is dangerous in the same way that static, implicit typing (see old Fortran) is dangerous. Explicit, static typing prevents one from unintentionally creating two distinct variables that are supposed to be the same, due to a typo.

As far as your "I should [use this] to weed out people like you": I don't want a job writing crappy Ruby code. I've already got a job (as a compiler writer). Thanks, though.

Re:The bit i like

[1729]

Having been incredibly productive with dynamically-typed languages, it would be difficult for me to put into words how wrong-headed and foolish your opinions are.

I didn't say that these languages are unproductive. I said that they are dangerous.

So, instead, I'll point out that you misunderstood: they mean "typing" as in "writing text on a keyboard with fingers".

Okay, having reread TFA, it appears you're right. I read the comment in the context of a discussion on Applescript, and assumed that the author was referring to the weak, dynamic typing of Applescript. It didn't occur to me that the author was making a far more stupid comment.

Re:The bit i like

[jc42]

Programing is hard. It doesn't matter if you use drag and drop widgets, or switches on the front board. You still need to specify what you are doing in a precise manner.

Nah; programming is easy. It's only hard for those geeks that insist that the code should work right. Most people aren't geeks, and hold contempt for the things that geeks value, such as precision. If you don't care about precision, programming is one of the easiest things in the world.

Quicksilver

[zaphod_es]

What, 22 favourite apps and no Quicksilver? This is the one program I just could not live without, it is what makes my Mac usable. I hardly use the mouse anymore and access and/or run almost everything on my computer with two or three keystrokes. And it's free!

Re:Quicksilver

[bismark.a]

I don't own a Mac, but I swear that my next laptop will be a Leopard tera-core sexy machine. And one of the reason for that is beautiful apps like Quick Silver.

Re:Quicksilver

[Ash-Fox]

If there was a quicksilver equivalent that had the same functionality available on the Linux desktop, would you consider Linux?

Re:Quicksilver

[tezbobobo]

Sorry, he said, "one of the reason". If it also had a program like Indesign, photoshop and their subsequent ability to use CMYK properly, I would. I used linux since RH 5.1 but that was when I was a networker - now I'm a type setter.

Re:Quicksilver

[Ash-Fox]

Sorry, he said, "one of the reason".

Sometimes it just takes one particular thing to make a decision on considering possible. For example, I knew when I switched to Linux on my main desktop not all my Windows games would work... But I got other benefits that I wanted.

If it also had a program like Indesign, photoshop and their subsequent ability to use CMYK properly, I would.

I don't know of alternatives to Indesign (mostly because I haven't done much with publishing related things yet). But Krita offers much Photoshop functionality and has had support for CMYK since 1.5.

Re:Quicksilver

[_|()|\|]

Launcher apps. like Quicksilver and Launch Bar aare very customizable, and I'm sure I could get used to any of them. The one I've gotten comfortable with is Butler. On Windows, I launched programs by navigating the Start menu with sequences of keystrokes that were ingrained in my fingers. Navigating the Dock or the Applications folder felt glacial by comparison. Butler's abbreviations are better than either approach. It's kind of like the WIndows Vista Start menu, except that it recognizes initials; for example, if I type "qp," one of the matches will be "QuickTime Player."

Another nice feature of Butler is the macro facility. I TELNET or SSH to dozens of Unix systems using a variety of accounts, so the terminal isn't always configured the way I expect. I have a "bash" macro that execs bash and sets TERM, and a "ksh" for machines without bash that execs ksh, enables emacs mode, sets TERM, and sttys the delete key.

If you're remotely a power user, I definitely recommend spending an hour or two with one of these launcher apps. On the flip side, if you want a launcher even simpler than the Dock, consider Docktop. If you've seen the desktop icons on the demo systems at an Apple store, Docktop is kind of like that. It puts big, single-clickable icons on the center of your desktop that even your Windows-using house sitter can understand.

Re:Quicksilver

[zaphod_es]

I love Quicksilver on the Mac and would love Linux even more if I had QS there as well. You make Linux and Mac an either/or, I use both a lot.

Re:Quicksilver

[shmert]

I was going to say the same thing about LaunchBar. It's what spotlight should have been. When I'm on a computer without it I'm constantly cursing. Or installing it.

Re:Quicksilver

[IwarkChocobos]

I agree 100% here. Quicksilver is one of the best programs for a Mac, an the fact that it's free makes it much better. Hell, I think they need a QS for windows..good luck with that one.

Re:Quicksilver

[Stamen]

Just to add one minor note: Quicksilver is a Launcher app, as the parent mentions, but it so much more than that. And it's one of those things you can't describe real well, you have to spend some time using it to understand.

It's like saying that the command line is an app launcher, which is true, but that is only scratching the surface of what the console can do; the best way to describe Quicksilver is a visual command-line.

The two things that I miss the most when using Windows or Linux on the desktop are Quicksilver and TextMate. There just isn't anything like Quicksilver on any other platform.

Re:Quicksilver

[DittoBox]

Colibri. Although not as good as quicksilver it can at least open applications and is really fast once started.

Re:Quicksilver

[Coryoth]

ust to add one minor note: Quicksilver is a Launcher app, as the parent mentions, but it so much more than that. And it's one of those things you can't describe real well, you have to spend some time using it to understand. This is a bit of a catch - I am interested to know exactly what Quicksilver does, but there seem to be few good explanations. Perhaps comparison would be easiest - how does it compare to, say, deskbar for GNOME which lets you launch apps, search files, open webpages, write emails, execute arbitrary commands, and whatever else you can dream up via pluggable backends? I like Deskbar a lot - it is flexible, powerful, and lets me do everything with just a few keystrokes. Since, apparently, there is nothing at all comparable to Quicksilver on Linux I was wondering what sets Quicksilver so far ahead of something like Deskbar?

I don't have access to any Macs, so I simply don't have an opportunity to see Quicksilver in action, so thanks for any explanation you can give - I'm simply curious as to what it actually does.

Re:Quicksilver

[Peganthyrus]

A quick once-over of the Deskbar site suggests that DB is pretty much the same sort of application as Quicksilver.

QS's default skin (and most of its alternate skins) is really Mac-pretty.

Mostly, I use QS as an app launcher and iTunes controller. It is not a major component of my every interaction with my Mac, the way it seems to become for some people. But the fact that it knows a lot of semi-private formats means it's how I dig in a lot of things - I never open Address Book unless I'm editing a contact, for instance; I'll just double-tap the Apple key, type a few letters from the name I want until it's the top choice in QS over any file/app/bit of data with a similar name, and then use the cursor keys to navigate into the contact and copy out the info I need. Or just show it big on the screen.

Re:Quicksilver

[_|()|\|]

I'm simply curious as to what it actually does

Googling quick-silver screen-cast should turn up some video tutorials. I'm not familiar with Deskbar, but from your description it sounds similar to Quicksilver, which also makes extensive use of plug-ins.

If you want to control everything with an app. like this (a sort of Emacs for your O/S, so to speak), I think OS X has a bit of an advantage. Automation is possible on Linux and Windows, but AppleScript on the Mac is more established and pervasive.

Re:Quicksilver

[nick.ian.k]

For the record, there's a little application for KDE called Katapult that does the exact same thing as Quicksilver.

But the replying /.er was right: there's still nothing under Linux that compares to Indesign and its amazing typesetting algorithms. Much as I hate Adobe (and believe me, I hate them a lot!), their work on simplifying and automating typesetting is nigh-on breathtaking if you care about beautiful text presentation. The work done on Scribus thus far is impressive, but it's doubtful that it's going to come close in that arena for quite some time.

Re:Quicksilver

[Coryoth]

It will be interesting to see how such things fare once both GNOME and KDE are suitably established on D-BUS. The possibilities certainly increase.

Re:Quicksilver

[Coryoth]

I love Quicksilver on the Mac and would love Linux even more if I had QS there as well. It sounds like Deskbar is not a bad alternative to Quicksilver - it seems to offer the same sort of functionality. Having never used QS I can't comment on how they compare, but I can say that Deskbar is very powerful and well worth having, and would certainly make things nicer on Linux if you're a QS addict.

Re:Quicksilver

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, like the other posters mentioned, it does what deskbar does.

It's basically a small shell. Think of it as a pretty Bash with cat: it can open programs (and documents) with text completion, it can take "arguments" for those programs and documents (such as saying what program to open a doc with), and it can send text and files to other programs for processing (such as emailing some text you typed--sends it to the email program and presses send--sending a file through IM, or creating a calendar event using the text/file).

You can also create global keyboard shortcuts for any app/file it can find. So, if you have a Bash script or AppleScript you like to run (such as something for pausing/playing music in iTunes), you can bind the script to a shortcut. (KDE made it easy to do something like this, but Quicksilver is nice because OS X only has a predefined set of actions that you can assign shortcuts for.) Quicksilver can use Spotlight to help look for things.

Mostly, I use it to open files and apps, and, sometimes, email a quick note or attachment. (Send an attachment like this: type a few letters to find a document, press tab/space, type send, press tab/space, type a few letters of the person you want to send the email to--or the email address if the recipient isn't in the address book. It's like using cat, mail, and bash tab-completion to send email--and having everything in one directory!)

Re:Quicksilver

[Anonymous Coward]

For the record, there's a little application for KDE called Katapult that does the exact same thing as Quicksilver.

Please get access to a Mac and try Quicksilver before you make such statements.

Just because they're both launchers does not mean that one does the "exact same thing" as the other. That's like saying GIMP does the "exact same thing" as Photoshop.

And I'm not even a mac fanboy!

Re:Quicksilver

[andreyw]

It's nice, but doesn't like capital cyrillic letters, making it pretty useless for me.

I thought on the Mac at least, we were done with application that only work correctly in ISO-8859-1?

Re:Quicksilver

[davester666]

What, 22 favourite apps and no Quicksilver? This is the one program I just could not live without, it is what makes my Mac usable. I hardly use the mouse anymore and access and/or run almost everything on my computer with two or three keystrokes. And it's free!

Why QuickSilver? It's one app/productivity enhancement tool that I have installed, that I haven't gotten around to actually using much yet, but it crashes on me. It just launches in the background when I login, I do nothing with it [not even bring up it's UI] and I'll be doing something like watching a movie or programming in XCode and get a CrashReporter dialog saying that QuickSilver has crashed.

And the one thing that I tried to use it for, namely to access entries in my keychain, there is an explicit keychain module for QuickSilver, and it is loaded, but I never get any results from it.

Re:Quicksilver

[myowntrueself]

I've just started to get into the mac and reading your post (and the others which followed) I installed quicksilver.

Yes, it looks useful and interesting... however their website does not help much. I've been trying to follow their docco but its slow going. Its an incredibly inefficient site, its laggy (have to wait for it to catch up when using mouse wheel) and consumes vast amounts of CPU just to scroll down the page. Not such great web design/coding. (This is on an AMD64+1G RAM + Debian Sarge + Firefox. So its no slouch when it comes to browsing web pages).

Does this reflect on Quicksilver itself?

Has anyone found the quicksilver app itself to have any bad memory leaks etc?

Re:Quicksilver

[Stamen]

Deskbar seems similar, but what I can tell Deskbar doesn't do the composition stuff that Quicksilver does (perhaps it does I didn't fire up my PC to check it). If you do a search or enter something in Deskbar, it gives you a list of choices, but in Quicksilver you can continue on after that and rout those results to other options, it's like a GUI pipe. Here is quick example:
* If I type in "Joe S" as I type it shows different options when I've typed enough to get "Joe Smith" address book entry
* I then type "," which means I want to select another person, then I do the same thing for, let's say, 5 more people
* Now that I have a list of vcards, I can do something with them, I hit "tab" which pipes that list to another process (not really, but in concept)
* I then type "Emai" until I've typed enough to get "Email To", then I press tab to pipe that to another process
* I then type the first letters of who I want to email them to. And I'm done

If you were to do this in the command line, you'd create a comma delimited string of names, pass it to a program that would look up the vcards for each user, pipe the results to another program that would email them, and you'd specify who it was emailed to. So basically Quicksilver lets you, when you get good at it, do something like this in seconds using a GUI rather than the command-line. It's this ability to combine actions that makes Quicksilver different from all the other launchers, and I may be wrong, but I've never seen this anywhere before.

Re:Quicksilver

[nick.ian.k]

Just because they're both launchers does not mean that one does the "exact same thing" as the other. That's like saying GIMP does the "exact same thing" as Photoshop.

If you were trying to be helpful, you'd've mentioned what Quicksilver does differently. Of course, you didn't, and you posted AC because you must fear burning karma. Why? If you're that obsessed with karma points, why not go for the easy "informative" points while simultaneously telling me why I'm wrong? Seems fairly stupid to me.

Checking the wikipedia entry on Quicksilver, it does look as though Quicksilver has functionality that goes quite a ways beyond what Katapult presently offers. The standout to me is the idea of cataloging various scripts for handling actions through Quicksilver: "fucking sweet" would be a tremendous understatement. Some common actions can be handled via Katapult (such as finding and playing songs in Amarok), though it doesn't seem to be anywhere near as configurable. This is definitely looks to be one of those areas where the ultra-tight integration of OS X applications pays off heavily, even to a stalwart Linux advocate such as myself. Very nice!

Re:Quicksilver

[zaphod_es]

Yes, the documentation is terrible. My guess is that, like many free projects, the geeks in charge like writing code and don't like writing manuals. Take a look at http://blacktree.cocoaforge.com/forums/viewtopic.p hp?t=3747 this thread There is a pdf of a draft manual by Howard Melman which is a good place to start.

Dunno about the web page. Maybe it is suffering from the /. effect.

Re:Quicksilver

[tezbobobo]

Sure, and I think you're right. That said though, unlike PC users, I believe that apple users are not interested in a general purpose machine. It has long been said that the Apple is the bastion of the graphic design artist. That Is I believe the case. PCs are very general purpose by their nature. The majority of mac people switch because they have to, it sure as hell isn't for the range of software.

thank you also for pointing me to krita. Although I put out a weekly newspaper, I am currently in the throughs of helping a small not-for-profit put out a quarterly. I really do need the power of photoshop and in honesty nothing comes close. Nothing.

However, their need are modest and I will trial this and point them in the direction if it is appropriate. I really do favour GNU/Linux over proprietary.

Re:Quicksilver

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said I was trying to be helpful?
What I say or the OP says holds no water. People will believe whatever they want to believe and they can find what they want to find on the internet (e.g. you finding out about Quicksilver's functionality in Wikipedia).

I was pointing out the apparent Linux evangelism and false advertising. Nothing destroys open source projects more than false promises and disappointed users who switched (and in turn their bad mouthing open source and switching back).

I'm not a Mac user (never owned a Mac), and I'm not a Linux user.

Me posting anonymously or not is simply none of your business.

Re:Quicksilver

[llscotts]

Try using either Safari or the WebKit nightly build (www.webkit.org). Both are much faster than Firefox, I've found, on the Mac. Firefox isn't nearly as fast on the Mac as it is on Windows, sadly. Another really fast option for Mac OS X is the latest Opera, which is worth a try if you haven't tried the 9.x builds. I've never noticed any sluggishness on the Blacktree wiki site. Also, try using Google for Quicksilver info. There are more guys out there with tips and tricks for QS than you can shake a stick at... mostly motivated by the poor Blacktree documentation (although it's much better today than it was a year ago). Leland

Re:Quicksilver

[chochos]

Not only that, he lists Entourage! I hate that piece of shit! I also love QuickSilver, BTW. I can't get by without it now... it's my app launcher and I also use it a lot to find addresses, phones, etc...

Re:Quicksilver

[Omestes]

Its really hard to complain about something you never use, no?

Quicksilver is by far my favorite app, ever. I don't have a single permanent program on my dock, only Finder, Trash, and the Applications Folder, QS is much more efficient than having to mouse down and click on apps. Opening Firefox is just double tapping "command", then holding down the letter "B" (for Bon Echo), poof, browser. Need a contact? Double tap, enter a letter or two, press enter, there the number is in a large type bezel. Want to send a quick email, or append a list without opening a file? QS does it without any others applications open. Want OS wide mouse gestures, or smart radial menus? QS. Etc... I love simple software that can expand to do almost anything. I don't think there is a single user out there who is using a full 60% of its capability.

Use it before you disregard it, and update it, as well, mine hasn't crashed in a couple months running the latest "unstable" beta. I've noticed that every person I've talked into downloading it can't live without it. But then again, it is hard to explain, so most people don't get it.

I am biased though, since it is one of the few apps that have changed how I use computers. How we do stuff on computers has been pretty much the same since well before Win3.1, or DOS.

Re:Quicksilver

[sgant]

Well, also don't forget that you can run Krita on Mac OS X, just compile it and run it on the X11 server that comes on Mac's install DVDs.

Compile and install it through Fink.

Re:Quicksilver

[Ash-Fox]

Mac users expect drag and drop installations.

After hearing all the anger from many people over OpenOffice.org not having a Aqua UI, I don't think Krita will have a chance on the OS X platform anyway.

printer friendly version

[JoeKuboj]

much better
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArt icle.jhtml?articleID=197700391
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArt icle.jhtml?articleID=197700439

BootCamp

[suv4x4]

Who else thinks that BootCamp being in the top 20 best OSX products is kinda silly?

On Windows (or even Linux) you don't see "top 10 best products" list that often, if at all, simply because they are too many to just list a "top 20 best".

Computers have moved to a point where different people use them for wildly different purposes. As such, you simply can't have "top X products" for an entire OS. If on Mac it's not the same, it's that much sadder.

Re:BootCamp

[AISI]

Who else thinks that BootCamp being in the top 20 best OSX products is kinda silly?

Since the Intel switch it's all about BootCamp, Parallels and VMware but it's not a new trend. Before that people were using Virtual PC by Connectix or Insignia's RealPC.

Computers have moved to a point where different people use them for wildly different purposes. As such, you simply can't have "top X products" for an entire OS. If on Mac it's not the same, it's that much sadder.

Windows is not a minority OS, everybody is used to it. This is not the case for Linux but listing your top ten thousand packages for Debian or RedHat would be too long. :-) Now some people are switching to the Mac, after spending x years or even decades on Windows, there is admittedly a learning curve. They need to learn about the Mac keyboard shortcuts, the apps/utilities, etc.

Re:BootCamp

[dwightk]

you are totally right... I see the error of my ways... can I have a quarter to buy a real computer?

Re:BootCamp

[suv4x4]

you are totally right... I see the error of my ways... can I have a quarter to buy a real computer?

I'd blink on it, but I'm a curious fella, and simply gotta know: what the heck do you mean with the whole "can I have a quarter to buy a computer" anyway?

Re:BootCamp

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm.. excuse me, Bootcamp is the best dual boot solution in existence. It makes installing another os a streamlined and almost effortless affair (in my experience).. add to that the proper hardware support with windows drivers. Made my installing windows on my mac, the best windows install experience ever. EVER. And I install windows regularly.

Re:BootCamp

[maj1k]

it's pretty obvious he was trolling the guy who trolled with his "As such, you simply can't have "top X products" for an entire OS. If on Mac it's not the same, it's that much sadder." comment.

Re:BootCamp

[GaryPatterson]

Computers have moved to a point where different people use them for wildly different purposes. As such, you simply can't have "top X products" for an entire OS.

This wasn't a list of the top 22 products for the entire OS. It was a list of 22 products this guy finds indispensible.

I could easily make a similar list for OS X or Windows, based on what I use and the needs of my work. I'd include dev tools and DBMS packages, plus a couple of casual games for relaxing. It wouldn't apply to many other people, but I'm certain you could easily pick 20 apps you find useful.

If on Mac it's not the same, it's that much sadder.

No, you're missing the point. It's not sad. It's just a list of stuff that this guy likes. Don't take it as some sort of inditement on Macs or list that we all must follow. It's just a list.

Re:BootCamp

[dwightk]

from dilbert:

the unix guru is talking to some little kid who is bragging about his computer's awesome stats, and the unix guru says "here's a nickel kid, go buy yourself a real computer"

Re:BootCamp

[ggvaidya]

The Dilbert comic refered to by the sister post is available online, too. "Condescending Unix computer user" has to be one of the coolest characters in Dilbert ever!

Slownewsday

[wumpus188]

My guess was these lists belong to digg... must be a really slow news day today.

My favorite Mac Tools?

[twitter]

A Debian or Yellow Dog installer?

Quicksilver

[Bega]

I think that Quicksilver would belong on that list.

svnX

[Anonymous Coward]

Really nice GUI for Subversion. Open source and they keep it in Subversion (obviously...). http://www.lachoseinteractive.net/en/community/sub version/svnx/features/?sid=418e4b38ebdea9315e79f72 50574c9b6

Some of Mine:

[sugapablo]

Being a web developer who works from home, here's my short list of tools I like:

Web Developer Ext. for Mozilla: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/60/
MailTags: http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html
FTP/SFTP Client: http://cyberduck.ch/
Text Editor: http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/
OpenOffice: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/
Image Editor: http://www.macgimp.org/

Re:Some of Mine:

[ViaD]

http://opensourcemac.org/

Re:Some of Mine:

[Listen Up]

I used to use Web Developer Ext. for Firefox, but ever since discovering FireBug https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1843/ it blows WDE away. Give it a try, it is great.

Easy top software: Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Those two years when I had a Mac, I always wanted to run Linux. Maaaan, was Virtual PC unbearably slow!

Now that I'm with Linux again, I don't miss the Mac at all.

Textmate!

[thelamecamel]

No textmate either! It certainly does everything the journo wants from BBEdit. And for LaTeX and Ruby it's utterly indispensable. I think it's the only shareware I've ever bought.

Re:Textmate!

[ai0524]

Texmate found at http://macromates.com/ is wonderful. Take a look at some of the screen casts. Textmate is also very useful for editing LaTex documents.

Re:Textmate!

[poopdeville]

I prefer TeXShop for TeX documents, but Textmate is surely a better all around editor.

It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[LKM]

Have you even read the freaking list? It's obviously a top-20 list for sysadmins.

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[Lars T.]

Have you even read the freaking list? It's obviously a top-20 list for [Mac] sysadmins.

All 3 of 'em?

What kinda sysadmin needs graphical concept drawing software The kind of sysadmin that documents his network. Not all sysadmins manage a small network like yours. Smells like network envy.

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[LKM]

Hahaha, I hope you like it in ignorance land, because that's where you are. As for the game, as I already said, read the list. He explains why he includes Sketch Fighter.

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[keytohwy]

One of the thngs I love about iChat is the abiity to send a file that is too large for email to someone. Sometimes I need to do this on the fly, and its a ton quicker than uploading teh filer to a server and then trying to tell the person where to dowload it from. and when iChat ships in Leopard, it will have screen sharing built in. Very nice!

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[Ash-Fox]

What kinda sysadmin needs graphical concept drawing software

The kind of sysadmin that documents his network.

Oh God! Not more Powerpoint presentations. ANYTHING BUT THAT!

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[Anonymous Coward]

What kinda sysadmin needs graphical concept drawing software or chat software on the systems he manages, how about screencast video maker? What kinda sysadmin needs "SketchFighter 4000 Alpha"?

The only thing more pathetic than a PC user is a PC user trying to be a Mac user. We have a name for you people: switcheurs.

There's a good reason for your vexation at the typical Mac system administrator's diversity of skills and interests: You don't speak its language. Remember that the Mac was designed by artists, for artists, be they poets, musicians, or avant-garde mathematicians. A shiny new Mac can introduce your frathouse hovel to a modicum of good taste, but it can't make Mac users out of dweebs and squares like you.

So don't force what doesn't come naturally. You'll be much happier if you stick to an OS that suits your personality. And you'll be doing the rest of us a favor, too; you leave Macs to Mac users, and we'll leave beige to you.

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[suv4x4]

So don't force what doesn't come naturally. You'll be much happier if you stick to an OS that suits your personality. And you'll be doing the rest of us a favor, too; you leave Macs to Mac users, and we'll leave beige to you.

Good job. The logical progression after failing to convert the audience into your little elite club, is to claim "you are not worthy of possessing a Mac" and further engage in your delusions of superiority.

BTW, I really find your opinion of the plain beige PC-s amusing. Do you think shiny white boosts your IQ?

In this case, I've a Futurama quote for you:

Dwight: "Put this flame sticker on the back side. It makes the ship go faster..."
Hermes: "And what is your scientific explanation for this?"
Dwight: "... I'm twelve?"

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[suv4x4]

Remember that the Mac was designed by artists [atspace.com], for artists [atspace.com], be they poets [atspace.com], musicians [atspace.com]

That's an odd way to look at it. Do you also prefer poetry/music written by nuclear physicists and aerospace engineers?

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[Anonymous Coward]

"I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[Anonymous Coward]

Your brickheaded literalism is indicative of the company you keep, and the OS you prefer. It's not the PC that's beige; it's you.

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[93 Escort Wagon]

I am glad to see Parallels on there - but, for the needs of most people, also including Boot Camp is rather redundant. Unless you're a gamer, dual-booting is so last millenium. :-)

And even that qualifier may be about to disappear with the next generation of Parallels and/or VMware.

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[suv4x4]

"I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."

This kinda sounds as if Jobs made it up. He also happens to be the best liar in the world.

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[suv4x4]

Your brickheaded literalism is indicative of the company you keep, and the OS you prefer. It's not the PC that's beige; it's you.

I can't believe that you spinned all this b.s. into a pathetic plead about how superior Mac users are, in defense of chat and game programs making the top 20 "sysadmin" programs on a Mac.

Don't think too low of us, I swear, we can chat and play games too! Is that supposed to be shocking to anyone?

Man.. it's too bad that although many of the Mac users are supposed historians, zoologists, psychologists, you don't recognize all the tired snobbish cliches you've been littering me with in the last few posts.

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[Lars T.]

What kinda sysadmin needs graphical concept drawing software

The kind of sysadmin that documents his network.

Oh God! Not more Powerpoint presentations. ANYTHING BUT THAT! What does Powerpoint have to do with documentation, and why would a Mac user use it over Keynote?

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[aristotle-dude]

The GP is a tired troll but Alienware is for people with too much money and no taste. They are as gaudy as some pimped out ricer.

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[Ash-Fox]

What does Powerpoint have to do with documentation

You mean you've never had to have a meeting after documenting something, having to present it in a presentation style to discuss it?

and why would a Mac user use it over Keynote?

I would imagine because the fussy projector wouldn't work with the Mac for one (hard enough to get them working with what they claim to support officially).

Another would be because the exportation to PPT (to run the presentation on Windows systems) would have it's annoyances.. Like objects, charts and tables getting converted to bitmap images, images with alpha flickering and giving all sorts of oddness, missaligned bullets, text inside shapes not wrapping properly etc. (note, some of these things only happen in certain circumstances)

And perhaps another... Not all Mac users like Keynote?

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't think too low of us, I swear, we can chat

Yes, if it's one thing we know about Mac users, they never shut up...

and play games too!

Photoshop isn't a game.

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[WinkyN]

Dwight: "Put this flame sticker on the back side. It makes the ship go faster..."
Hermes: "And what is your scientific explanation for this?"
Dwight: "... I'm twelve?"

Wrong. Cubert said that to Leela. If you're going to quote Futurama, at least do it accurately, please.

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[GaryPatterson]

Furthermore, wtf is a Mac sysadmin anyway?
What is a Mac sysadmin? I'd have thought someone who manages a bunch of Macs. Just like a Windows sysadmin manages a bunch of Windows boxes, or a Unix sysadmin manages a bunch of Unix boxes. Seems like a common usage of the term 'sysadmin' to me - I can't see how it confuses you.

OSX is a system for consumers and the occasional designer. Do you have a crack team of sysadmins managing your iPod?
Wait a minute! I'm responding to some trolling!

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[LKM]

I would imagine because the fussy projector wouldn't work with the Mac for one (hard enough to get them working with what they claim to support officially).

You mean your projector does not have some kind of standard input? Like RGB or DVI? Who would buy something like this???

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[Ash-Fox]

You mean your projector does not have some kind of standard input? Like RGB or DVI?

RGB, most projectors I've used are very fussy. They don't like certain refresh rates even though they 'advertise' they can do them among other things.

The funny thing is that if you try to use ATi's projector options in Windows, the projectors often don't want to work with it at all.

Re:It's a top-20 list for sysadmins

[FictionPimp]

What I want to know is where the cedega for mac is at. I mean its an x86 platform now, where is the wine bandwagon.

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of these are not Mac-only, but here is my list of essentials:

• Transmission (Get the latest beta; the 'official' version hasn't been updated in awhile)
• VLC
• iTunes
• Seamonkey
• TextWrangler
• MS Word

That's all I can think of now.

Strange ommisions

[Salsaman]

No mention of fink or Darwin ? Those are pretty much the only tools I know on OSX.

Re:Strange ommisions

[sentientbrendan]

fink sucks, and darwin isn't a tool, it's the operating system...

Last time I used fink it was buggy, and the packages were perpetually out of date. It doesn't matter that much anyway since there are usually osx packages available directly from most large open source projects. The only thing I miss is the uninstaller, which traditionally hasn't existed because it hasn't been necessary on mac systems that kept all files related to an application in one folder.

Re:Strange ommisions

[Space cowboy]

I'm assuming he means darwinports (now renamed to be macports

The thing where you do:

      sudo port install gimp ... and it does the bsd "ports" thing, downloads the source, patches it, compiles it, and installs it. Very useful.

Simon

Re:Strange ommisions

[poopdeville]

The GP might have been thinking about DarwinPorts (now called MacPorts), a different, ports-based package manager. I've found that Prefixed Portage works best on OS X. See http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/macos/

CodeTek's Virtual Desktop

[Brackney]

I was quite fond of CodeTek's Virtual Desktop. http://codetek.com/ctvd/ It made me feel right at home when jumping between my Linux desktop and the Mac. Lots of real-estate, some nice customization features, and mouse focus behavior I preferred to OS X's. Sadly, the application hasn't been properly supported for a while. It does work, mostly, but isn't as flawless as it once was. I recently had to turn it off because of some misbehaviors with Firefox.

Re:CodeTek's Virtual Desktop

[Brackney]

Oh shoot. I forgot to mention another app that I use a lot, Cyberduck. http://cyberduck.ch/ Great little FTP client.

Re:CodeTek's Virtual Desktop

[CptNerd]

I believe that Leopard will have a virtual desktop-like capability built-in. I vaguely recall something about that during one of Jobs' keynotes.

Re:CodeTek's Virtual Desktop

[dukerobillard]

I had that Firefox misbehaviour on my old TiBook(if you're talking about not being able to get to text boxes in the browser), and an upgrade fixed it, so you might give that a go.

My sadness is that I just got a new Intel Mac, and CodeTek doesn't work on that at all. :-( The other virtual desktops I tried suck...I'm running Virtue Deskop now, but I'm not happy with it. You Control looked better, but it crashed every 5 minutes.

Virtual Desktops seem to be the only thing where the Linux GUIs are better than the Mac one. Gnome and KDE both have really good ones.

No mention of...

[plasmacutter]

mplayer, vlc, or the veritable slu of third party and oss quicktime plugins that give you multiple redundant and dependable playback of every video format on the planet.

this is something the user must install, because the default codec packs for quicktime are, imho, even worse than those for windows media player.

Kiddie pools...

[Beefslaya]

For starters:

I would throw in iTerm, virtueDesktops, Parallels, TextMate, Navicat for Mac.

Without these programs, I couldn't make it in the fast paced Graphic Design field of Macs (Any other IT people out there want to shit nails when someone says Mac's are for graphic design? Last time I checked, my Macs didn't look like big blue pumpkins.)

----My Motto:
I don't care if the customer's stuff is working or not. I just don't want to be affected by whatever they have. My equipment MUST work, Therefore I use Apple.

Re:Kiddie pools...

[AugstWest]

iTerm is essential to me, tabbed terminals are something I can't live without.

Check out Quicksilver if you haven't yet, it's by Blacktree. I have no affiliation with them, but it's the bomb:

http://blacktree.com/

Re:Kiddie pools...

[tres]

For anyone interested in an open source Navicat alternative, check out Yoursql.

For a Postgres GUI, check out pgAdmin (I've had some stability issues with this one, but there's not much else out there that's Free and Open.

Re:Kiddie pools...

[TheSkyIsPurple]

> I would throw in iTerm

While iTerm does some nifty stuff, it is just not responsive enough for me to agree having it on a top-anything list.

Re:Kiddie pools...

[sgant]

Good news! Tabbed terminals in Leopard!

Will be interesting to see what else they have in store for the Terminal app.

Three more

[BandwidthHog]

Little Snitch from ObDev.

BBEdit or TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software.

Opera.

Have you seen

[Anonymous Coward]

Dashcode?

Sure it's just for widgets, but programming widgets for OS X couldn't be any easier.

Network Location

[Anonymous Coward]

The submitter writes: "Also, do you think Welch gives too much air time to built-in OS X tools at the expense of third-party products such as NetworkLocation?"

Network Location is #10 on the list. So now even the submitters don't RTFA?

iTerm

[tji]

For others moving from Linux to Mac OS X, like I did (for my laptop at least, my server & mythtv boxes are still Linux), iTerm is the first thing to install. Mac OS X has a terminal program, but it's weak at best. iTerm is a good terminal program, with multiple tabs and cutomizable display settings.

http://iterm.sourceforge.net/

Re:iTerm

[PsychoSid]

Apparently the new terminal in Leopard will have tabs (see various Mac sites who have broke the NDA on the betas).

Little bit of an afterthought but I guess that CLI nuts such as myself aren't the top of the priority list.

Re:iTerm

[Builder]

And yet you still can't click a button and have the windows tiled... or set them to start up in a decent tiled format :(

Textmate and Quicksilver???

[Anonymous Coward]

Textmate and Quicksilver should be there... Without the two, OS X wouldn't really appeal to me.

Parallels

[chord.wav]

Parallels with coherence mode rules.
I still have no good replaces for SQLYog, Filezilla and scite (No I don't want to port it and use it under X, I wan't a Mac app)
At this time I'm running all of them "parallelized"
Any suggestions?

Re:Parallels

[myowntrueself]

Parallels with coherence mode rules.

I'll second that.

On the weekend I wanted to use the mac for watching some arbitrary downloaded avi movies.

Unfortunately they would not play on the mac because I didn't have the codec installed (I had divx though and quicktime *pro*).

The movies played perfectly well in windows media player in coherence mode even in full screen.

Incidentally, the windows install which played these avi movies was totally out of the box -- no extra codecs installed, nothing, just the basic XP Pro windows media player. Seems pretty sad for the Mac not to be able to cope as well by itself and to have to call on XP to play a media file... :(

Re:Parallels

[Skippy_kangaroo]

Try Perian.

I am completely unsurprised that Windows supports Microsoft proprietary formats out of the box. I could equivalently claim that I am disapointed that the Windows instals I have dealt with can't handle Quicktime out of the box, especially H.264. Seems pretty sad for PCs not to be able to cope as well by themselves and have to call on Apple to play a media file... ;)

Re:Parallels

[myowntrueself]

I am completely unsurprised that Windows supports Microsoft proprietary formats out of the box.

avi not wmv

The avi concerned is not encoded in an MS proprietary format.

Re:Parallels

[Skippy_kangaroo]

Perhaps proprietary is too strong then. But .avi was born of Microsoft and remains a Windows-centric container format. As such, cross-platform compatitbility issues invariably crop up (in the same way that Quicktime and .mp4 can create problems for 'not invented here' Microsoft products). These issues may stem more from cross-platform availability of the codecs - and particularly the shoehorning of certain codecs into the avi container (H.264 for example). You might find that similar content encoded in a Quicktime/MPEG-4 container would have fewer problems.

Anyway, if Perian isn't to your taste for solving the problem, try here.

Re:mmm.. cripple ware.. mmm..

[Anonymous Coward]

GTFO, troll. Nobody's interested in what you have to say.

No mention of QuickSilver?

[AugstWest]

It's the greatest launcher ever...

http://blacktree.com/

It's like bash completion right in the GUI, just hit ctrl-spce, type a letter or two, and hit enter. I can't live without it anymore.

I'd substitute Interarchy for Transmit

[wfolta]

I'd substitute Interarchy for Transmit. Otherwise, looks reasonable.

Also, OmniOutliner is VERY nice for many tasks. And Silverkeeper is a free basic backup program that does well enough for me.

Quicksilver

[goombah99]

If you had not posted I would have. Before I got quicksilver I had no clue what I was missing. It completely changed how I interact with the computer. I don't use any of it's fancy features I just use it to launch apps from the keyboard. I have not opened my application folder in months. That and BBedit are the two apps I would be sorely pressed to give up.

Interesting list...

[niktemadur]

...but, as always, subjective at best. I still have a G5 iMac, and many of the apps on the list are useless to me, as they're specifically for the Intel processor. However, these lists are informative in that they help to become aware of potentially useful apps to any mac users out there.

That said, here are a few apps the guy neglected to mention:
- Claris Filemaker http://www.filemaker.com/. Hands down, the best database software out there, for the Mac or any other OS.
- iWeb http://www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/. Ridiculously easy to use, yet web pages still come out clean and looking pretty good too.
- DVD Studio Pro http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/dvdstudiopro/. Isn't this still the industry standard for assembling DVD structure and navigation?
- Visual Hub http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/. For its' ability to convert video files in any format out there into any other.
- Disk Warrior http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/. In the extremely isolated cases of ever having to need it, this is the single most important life-saving app out there.

Oh, and an honorable mention: Mac The Ripper. Site is down, but you can check out their forum http://www.ripdifferent.com/.

Re:Interesting list...

[FictionPimp]

I recommended iWeb to a friend of mine who had no computer experience to build websites. He was able to make some very nice designs with it in a short period of time, but then after about 4 months, he outgrew it. He wanted to add javascript and flash to his site. It's not that this was impossible, just cumbersome to do with iWeb. You have to save the page, then publish it, then open it up and add your javascript and flash. Then if you want to edit again in iWeb, you have to yet again open it and readd your javascript and flash. He is now looking for a more powerful replacement that works similar.

Is Iterm stable?

[goombah99]

I tried using I term 2 years ago and it was a horrible experience. very slow and it would crash taking all my terminals with it. Has it improved?

Re:Is Iterm stable?

[tres]

I use iTerm for hours every day. It's much more stable than it was a couple years back, and has some cool new features.

command+enter gives a full screen of terminal. Combine that with Virtue desktops & I've got my "terminal" desktop.

Re:Is Iterm stable?

[AugstWest]

Agreed. It was a mess for a while, now it is very stable and always running on my machine.

Re:Is Iterm stable?

[_|()|\|]

command+enter gives a full screen of terminal

I miss the tabbed terminal in GNOME, but I wasn't impressed by iTerm the last time I looked at it (0.9.0, maybe?). It was slow, and the font rendering seemed a little off. That Cmd-Enter trick sounds cool, though, so I'll give it another try.

Re:Is Iterm stable?

[Unxmaal]

I suffered through iTerm's flakiness for years -- effectively since its creation. Updates dropped to nil after 0.87 (?), so I stopped looking for them after a few months. I just expected copy/paste to be weird and for it to randomly crash. A month or so ago, I checked the site, and wow, there was a whole new release!

It had true X-like select-to-copy and middle-to-paste, configurable tab positions, UI style support, fullscreen, autoupdating, and so on.

One of my favorite features has been the ability to specify what characters should be included as part of a word on a doubleclick -- this means doubleclick copy of IPs or paths.

The updates for this rebirth of iTerm have been on a near weekly basis. I'm not sure of the politics around this new burst of development, but it looks like maybe someone new got involved, or the original authors finished school (or quit playing WoW? ;) )

Re:Essential Mac tools...

[AugstWest]

Or, just:

vi (built-in)
screen (built in)
apache (built-in)
ssh (built-in)
emacs (built-in)

and the list goes on.

It's my favorite *nix workstation. I don't wear an earring, drive a Jetta, or own a kayak, mountain bike or iPod.

The short high quality list

[postmortem]

mac-fdisk

The things I had to install immediately

[dildo]

Just my personal preferences, but I imagine lots of people will agree with me.

0. Start Safari, get Firefox, remove Safari from the dock.
1. OS X Developer tools. Going to be compiling lots of stuff.
2. Subversion.
3. VLC
4. TextMate
5. GraphViz
6. Clisp
7. SBCL
8. XWindows

I was so impressed with the compile speed on my new MacBook. I blink and it is done. (Except for compiling
Erlang, that took 30 minutes and burned a hole through my desk. Dude.)

Re:The things I had to install immediately

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a dildo.

Path Finder, the better Finder

[davebarnes]

I use Path Finder (http://www.cocoatech.com) every day, all during the day.
Can't imagine only having the Finder to use.

MOD PARENT UP

[0100010001010011]

Textmate:BBEdit::OSX:OS9

BBEdit was it back in the day. Bees knees. But they're still stuck in a world of floating palettes and out of date syntax coloring.

Textmate.... is just amazing. I think I've only scraped the surface of 10% of what it can actually do. The best thing is, if I don't like a keystroke or a syntax coloring, I can change it. I wanted to start writing Matlab. Sure enough, someone has written a bundle for it. There's even a Bundle called 'GetBundle' that will automatically download and update my bundles.

Leaving Textmate off is more than a gross oversight. It invalidates the list :)

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Lord Flipper]

BBEdit was it back in the day.

BBEdit is way more than a text editor. Hell, TextMate isn't even close to being on par with TextPad, on Windows.

But the list is missing a few critical apps:

Thoth, for starters, hasn't been updated in a long time, and still runs rings around any news reader.

VLC and Flip4Mac

FileBuddy and Xfile (the Finder is arguably the worst file manager on any platform)

Toast Titanium (one burning app that does it all, as opposed to the fragmented Windows equivalents)

Eudora (all other email apps are okay for secretaries and kids. period)

OmniDiskSweeper

iDefrag

And the killer drive Directory wonder-app: DiskWarrior

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[Serious Callers Only]

Hell, TextMate isn't even close to being on par with TextPad, on Windows.

I'm curious, why do you say this? Have you used it for more than 5 minutes? Did you look in the bundles menu? TextMate is also way more than a text editor, that's why people like it. I'd say the same about BBedit (way more than a text editor), though that isn't developed as actively as TextMate has been the last few years.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[sgant]

I have to agree, TextMate is bar-none one of the finest editors I've ever used. Not to mention that TextMate is also a Cocoa app, unlike BBedit...not to mention the fact that BareBones has said that BBedit may never become a Cocoa app. (This was mentioned on a recent MacBreak Weekly).

I find something new in TextMate just about every time I use it. For instance, in a Cocoa app like Safari when you're going to type in a text field, just click in the text field and hit command-control-E and it will invoke TextMate to edit. Then when you save it (to a temp folder) it loads it into your text field in Safari. Give it a try.

NetworkLocation

[towad]

Those interested in NetworkLocation might also want to take a look at Wilma. It has a cleaner, more tradional Mac interface.

http://www.codehackers.net/wilma/

Where's Clickbook?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is ClickBook in the list?

Re:Essential Mac tools...

[Stamen]

I think your post needs to be repeating. People love stereo types, so I'm probably whistling in the wind, but there are many people like you out there, I'm one of them. People who are love Unix and also love OS X. However I do own an iPod, a few of them.

People have to realize that OS X is mostly open source, except for the windows manager and the user-land stuff. The first thing I install on OS X is XCode so that I have gcc, and then DarwinPorts so I can "port" myself to happy goodness.

Of course I'd rather OS X run on any PC (you can if you work at it), but Apple hardware is pretty decent, and contrary to popular belief it isn't much more than equal hardware from Dell or whomever (that was the queue for someone to point out that you can buy that 9 pound 2 inch thick Dell laptop for 600 bucks; come on, you know you want to). It's OS X that I really like, what it runs on isn't as important to me.

I think there a 3 distinct groups of people using OS X.
* The home user who is attracted by the commercials that say how easy it is to use

* The artists/designers who use Photoshop/Final Cut Pro/etc

* People like me, *nix peeps that enjoy a really nice windows manager and seamless hardware drivers

Now saying all that, OS X on the server isn't so good, for that it's hard to beat BSD or Linux.

Missing Program

[maytagman]

How on earth did he not include Onyx? I'd probably say its top 5... http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html from the site: It allows you to run misc tasks of system maintenance, to configure certain hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, Dashboard, Exposé, Safari, Login window and many Apple's applications, to delete cache, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome, to see the detailed info of your configuration, to preview the different logs and CrashReporter reports, to check the Preferences files and more. I would even go so far as to say it deserved to be number one...

Re:Missing Program

[Anonymous Coward]

How on earth did he not include Onyx? Because everything Onyx does can be done with Terminal and Console?

Re:Missing Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Because everything Onyx does can be done with Terminal and Console?

True, for the nerds that are into that kind of thing. For everyone else (sounds like a Mastercard ad), there's Onyx.

Onyx

[Hao Wu]

Onyx should be #1

Re:Huh?

[Divebus]

Of course the "Mac" thing is important.

Why? Is there another kind?

Ecto 2 has serious problems

[MisterSquid]

Ecto 2 has serious flaws and the developer suppresses this information on his developer page. Quoting my own blog entry regarding the problem:

If after posting a blog entry (with or without Ecto) you edit the code for a blog entry in a text editor, say BBEdit, and then load that entry into Ecto, Ecto wipes out all advanced tagging, including but not limited to CSS tags, XML markup, and HTML styling. Ecto will not notify you that it has made these changes. So if, for example, you use Ecto to do a minor edit of a blog entry, all of your specialized markup will silently but surely disappear.

Ecto 2 is not for anyone who uses even the least bit of custom CSS and/or markup.

Johnnie Wilcox
aka mistersquid

My list

[Anonymous Coward]

Power User on the Mac for 13 years, former Mac Genius...

FontExplorerX (it is free, it rocks! Better than Suitcase, Font Reserve, ATM Deluxe ever dreamed of being)
Photoshop (no doubt)
TypeIt4Me (first shareware app I ever registered)
OmniWeb (feature-wise kicks ass on Safari, makes FireFox look silly)
FileBuddy (file manipulation in every way you can imagine)
WeatherManX (simple, yet awesome desktop weather app)
BBEdit (don't even try to bring up TextMate...BBEdit eats it for lunch)
MacProgramGuide (desktop TV listings, the only program to get it right since the late lamented Watson)
VLC (watch almost any video for free)
TinkerTool (customize without memorizing a pile of Terminal commands)
KrossWordz (great crossword puzzle app)
VueScan (I'm a photographer, can you tell? Makes Silverfast look stupid)

he lists PDF

[spasm]

.. and then he never lists any actual pdf tools.

My favorite is PDFLab - lets you extract, merge, add, delete, reorder pages. It's freeware.

http://www.iconus.ch/fabien/pdflab/

The same group also do cocoabooklet, an app for turning a pdf'd document into booklets (link on the page above).

Menumeters

[Espectr0]

Come on, who doesn't have menumeters? It's even free. Handy little tool to know the transfer rate of your network card.

http://mydreamapp.com/

[Criminally Insane Ro]

Check this out http://mydreamapp.com/

Nitpicks...

[Savage-Rabbit]

Remote Desktop Connection - connect remotely to a Windows desktop. FREE rdesktop Is better and it's also free. Of course you'll have to install the Apple development kit that comes with your computer and compile rdesktop (three commands IIRC and it takes less than 30 seconds, there used to be a bug in the makefile, they seem to have fixed that). The last time I downloaded rdesktop didn't come with a newbie proof GUI client and the only help is a the man page, which I suppose is a show-stopper for some people. You'll also probably have to modify the $PATH and $MANPATH variables since it installs to /usr/local by default.

BBedit text/html editor. $125, but worth it. Does not do enough things, that VI, Emacs or Eclipse can't do, for me to be willing to pay $125 for it. Those three alternatives are all free btw.

IChat AV - built-in to 10.4 Adium does several different chat protocols including MS Messenger and iChat and it's also free.

Transmit an FTP client. Shareware, $17.95 Fire up Terminal (Its in the /Applications/utilities folder), type: 'ftp', it comes with OS.X. I won't fault anybody for being reluctant to use the FTP functionality built into Finder since Finder sucks ass. Hopefully this will change with OS.X 10.5

Nota Bene - These are my personal opinions of these apps, your milage may vary.

Re:Nitpicks...

[bjohnson]

rdesktop is only better in that you can connect to more than one system at a time.

Remote Desktop Connection also gives local disk access on the romote system, very useful.

What about Growl?

[libwolf]

Don't forget http://www.growl.info/ - just need to know a tiny bit of scripting and it's amazingly useful

I need a good image browser for MacOSX

[thanasakis]

iPhoto is great, but I need something more "traditional" like ACDSee or XnView for windows. XnView for mac basically sucks, so it doesn't count. I usually end up firing up gqview under X11, which is almost ok, except that I would prefer a native app.

I would welcome any other suggestions.

Re:I need a good image browser for MacOSX

[Goaway]

Xee

Re:I need a good image browser for MacOSX

[skawaii]

I've found ToyViewer http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~ogihara/software/OSX/t oyv-eng.html to be a great image viewer. It supports a pretty wide variety of image formats and can convert images to different formats for you (really useful when you need to put MS unsupported images into a Word doc).

Re:I need a good image browser for MacOSX

[lucas teh geek]

magic lantern rocks

Don't wopprt crippleware!

[Weezul]

I find it funny that people are soo fond of all this crippleware. Infact, the is unique *most* useful package is obviously: Fink

Oh, thanks for all those services! You might check out Equation Services.

Does anybody have a good free gui text editor for the mac? The GUI ports of Emacs and Vim act a little funny.

Re:Don't wopprt crippleware!

[poopdeville]

Fink is lame. MacPorts is okay, but it pulls vanilla source from the project site and tries to compile without any OS X specific patching. Depending on the application, this can work of fail miserably. I'm running Portage Prefix right now.

Re:Don't wopprt crippleware!

[jbolden]

Does anybody have a good free gui text editor for the mac?

http://smultron.sourceforge.net/

Re:Don't wopprt crippleware!

[davester666]

I'd suggest TextWrangler [by the same company that makes BBEdit]. It's free and is fully-functional as a general text editor [and also does file and folder diffs]. And it has a separate cli tool so you can use it from the command line [even from scripts or from other tools like p4 that want a tool that blocks until you are finished editting]. That's a feature I really like, because if you use 'normal' apps like TextEdit, you have to quit the application for scripted use to continue, while with TextWrangler, you just have to close the window.

http://www.bbedit.com/products/textwrangler/index. shtml

ControllerMate

[lungofish]

http://www.orderedbytes.com/controllermate/

  I wish every OS had a program like this, because I've been able to use it to replace all of the annoying drivers (I'm looking at you, Logitech) for all the USB input devices I own. It also works on devices that don't have Mac drivers, like a lot of the more advanced keyboards. I have a logitech G-15, and though the display doesn't work on the Mac, thanks to CM all the extra buttons do, and are easier to reprogram and use than with the native Windows driver.

You plug in a usb device and bring it up in ControllerMate. It shows you a list of all the inputs. Any time you hit a button or move an axis, that specific control lights up inside CM, and you can then drag it into the programming area and set it to do whatever you want - key input, axis control, run scripts, launch apps, just about anything.

I wound up paying the shareware fee on this one within 20 minutes of using it, not because I needed to (actually, for what I needed it to do the free version worked fine) but because I was so impressed.

now that's not true

[sentientbrendan]

it's because, on linux, there are too few.

terminal.app rocks

[sentientbrendan]

I don't know why you'd replace terminal.app with iterm. terminal.app is by far the best terminal I've ever used.

Consider that most terminals for linux either fall into the category of small and quick to boot, but missing lots of features and are difficult to configure (rxvt, xterm, etc). Otherwise there's the big bulky terminals like konsole that take forever to boot, have kind of an ugly and bulky UI, and have lots of features, probably too many...

Let's not even think about what the one and only terminal for windows is like... Seriously, why has no third party developer *ever* made a replacement?

Terminal.app starts up fast, and has all the features I need and none that I don't configurable easily from preference panes. It is, in essence the best terminal ever and I would be glad if I could get an equivalent for windows or linux.

Re:terminal.app rocks

[fingusernames]

What the hell is with Mac people (probably just OS X people too) and .app? It was bad enough when Apple adopted file extensions in OS X. Now people write things like terminal.app. I have never referred to MS Word on Windows as winword.exe (except when telling people how to start it quickly). So bizarre. As for best terminal ever -- I do like that it is light and simple. With Expose, tabs are sort of pointless (I will not open anywhere the number of Terminal windows as I would Firefox tabs, what's the point). My favorites are simple xterms, putty, and on the Mac Terminal. Does the job, nothing more, nothing less.

Larry

Missing Timbuktu and TextMate

[Anonymous Coward]

Timbuktu - essential for remote control
Textmate - better editor then bbedit

Feeding the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

... but in the interests of accuracy...

I would imagine because the fussy projector wouldn't work with the Mac for one (hard enough to get them working with what they claim to support officially).

I've given countless presentations using Keynote on a Mac. All any Mac needs is a projector that can take a VGA signal, just like any PC. There's nothing to "support", or at least I've never had any issues with any type of computer - the projector syncs to the input signal. That's it.

Another would be because the exportation (sic) to PPT (to run the presentation on Windows systems) would have it's annoyances..

Ah, Stop right there - that's your problem. Why on earth would anyone *want* to run powerpoint, when they could run keynote ? Seriously, it's like chalk and cheese - Keynote makes things easy, fluid, beautiful and effective. Powerpoint makes a mess.

Not all Mac users like Keynote?

LOL! You're trying to say people prefer POWERPOINT ??? Really ? That's your argument ? (picks up self from floor, no, it's no good. Falls back down again. Too weak with laughter). You'd better come back later, this may take a while...

Re:Feeding the troll

[Ash-Fox]

All any Mac needs is a projector that can take a VGA signal, just like any PC.

As I said in another post:

Most projectors I've used are very fussy. They don't like certain refresh rates even though they 'advertise' they can do them among other things.

Ah, Stop right there - that's your problem. Why on earth would anyone *want* to run powerpoint, when they could run keynote ?

• To actually show the presentation on a non-Mac.
• So they can apply their knowledge on how to make Powerpoint presentations (which may exceed their knowledge of keynote)
• To not bother with a program they know nothing about
• *gasp* They may not actually like something about keynote

LOL! You're trying to say people prefer POWERPOINT ???

No, I'm saying some will.

But heres my reason. I prefer using Powerpoint because I don't have the time to waste learning yet another useless program that nobody uses in this nation (Poland), where the majority of people who know what Microsoft is, don't know what Apple is. Another reason why I don't like Keynote is that it's software locked into the Mac platform. The last thing I want todo is promote worse lock-ins. No thanks.

Too Short And Too Much Attention

[llscotts]

First, there are far too many criticial/essential Mac OS X apps to narrow down to 20. This is a silly, arbitrary number because people seem to like lists, and have very short attention spans. Any list of 20 is easily criticized because it leaves out too many goodies. Go beyond critical/essential to the merely excellent/marvelous, and the list will quickly quadruple, at least. Second, this list reflects the opinion of someone who tried the first app he liked in a given category and hasn't researched the alternatives. There are too many selections here that are leaders in sales in their category but are way behind in functionality and value. Welch may be an expert or whatever (I have no idea what distinguished background he comes from), and he gets some useful tools right, but he's obviously not nearly expert enough to be getting this kind of attention for his list of 20. Some examples of his cockeyed perspective:

1. Snapz Pro X. This is every "expert"'s favorite, because it's been around so long and was leader for many years. But it's over-priced for what it does, and the way it works is outdated. Snapz Pro X hasn't been updated in years, because the developer is too busy laughing at how much money he's making without doing anything. Especially in the realm of movie making, Snapz is way behind tools like iShowU, which can be had for a fraction of the cost and are much faster and easier to use. For plain old screenshots, I've found the $10 Constrictor to be a satisfactory replacement. Constrictor isn't perfect, but it has a few very cool bells & whistles that Snapz doesn't, which make the problem of "cleaning up your desktop" and "replacing your background picture" a thing of the past.
2. BBEdit. BBEdit is a great program, no question about it. However, it's also bloated and outdated from a user interface perspective, and for programmers there are newer alternatives that might work better and don't rely on the older Carbon framework (no that's not the only thing I don't like about BBEdit). For example, TextMate is what all the younger Mac programmers are using, and there's a good reason for it. TextMate is a programmer's dream come true, including HTML tools. I've been using the open-source Smultron for over a year and really like the way it's developing. It's not perfect, but for zero bucks it's a pretty great option. Smultron, by the way, is one of the brainchildren of Peter Borg, who developed Lingon, one of the actually cool choices on Welch's list. Putting BBEdit on the list is such a cliche, and certainly doesn't belong in a list of essentials. Heck, even the lowly TextEdit that comes with Mac OS X has cool features that are unknown to most Mac users. For example, it's a terrific HTML editor and has options for controlling the way HTML is output that make it much better for ensuring gunk-free code than any of the WYSIWYG tools. Yet you can format your HTML in TextEdit while in RTF mode (as long as you don't try to include images). Great for text tables, lists, etc.
3. Transmit. Yawn. Everybody loves Transmit... I'm a license holder, and I used to love Transmit, too. Until I tried Yummy FTP, that is. Yummy FTP has so many great features that Transmit lacks, and most important it's a speed demon. I got so tired of Transmit's poky behavior that I went around trying all the Mac FTP clients out there. When I got to Yummy FTP, I couldn't believe how great it was. Yummy can get files to the server while Transmit is still thinking about what you asked it to do. :-) Don't fall for Transmit without trying Yummy FTP. Transmit is very good software... heck, it's Mac software, right? ... but Yummy is the one to get if you do a lot of moving files around. Like Transmit, it can integrate with the Finder and Dock, so moving 20 files is just a drag-and-drop operation in the Finder if you want it to be. But wait! I don't have time to go into all of Yummy's virtues. I wrote them all up in a

Avenir

[toothless_kinch]

I could not have finished my novel without Avenir.

my mac application list

[10sball]

A few things I personally couldn't live without that are missing from this list

* VoodooPad - for general note taking, todo lists, etc
* TextMate - self explanatory
* Camino - for web surfing
* Paparazzi! - for taking quick screenshots or thumbnails of web pages
* Colloquy - irc client
* twitterific - interface for twitter
* NetNewsWire - Feed reader

my OS X key apps:

[nandnor]

My OS X 'must have' toolkit is a mix:

3rd party /shareware:

Transmit
BBEdit
NeoOffice
Chicken of the VNC
iPodRip
Indigo
Think

comments:Transmit is the best--I use it to sync content locally and across the network--hands down the best FTP. NeoOffice works great as an Office suite, Chicken of the VNC is a good remote desktop client, and Indigo, while the most expensive sw here, is the best software for home automation (INSTEON, x10)

bundled apps:

Safari
Terminal
AppleScript
Apache
PHP

comments: lots of great stuff included in OS X that can be easily turned on by changin some configs.
Terminal is a killer app!

Utilities:

Airport Admin Utility
Network Utility

notes: wrappers for command line configs, these make life easy.

terminal.app SUCKS

[specmurt]

How about any Cyrillic/Hebrew/Arabic/Thai encodings support? Even then you use screen -U/:encoding it sucks 'cause it addd spaces between symbols.

My ultimo favorites

[Anonymous Coward]

Ecto: http://kung-foo.tv/
Transmit: http://www.panic..com/
OmniGraffle: http://www.omnigroup.com/
DevonThink: http://www.devonthink.com/
Guitar Shed: http://www.guitarshed.com/
Logic Pro/Express: http://www.apple.com/logic

My personal List.

[pjludlow]

Looking at the folder of software I use for new installs this is what I would have (no particular order):

1. Firefox
2. Flip4Mac
3. Littlesnitch
4. menuCalendarClock-iCal
5. MenuMeters
6. Onyx
7. LotsaWater (screensaver, seriously it is awesome!)
8. StuffitExpander
9. Synergy
10. Toast (or use "Burn" if you want freeware)
11. Transmit
12. VLC
13. Whatsize
14. GoogleEarth
15. Azureus

Some other nice programs (although not essential):

1. Fission
2. MacTheRipper
3. Handbrake

Obviously I have more programs but these are the ones I feel could be used by most people.

MacFUSE sshfs

[vonFinkelstien]

I love MacFUSE and sshfs for using my webpage provider as a cheaper, faster, and better alternative to iDisk. No more syncing files from work and home. I just edit the file directly on the server. I mount it on my Ubuntu box at work. The old iMac G3 at work needs to be upgraded to Tiger before I can use it. Grr.

Re:Ecto 2's flaws are forgivable

[llscotts]

It would never occur to me to use Ecto to re-edit an article. Ecto is great for the first draft, but then after that I just edit in my web browser. If you use the nightly WebKit builds, they've implemented the CSS3 spec for resizing divs and textareas, so you can make the editing window as big as you want. Most WYSIWYG tools are good only for the first round, and if you do custom coding afterwards, you're in for trouble if you try to go back to the WYSIWYG tool. Of course, it could also be that you need to adjust Ecto's settings a bit.

If you know of a better blog editing tool than Ecto for the Mac, I'm all ears. MarsEdit comes close, but it's missing a lot of Ecto's bells and whistles, especially for supporting images, videos, and so on, that you want to include. Ecto makes this really fast and easy, since you can set up custom templates for different kinds of images, including custom CSS, javascript, and the like. MarsEdit, unfortunately, is totally bare-bones where that's concerned.

Adium

[INeededALogin]

WTF! No mention of Adium in the article or in the thread. It is only the best chat program on the planet.

Re:Adium

[argent]

The author of the article is an unabashed iChat booster. There's a lot of myths on the Mac about which applications are "best", and iChat is one of the ones beloved of the cult. I've got co-workers that are the same way, and when there's a problem with the network and I can't get on our Jabber server I always have to eat digs about using "Brand X" instead of iChat... even though I always try iChat FIRST and verify that the problem is real before blaming the server.

Re:Adium

[MalleusEBHC]

I wholeheartedly agree. There's only one piece of third party software that immediately goes to the Dock on a fresh install, and that's Adium. It's simple, predictable, and incredibly intuitive.

Try Graphicconverter

[k2r]

http://www.lemkesoft.com/ I use it since 10 Years or so. It opens an image-browser if you drop a folder on it and can do about any image conversion in the known universe.

You can do better on a Mac...

[argent]

Camino rather than Firefox. Same HTML rendering engine, better user interface, no security-hole XUL and Microsoft-style XPI installer. And Safari is not bad, once you turn off the daft "Open 'Safe' files after downloading" option.

It's a shame there's so little choice for good secure browsers on Windows. Mac's got an embarassment of riches here.

Network Location?

[argent]

Run scripts when you change your location? You want to pay *money* for this?

Someone who's so big on using Applescript should be able to figure out how to do this. It's trivial. It's even trivial from the shell. Yeh, I can see this being a pain for the point-and-click gang, and Apple really needs a location preference pane with things like "turn on Bluetooth in this location, disable it in that" but *sheesh*.

I need to polish up my location change detector and post it on Macupdate, but I'll bet there's one in Doug's Applescripts already.

Coherence... just say no.

[argent]

If Microsoft had done a better job of gussying up Windows after Windows 3.11 I'd be all over Coherence mode, but the double hit of Windows 95's taskbar (with all the disadvantages of Apple's menu bar and none of its dubious advantages) and their choice of screen-scraping Citrix technology instead of virtualizing GDI in Terminal Server makes the multi-windows support a bit of a dancing bear. Every time you move a window or see ALL your "Windows" windows pop up when you click on one it's clear that they'll never be first class citizens on the Mac desktop. And the task bar? Can't live with it, can't live without it. Your best bet is to run Parallels in its own full screen window... it does a good job there.

And with Coherence is coming new drag-and-drop support that makes a mockery of the ability to export only part of your Mac to the encapsulated Windows and any malware it may be harboring, because if you enable it you open up the whole Mac file system as a network share. Now, before anyone goes on about the "virus-proof" nature of the Mac: when you're running Windows in Parallels you're running Windows, with everything that implies. A virus might not be able to *infect* the Mac around it, but if it screws up your personal files trying you're not going to care much that "/System" is secure.

Parallels is a great tool, but it's a great tool with or without Coherence. And the extra complexity and insecurity just hasn't been worth it for me.

And yet Apple still sucks for many users

[Builder]

Ok, so I'm trying the old tried and tested 'Blah sucks!' to try and get support trick :)

I cannot find a single way of talking to an IR device (http://www.alti-2.com/sport/neptune/Neptune2.htm) from OS X. It worked in 10.1, but doesn't work in 10.4 anymore.

Apple can't help, their support in India is among the worst in the world that I have ever used, and even raising an ADC support request didn't help.

So for my needs, apple sucks ;)

Not only that, but iChat? WTF.

[Kadin2048]

More significant, IMO, than the lack of Quicksilver, is the lack of Adium.

Seriously -- iChat AV? Who do they think they're kidding? iChat is only useful if all of your contacts are using either AIM or Jabber, and that means it's a nonstarter if you have many contacts outside the U.S., where AIM is a distant second or third (usually to MSN Messenger). Sure, if I could, I'd get them to all ditch MSN and move to a protocol that's not owned by the Great Satan, but that's just not an option in most cases.

The only thing iChat offers over Adium is video and audio chat, and to most people, I think those are mostly eye-candy features rather than something they'll use every day, particularly since they really tax your hardware, software, and internet connection. I can only think of a few people that I would be able to conduct video chat with, if I wanted to. And this is out of the literally hundreds of people across the four major (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google) IM networks that I communicate with.

The 'killer feature' of instant messaging isn't video or audio. If people want those, they'll use a purpose-built application that does the job better than an IM client will -- c.f. the success of Skype. The key feature is telepresence and quick, effortless communication. It's being able to glance at a Buddy List and see whether someone on the other side of the planet is there at their desk, or if they're away, and sending them a quick message.

The value provided by an IM application (really, any communications application), is directly related to how many people it lets you interact with. In this, Adium kicks the bejeezus out of iChat.

because...

[sentientbrendan]

then we'd be referring to terminal, mail, etc for all the common tools that are named after generic things... the .app extension is only used in those cases. You'd note I didn't refer to iterm as iterm.app.

If you had a specific grep binary that you wanted to refer to (that had specific things compiled in), you'd say "the grep binary" instead of just grep in general. It's a linguistic device to make a semantic distinction.

In general people who nit pick too much about how other people speak are those who simply do not understand the variations in the language...

Re:because...

[fingusernames]

Terminal, Mail, Apple Mail, Apple Terminal, so on. Mail.app is no more descriptive than Mail -- they are the exact same thing -- it is like writing "Mail program" and without specifying Apple it could be Joe's Mail.app for all anyone knows. The only reason you know Mail.app refers to Apple Mail is because you know it already!

As for grep, no. Variations are GNU grep, SysV grep, so on. Those actually mean something. Never, and I literally mean never before reading your message (and I've been talking about grep for twenty years!), would it cross my mind to refer to it as "the grep binary" in conversation unless the conversation were about compiling grep. If I recompiled it and needed to differentiate it, I would name the binary something descriptive, like, maybe egrep or fgrep or farging_grep. Not to mention that calling Apple Mail Mail.app is akin to calling grep grep.0755.

As for .app -- really, did you come up with that yourself? No, more like joining the bandwagon. No problem with that, more power to you. But I just wonder why the hell the bandwagon started, and I *really* wish that Apple hadn't gone Windows on us and brought mandatory file extensions to the OS just to placate the feeble. If standard Unices can get by without .app or .exe, why did Apple have to regress? Oh well. What is done is done.

In general, people who don't appreciate a little jabbing are dorks.

Larry

Re:because...

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason NeXTStep, OpenStep, and OS X use .app as a file extension is because that tells the operating system that it is not a "straight" mach-o binary. .app's are actually directories containing executables (potentially multi-platform) and any resources (in particular, language files for i18n support) that the application might need. The extension allows the GUI, etc, to present and run the content different than one would, say, cp or grep or whatever.

Terminal and screen

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget iTerm - open up a plain Terminal window and use screen.

screen works like tabbed shells, plus you can drop the connection to the tty and reconnect without any bad effects.

If I'm working locally, or I ssh over to any other OSX / *ix box, I do all my command line work in a screen session.

Programs is always hard

[adah]

Programing is hard. It doesn't matter if you use drag and drop widgets, or switches on the front board. You still need to specify what you are doing in a precise manner.

Agreed. Programming was hard, is hard, and will remain hard in the foreseeable future. This is not to say things are not improved. On the contrary, many things are simplified. Go check the lines of code of a big project twenty years ago and of that today. Systems are becoming more and more complex.

When old stuff is automated, people will always find new things that need programmers to spend their efforts and time. This is the way of life.

typesetting algorithms

[WillAdams]

nick.ian.k said:
> Indesign and its amazing typesetting algorithms

Uh, you really should know that InDesign's mult-line composer is URW's HZ algorithm, which was developed as an extension of TeX's H&J (see the paper by Knuth & Plass on linebreaking for the original) and that Han The Than (sorry, his name is Vietnamese and should have several accents which can't easily be shown here w/ robustness) in developing pdftex added the HZ features to his pdftex, see http://www.pdftex.org/ and his doctoral thesis which was published as an issue of TUGboat: http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Contents/contents21-4.h tml

Also look at the TeX Showcases:

http://www.tug.org/texshowcase
and
http://www.tug.org/xetexshowcase/

The latter is especially interesting since it shows the new font technologies in use by TeX and which are being worked on for luatex, pdftex's successor.

William

FOSS apps

[IntergalacticWalrus]

This list is unfortunately lacking in the free/opensource department. And like many other Mac sites they fail to indicate what's closed source and what's not, and when they say "free" they really mean that "beer" kind of free which is annoying (but that's another subject).

Personally I use non-free software only when I REALLY need something and there's absolutely no free alternative (and yes that's the "freedom" kind of free here).

Open Source Mac is a good resource for free/opensource software on the Mac. I'd suggest you check it out if you haven't already.