November 12th, 2007
OS X killer apps
Recently I polled my friends and based on their feedback and my experience. I won’t highlight Apple software like iLife in the links below but rather software we use on a daily basis that doesn’t come with our Macs or from Apple.
AdiumX
AdiumX is what multi-protocol chat clients should aspire to be. It’s what Trillian should be. It’s the single application that gets non-mac users to take notice. It supports AOL Instant Messenger (Including ICQ and .Mac), Jabber (Including Google Talk and LiveJournal), MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger (Including Yahoo! Japan), Bonjour (Compatible with iChat), MySpace IM, Gadu-Gadu, Novell Groupwise, QQ and Lotus Sametime.
Firefox
Firefox is a great web browser. On the Windows platform it’s a good competitor to Internet Explorer, on Mac it offers near IE compatibility with websites. Because it’s not Apple software and less integrated than even Camino, it doesn’t yet support use of the OS X Keychain for saving passwords, for example.
Cyberduck
Obviously the Apple platform seems to attract duck software. Command line FTP is fine for a lot of cases but when you want SFTP or you are navigating complicated sites, a GUI is great. I have tried all the major FTP warez for OS X, this is the best.
MenuMeters
I found menu meters after I became tired of the weak CPU meter provided by the activity monitor. I was looking for a program that would monitor CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization with a very small footprint. This is it.
Acqlite
P2P is not what it used to be in the hayday of Napster. Limewire and eDonkey networks are a mere shadow of their former selves. Acqlite is not a great program and it hasn’t been maintained in ages. But given any platform Windows, Mac or Unix, I have the most success with this client over all others of just hopping online and finding what I am looking for. On my old G4 this application would leak memory and CPU until it had to be force quit, and I still used it. For some reason the same problems don’t persist on my Intel Mac.
RDC and CoRD
I live and work in hybrid environments and the ability to connect via Remote Desktop or Terminal Services to a Windows machine is paramount. It’s a toss up between Microsoft RDC and CoRD. If you need VNC, Chicken of the VNC.
DejaVu
I spent a while trying to find good backup software. DejaVu was the only one I got working to my satisfaction across a network to an XP share. Though I ended up settling on external firewire drive for my backups.
The following software is recommended but either I don’t have as much experience with them, don’t use them very often or they charge a license fee that I haven’t chosen to pay yet.
MoneyDance
Quicken for Mac, but better.
MacFuse and NTFS-3G
Together these two allow you to read and write an NTFS partition on OS X.
VLC or DiVX
To play all possible video files, you may need more tools in your chest than just Quicktime. Apple isn’t know for supporting alternative formats like OGM, MVK or FLAC.
HP48
Who doesn’t need a good graphing calculator?
Max
Converts lossless formats to lossy formats, like FLAC to MP3.
TuneRanger
This software magically synchronizes iTunes libraries. For other iTunes tricks check out DougScripts.
MacTheRipper
DVD video ripper, Roxio Popcorn is another alternative.
Springy
I can’t stand StuffIt, this is a better alternative for compression software, think WinZip/WinRar meets OS X. Unfortunately it’s not free.
Toast
Unfortunately if you burn a DVD using the native OS X software it will not be readable by a PC, therefore I use Toast.
November 16th, 2007 at 12:39 am
If you’re a fan of the way Windows does alt-tab and deplore Apple’s poorly conceived apple-tab, Which http://www.manytricks.com/witch/ is the program for you.
It has several configurable options, but the important ones are to switch between windows and not applications and to switch in MRU order.
The only downsides to this app are that you must use option-tab (apple-tab cannot be overridden) and that if your machine is bogged down, Which will be too — you’ll end up wanting to just change apps manually and then a few seconds later it will catch up and change you back unexpectedly. Even given these annoyances, as a former alt-tab junkie, I can’t live without Which.
December 6th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
I need to add LAME encoder as well. http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/13048
iTunes-LAME Encoder - 2.0.9
convert cd & aac to mp3 with lame
December 6th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
With LAME make sure to your option list includes –multi like so “–alt-preset standard –multi” if you have a multi core or multi processor box.
December 28th, 2007 at 10:52 am
http://echoone.com/filejuicer/
File Juicer looks interesting.
March 14th, 2008 at 11:12 am
http://osx.iusethis.com/hot
Site with top mac apps, digg style.
July 2nd, 2008 at 5:43 pm
imovieplugins.com turn clip
this iMovie plug-in rotates your clip exactly 90, 180 or 270 degrees. since DV clips are
not square, parts of the clip will be lost when rotating 90 or 270 degrees, and the clip will
show bands of a (user defined) color left and right of the formerly narrow parts.
October 5th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
http://rixstep.com/2/20080922,00.shtml ‘We stood before it and began to freeze inside from the exertion. We questioned the application, berated it, made love to it, prayed to it: we called it mother, called it whore and slut, called it our beloved, called it iTunes.’
October 5th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
http://www.ironicsoftware.com/leap/
Leap. Browse your documents.
December 8th, 2008 at 1:30 am
http://perian.org/
December 8th, 2008 at 1:31 am
perian made 1080p mp4 playable
December 17th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
macfuse allows easy and reliable mounting of alternative file systems
December 17th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
http://riffraff.livejournal.com/356503.html
glterminal is a cool old school app
December 17th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
http://secrets.blacktree.com/
secrets for os x is a system preferences plugin that is much like tweakui alternative
December 18th, 2008 at 12:48 am
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/19139
EZ 7z 0.65
Easy way to use p7zip archiver.
December 18th, 2008 at 12:48 am
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/9365/unrarx
unrarX
December 30th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
lame settings
http://www.geocities.com/altbinariessoundsmusicclassical/vbr-encoding.htm#ch6
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=28124
http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/1912
December 30th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
http://www.vuze.com/app
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
java p2p bit torrent client
December 30th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
http://developers.facebook.com/iphoto/
January 2nd, 2009 at 4:12 pm
http://www.getmiro.com/
video podcast, video rss, youtube, torrents
January 2nd, 2009 at 5:48 pm
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/index.html
January 4th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
best free adobe photoshop alternative on mac os x
http://www.gimp.org
January 4th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
http://seashore.sourceforge.net/download.php
allows for some gimp like activity in a cocoa interface at 1/10th the size of gimp which is 1/10th the size of photochop.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:18 pm
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/imaging_3d/paintbrush.html
paintbrush is a microsoft MSPaint paint equivalent for os x.
January 4th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
http://www.plexapp.com/
plex aka OSXBMC based on or at least inspired by xbmc, the xbox media center which made the xbox in to a great media center. unfortunately the xbox can barely play 720p video streamed. both the ps3 and xbox 360 disappointingly failed to live up to this standard. OSXBMC can turn a mac mini into a full fledged media center.
May 8th, 2009 at 10:58 am
http://visor.binaryage.com/
Visor provides a systemwide terminal window accessible via a hot-key
Quake style terminal
May 15th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
http://www.davidalison.com/2009/05/10-little-known-mac-utilities.html
May 15th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
http://adamcohenrose.blogspot.com/2008/02/time-machine-wireless-backup-without.html
July 2nd, 2009 at 2:35 pm
http://im.qq.com/qq/mac/download.shtml