My 9 must-have applications for Mac
Lately, particularly since the introduction of the Intel-based iMacs and MacBooks, lots of friends and colleagues have bought their first Mac, most of them coming from Windows, and some of them, from Linux.
Being the long-time Mac user (since the days of Puma) I am, teasing them with Exposé and Keynote transitions when Redmond hadn't still turned on the Photocopiers, I usually get questions about the applications I use for Mac, and whether there exists a Mac app equivalent to a certain Win app.
So, here is my must-have applications list for Mac:
1. TextMate: The best editor EVER. Really. Whether it's Rails, LaTeX or a shell script, TextMate is for you. It's €39, but well worth it.
2. VLC: A multi-format video player. For Mac, Linux, and Windows. But in the Mac is even nicer, and you can even use your Apple Remote to control it.
3. CocoaMySQL: A graphical MySQL client, with Mac looks. Perfect for development.
4. Camino: Although I prefer Safari, Camino is useful if you need a Firefox-based browser for web development testing. It's much lighter and faster than its bulky cousin. It doesn't support Extensions, though.
5. iTerm: While we wait for Leopard, iTerm is a Terminal replacement, with tabs.
6. The Unarchiver: An all-format decompressor (including Zip, RAR, StuffIt, gzip and bzip, among others). It automatically decompresses a file with a double click, integrating seamlessly with the Finder, without annoying windows popping out, and it's faster than pricey StuffIt. You install it, and forget about it.
7. Transmit: A FTP/SFTP/WebDAV client, with a nice interface, developed by the Panic blokes. Worth the $29.95 if you use FTP a lot.
8. Visor: A scrolling Terminal (Quake-alike, they say) a key combination away. I find it useful, for instance, to leave a mongrel running there, without closing it accidentally.
9. Transmission: A GUI BitTorrent client. It's up to you if you download the last 24 episode or a Linux ISO ;)
And, of course, the rest of the applications that already come bundled with MacOS: Mail, iChat (using Google Talk), iTunes, Keynote (not bundled, but quite cheap, and comes with Pages, too).
Being the long-time Mac user (since the days of Puma) I am, teasing them with Exposé and Keynote transitions when Redmond hadn't still turned on the Photocopiers, I usually get questions about the applications I use for Mac, and whether there exists a Mac app equivalent to a certain Win app.
So, here is my must-have applications list for Mac:
1. TextMate: The best editor EVER. Really. Whether it's Rails, LaTeX or a shell script, TextMate is for you. It's €39, but well worth it.
2. VLC: A multi-format video player. For Mac, Linux, and Windows. But in the Mac is even nicer, and you can even use your Apple Remote to control it.
3. CocoaMySQL: A graphical MySQL client, with Mac looks. Perfect for development.
4. Camino: Although I prefer Safari, Camino is useful if you need a Firefox-based browser for web development testing. It's much lighter and faster than its bulky cousin. It doesn't support Extensions, though.
5. iTerm: While we wait for Leopard, iTerm is a Terminal replacement, with tabs.
6. The Unarchiver: An all-format decompressor (including Zip, RAR, StuffIt, gzip and bzip, among others). It automatically decompresses a file with a double click, integrating seamlessly with the Finder, without annoying windows popping out, and it's faster than pricey StuffIt. You install it, and forget about it.
7. Transmit: A FTP/SFTP/WebDAV client, with a nice interface, developed by the Panic blokes. Worth the $29.95 if you use FTP a lot.
8. Visor: A scrolling Terminal (Quake-alike, they say) a key combination away. I find it useful, for instance, to leave a mongrel running there, without closing it accidentally.
9. Transmission: A GUI BitTorrent client. It's up to you if you download the last 24 episode or a Linux ISO ;)
And, of course, the rest of the applications that already come bundled with MacOS: Mail, iChat (using Google Talk), iTunes, Keynote (not bundled, but quite cheap, and comes with Pages, too).
