Software Update
A handy list of the software I use here at Macskill. To be updated as needed.
Last modified July 2, 2009.
• Text Editing / Writing / Development
• Life / Organization
• Graphics
• Internet / Network
• Video
• GUI
• Screen Savers
• Games
• Comics and Reading
• Utilities
• Currently checking out
• Software we want to try
• Notes for fresh installs
Text Editing / Writing / Development:
Smultron – Free, Donations Accepted – Great text editor with file view column.
Nvu – Free – Although the name stands for Not Very Useful, this simple WYSIWYG HTML editor has helped me out in times when Dreamweaver wasn’t handy.
TextWrangler – Free – Decent text editor with some text conversion abilities.
Delicious Library – US$40 – Physical media cataloguing app. Very pretty, occasionally useful.
CDFinder – US$30 – Digital media cataloguing app. Catalogs data, audio, and video CDs, DVDs, and hard drives. Very useful, not very pretty.
Linotype FontExplorer X – Free – Decent font management for OS X.
Serverskine – Free – Meant for server admins, Serverskine is a notepad for all hosting and domain-related account information.
Rage Domainer – US$39.95 – Also for server admins, a commercial alternative that offers quite a few more import-export options and other niceties.
Yep – US$34 – Excellent PDF organizer.
Graphics
Pixen – Free – Pixel art editor. Great for editing in ‘FatBits’.
GraphicConverter – US$30 – Reads and writes many image formats, and usually the final step before posting any image online.
ImageWell – Free – Combination image editor/FTP program.
Goldberg – Free – Image and movie viewer and editor.
FFView – Free, Open Source – Comic book and image viewer.
Internet / Network:
Utilities:
OSXvnc
Chicken of the VNC
PageSucker
URLwell
1001 – Free – A Flickr management app by Ado, the author of Ecto.
SharingMenu is a menu item that gives quicker access to your sharing preferences. Free.
Carrafix – Free – A bandwidth manager, allows limiting speeds of network connections based on port numbers.
DummyMac – Free, Open Source (APSL) – Another bandwidth manager, allows limiting speeds of network connections based on port numbers.
Fax Alert – Notification of incoming faxes, not sure if needed for Tiger.
Wireless Discovery:
MacSniffer – Free.
iStumbler – Free.
FTP:
Transmit – US$29.95 – The best commercial FTP client.
Cyberduck – Free, Open Source – Decent FTP and SFTP client.
Fugu – Free – FTP and SFTP client.
RBrowser – I was disappointed when they pulled their Lite version, now it’s nagware or nothing. Works fine for FTP, but there’s much better choices listed above.
Browsers and Browser Add-Ons:
Camino, Flock, Firefox, Safari, SeaMonkey, Shiira, Opera, iCab – All free.
SafariStand – Free – Brings keyword searching and an OmniWeb-style sidebar to Safari.
PithHelmet – US$10 – Mike Solomon – Solid ad-blocking features for Safari.
Email / RSS Readers:
Mail Scripts – Andreas Amann – Free – A set of AppleScripts to enhance Mail.app.
Thunderbird – Free – Open source email client.
NetNewsWire – Free – RSS reader with free online sync and free iPod Touch/iPhone app.
Vienna – Free – RSS reader, replaced by NetNewsWire.
IM / VOIP / IRC:
Adium for its open source goodness, compatibility, customization and stability.
The only MSN client for Macintosh that allows webcam sessions with Windows MSN users, amsn.
Gizmo Project
Colloquy – Free – IRC app.
Bluetooth:
Video:
Players / Browsers:
VLC, MPlayer – Free – Either will play almost any video file, including DVDs set to non-local region codes.
The BBC Radio Player – Free – Ad-free version of RealPlayer.
CenterStage / BackStage- Free, Open Source – Front Row clone that looks to turn into something even better.
Miro – Free – A good start to RSS-enabled television shows, with many popular video podcasts built-in.
NicePlayer – Free – QuickTime player with a better control scheme.
Codecs / Converters:
Perian – Free – Codec pack for QuickTime.
Handbrake – Free, Donations Accepted – Once you have the VIDEO_TS folder on your hard drive, use this to convert it to regular video formats.
XiphQT – Free – Ogg QuickTime components; play Ogg Vorbis in iTunes or use Ogg Theora in iMovie.
ffmpegX – US$15 with Eternal Trial – Convert video to other formats.
Capture:
Evocam – US$25 – Decent webcam app with motion detection.
Metadata:
Metadata Hootenanny – Free – Edit most metadata fields available in audio and video files.
GUI:
Windowshade X – US$17 – Double-click a window’s title bar and it disappears into the title bar. I’m very happy to have this old OS 9 feature back, and enjoy the new features and control it offers under OS X.
FontCard – US$17 – Provides better font menu behaviour in many apps.
ClearDock – Not needed in 10.5.
Application Enhancer
Shadowkiller – Free – For slower machines running OS X 10.3 or 10.4.
I don’t use many Widgets. My Dashboard (other than the built-in Thesaurus and Weather ones) usually runs Easy Envelopes, Audio Calculator, and Email Cloaker.
Screen Savers:
Hydromancy – Phillip Nguyen – Open source colourful OpenGL blobs.
O’ Canada – Free – Waving Canadian flag, although it only seems to support a single monitor, and there are no configuration options.
SuperTux – Free, Open Source – Action side-scroller.
SolarWolf – Free, Open Source – Fun space-based action/arcade game.
Frozen Bubble – Free, Open Source – Fun puzzle game loosely based on Bust-A-Move.
Emulation
MacMAME
Boycott Advance
VisualBoyAdvance – All free.
Comics and Reading:
Jomic – Free – Thomas Aglassinger – Java comic archive reader.
FFView – Another comic reader.
Tofu – Free – Reflows text into columns for easier reading in web browsers and other applications.
Utilities:
General:
Butler – Free, Donations Accepted – Peter Maurer – Amazing, incredibly useful programs for today’s power user.
Witch – Free, Donations Accepted – Peter Maurer – Shows all open windows in an attractive list. I set it to Control-Tab so as not to conflict with Opera’s default Alt-Tab tab switcher.
Service Scrubber – Free, Donations Accepter – Peter Maurer – Lets you restructure the services menu, change service keyboard shortcuts, and disable superfluous services.
Default Folder – US$34.95 – St. Clair Software – Very handy addition to the save dialog, letting you save favorite paths, set key commands and more.
TinkerTool – Marcel Bresink – Allows you to change a few hidden OS X settings.
DragThing – James Thomson – Very handy launch utility.
iPulse – Graphical info utility, replaced by MenuMeters.
MenuMeters – Raging Menace – Set of CPU/Network/Memory/Disk meters for your menu bar. Replaced by iStat menus.
iStat menus – Free – CPU/Network/Memory/Disk meters for your menu bar.
SideNote – Free – Handy, unobtrusive notepad program.
DesktopManager – Rich Wareham – Free virtual desktop software. Not yet Universal, but version 0.5.3 works fine with Rosetta.Skins
Boinx Mouseposé – Free with email registration – Makes the cursor more obvious, handy for presentations or finding your cursor on multiple monitors.
Preferential Treatment – Checks preference files for corruption.
XBench – Benchmarking app.
Mactracker – Comprehensive list of Macs in an app.
Pacifist – Lets you look inside .pkg files.
BatChmod – Will force-empty the Trash when the Finder refuses.
Dragon Burn
Free Ruler – On-screen ruler for measuring pixels.
Locator – A regular ‘Find’ program.
OnMyCommand – Highly customizable contextual menu plugin.
coconutIdentityCard is a small app that reads out where and when your Mac and your iPod were built by Apple.
SlimBatteryMonitor – Free, donations accepted – Replacement battery status indicator, takes up much less menu bar space than the built-in one.
Audio:
Audio Hijack Pro
Audio Recorder
Clutter – Free – Grabs album art from Amazon.
iScrobbler – Free with Last.fm account – iTunes plugin for Last.fm.
iTunes-BPM Inspector – Helps you set the beats per minute of songs in iTunes.
LineIn – Sometimes you just need a simple line in.
Ogg Drop – Free – Convert audio to .ogg format.
OnDeck – Free – Uploads album artwork and track listing to your web site.
Perfect Pitch
Reason – CA$499 – The ultimate compositional tool.
SoundFlower – Free – A system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications.
Disk / Backup / iPod:
Disk Inventory X – Treemap style disk usage utility.
DV Backup – Back up files to DV tape.
Carbon Copy Cloner – Mike Bombich
DiskWarrior – CA$139 – Longstanding emergency hard drive recovery tool, mainly rebuilds catalogue files.
TechTool Pro – CA$139 – Another drive recovery program, offers many useful features.
Hardware Control:
Conversion / Migration:
URL Manager Pro – US$25, Eternal Trial – Essential for keeping bookmarks up to date between many browsers.
DeliciWeb – Converts your Delicious Library into a web page.
AB-FOAF – Converts your Address Book into a FOAF document.
WordNet -Free, Open Source – Princeton University’s Cognitive Science Laboratory online dictionary system, much more comprehensive than the built-in tools and always being updated.
CLIX – Free – Interface for learning many useful Terminal commands.
MenuShade – Free – Dims the brightness of the menu bar.
iWiki – Free, Open Source – Wikipedia search tool.
MyMind – Free – An outlining app.
Software we want to try but haven’t the money / time / inclination at the moment:
Peripheral Vision – US$6.95
BibDesk – Free – A graphical BibTeX-bibliography manager.
BT-AT – A Sony Ericsson Bluetooth phone utility.
BallDroppings – Game
AutoPairs – By the author of PrintToPDF.
ArtRage
Bricksmith – Virtual Lego modeling.
Cacophony – Multi-track audio editor. The author also maintains most of the game emulators for OS X.
EasyFind – Free
Blue Service – Free
Celestia – Free – Planetarium software.
Cenon – Free bitmap and vector image editor.
CocoaBooklet – Fabien Conus – Free – Create booklets from PDF files and the Print dialog.
Crystal – Free VST/Audio Unit soft synth.
Darwine
DisplayWatcher
DropCopy – Easy LAN file transfer tool.
Earl of Tab
EtherPEG
EXIF-O-Matic – Free
File Juicer – Extraction app.
Flame – A Bonjour browser.
FreeMind – Free – Mind-mapping software.
Fugu – Free – SFTP, SSH browser
InterMapper – US$295 and up
IPNetShareX – Free for non-commercial use – adjust OS X’s NAT settings.
LaserLine – Free – Hack a laser pointer to be controlled by your Mac.
LyX/Mac – Free – A TeX GUI app.
Nefu – Free – Network monitor.
osx2x – Free – Open source client for connecting to VNC and X11 servers. Like QuickSynergy and TelePort, control multiple machines from one keyboard and mouse, but with standard protocols.
PDFLab – Fabien Conus – Free – Splits and joins PDF files.
Pics4Pic – Free – Use small picures to create a larger one.
Q – Free – Guest machine emulator.
QemuX – Free – Guest machine emulator.
QuickSynergy – Free – Control multiple machines with one mouse and keyboard. Shootout between this one and Teleport.
Reptile – Free – Stiches tiles of pixel art together.
SBook5 – Free – Address book / note-taking app.
Scribus – Free – Open source desktop publishing application.
SSH Tunnel Manager – Free – Forums
Stellarium – Free – Planetarium software.
SubnetCalc – Free – Julien Mulot – Calculates valid IP addresses.
SunShield – Free – Configure the built-in OS X firewall.
SunCase – US$5 – CD / DVD cover maker.
Taco HTML Edit – Free – HTML editor with built-in colour picker and a file column.
TelePort – Free – Control multiple machines with one mouse and keyboard. Shootout between this one and QuickSynergy, I guess.
TeXShop – Free – TeX typesetting application.
TrailBlazer – Free, Open Source – Web browser with graphical history.
Tryst – Free utility for video streaming over Bonjour.
WebGrabber – Free, Open Source – Web site grabber.
GenerationX – Free, Open Source – A genealogy tool with data import and export.
AppleJack – Free, Open Source – Single-user mode troubleshooting tool.
Audio Overload – Free – Plays most console game music formats.
Firefox Extensions
Colorful Tabs
IE View
OpenBook
Password Exporter
ScrapBook
Slashdotter
Tab Mix Plus
VideoDownloader
Web Developer
Stylish
With styles available here
Relevant LifeHacker post
- Mozilla Browser (Camino, Firefox, Flock, SeaMonkey) about:config settings
Master about:config List (not all are available in Camino)
My Changes:
accessibility.browsewithcaret true
accessibility.tabfocus 7
OS X Defaults Changes:
Finder
Add a “Quit” item to the Finder File menu
defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool yes
Show hidden files in the Finder
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool yes
Dock
Force the Dock to expand from its beginning or end
defaults write com.apple.Dock pinning start
defaults write com.apple.Dock pinning end
Force the Dock to show hidden applications as grayed-out icons
defaults write com.apple.Dock showhidden -bool yes
Disk Utility
For added disk formatting options
defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility advanced-image-options 1
Window
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime 0.001
defaults delete NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime
/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background