What's on My Mac 3

It's been two years since I've written What's on My Mac. With the new machine, it's time to revisit this. This is more accurately called What Apps I'm Using, but I won't change the name. Widgets will be in another post. My list at iusethis is pretty accurate.

• Quicksilver - Quicksilver is one of my favorite programs and it's hard to describe what it does. Since my last post on this topic I've written a 50,000+ word manual for it and it's still hard to describe. It's a launcher but can do so much more. Basically anything I want to do on mac I can do from Quicksilver, or I start doing from Quicksilver. I used it several hundred times while composing this post.
• Safari - I use Safari as my browser because it works and is the most mac-like and has the best Quicksilver support. control-command-D to popup a dictionary definition of a highlighted word works on any page, emacs-like editing keys work in any field, as do the spelling and grammar checking, and it integrates well with every other app (like Adium and MarsEdit). It's fast, and has all the features I want in a browser.
• Cyberduck - is my FTP client of choice. It has a GUI and drag and drop works and that's all I really need in an FTP client. If you need more Transmit is the one to get for $30.
• Transmission - is my BitTorrent client of choice. I don't download much and this works, is very easy to use, takes up little screen space, is very mac-like, etc.
• NetNewsWire - is my RSS newsreader of choice. I keep up with about 250 blogs with it. It is now free and is a little faster than Vienna which I used to use. I also like how it does tabs, with thumbnails down the right side, this holds more and preserved vertical space. The other neat feature is that it tracks which articles you click on and can give reports of feeds you don't use often. This is really nice for helping to prune the number of feeds you read. It can open pages in tabs using the same WebKit engine that Safari uses and persists those tabs between sessions.
• MarsEdit - I use this to post to this blog. It's a thick client for posting to several blogs and is good for the reasons that any thick client is good, it's a real app, not a web app. As good as some Google apps might be this is far better than Google's Blogger web form. My window is larger and resizable, I get spell-checking (well I could in Safari), it's easier to manage several draft posts, including images is easy, etc. I use a bookmarklet to post from Safari and NetNewsWire has a blog button that works great. It's $30 but it's probably why I can post so often.
• Mail - I use Apple Mail as a thick client and get mail from a gmail account so I have webmail if I'm away from my machine. Spotlight works well searching through archives. Every mac app integrates well with it (opening a new mail message, addressed, and often with subject or body filled in). It works well with Address Book, shows pictures of people that send me mail, allows me to add addresses to the Address Book, and now can recognize addresses and event text in the body of email to let me add to contact or calendar entries. It finally fixed the bug to let me use nicknames to address messages. The junk mail filtering is pretty bad but gmail solves that for me. Spell checking, dictionary lookups, and emacs keybindings all come from the standard cocoa text widgets used. Nice integration with iPhoto for resizing pics for email. I also use Mail Act-On so I can save messages to specific folders with a keystroke.
• Adium - is my IM client of choice. iChat is quite good and I use it often for video chats, but Adium supports Yahoo IM and I really like the Dock skin which takes up little room and shows me images of my buddies. Adium is working on video support but it will be a long time, if iChat adds Yahoo support I might well switch.
• Colloquy - is my IRC client of choice. I basically just use IRC for the Quicksilver channel and this is free and is mac like.
• iCal - My calendaring needs are light as I'm not in an office environment scheduling with other people. The calendar is just for me to keep track of my schedule and iCal is ok for that. Well it used to be ok for that, the new version in Leopard has some issues.
• Address Book - I use this to manage contacts. It's a little on the weak side, particularly for notes and has no features for keeping track of communications (use spotlight instead I guess). Still every mac app integrates with it and it can enter all the fields I need. I also like adding pictures of contacts and other apps using them. I wish I could mark email (and other) fields as obsolete, so that I could go from archived emails could map to current contact info (e.g., to get pictures) without getting confused when addressing new messages.
• iGTD - There are many GTD apps for the mac and while I don't use the system as much as I should I find it's helpful for keeping track of todos. A new version is in beta. This is free and when I choose it, it was better than the other options. Now OmniFocus seems to be the top choice but it's $80. Things is another interesting one but it's still in beta (free while it is and about $50 when released) and I really want to like Midnight Inbox ($35) but I found the first version too buggy and the second isn't out yet.
• iTunes - The obvious choice for managing music.
• IPhoto - This is the one iLife app I use, it's also the obvious choice for managing images on the mac. I don't take that manage pics and I don't use photoshop so this suits my needs. I really like the new events feature.
• NicePlayer - is my player of choice. There's a difference between the media engine and the player and Apple blurs the line using the name Quicktime for both. Niceplayer uses the Quicktime engine so can play anything it can, but the video is borderless and I like the controls better. It can do fullscreen without having to pay for Quicktime Pro which is a rippoff. There isn't a media browser to get in the way, which I don't use anyway. Flip4Mac is the Quicktime engine plugin that lets it play most Windows Media files. Perian is the plugin to play everything else. The other choice is VLC which is available for many platforms and it plays most things. I use it sometimes but prefer the simplicity of the NicePlayer interface. Occasionally I use Real Player, usally for NPR audio streams.
• iWork - I use Pages for documents and prefer to Word, which I've never liked. I've written a 50,000+ word document in it and find it quite capable and fairly intuitive. It could use a few more features, but overall it's great. I use Numbers where I can, but my main spreadsheet use is my Oscar pool and I have to use Excel for that. I'd like to use Keynote more but I don't have any real need, I think it's a lot better than PowerPoint and PowerPoint was my favorite Microsoft application.
• Microsoft Office 2004 - I still use the 2004 version as I don't use this often and the 2008 version doesn't offer much I'd need other than user interface changes. If you communicate with others you need to be able to read and change MS Office documents. I don't think the various mac Open Office apps are baked yet.
• Aquamacs - It's an up-to-date emacs that's tweaked to be more mac-like. I can use it as real emacs and it's easy to install and has the best mac integration. I have option configured as the meta key and the command key bindings all still work, so my fingers don't get confused switching between emacs and other apps. Also you'll want this hack to add more emacs keybindings to every cocoa app.
• Terminal - Before Leopard it was pretty bare bones and there were competitors. Now with Leopard there seems to be no reason to use anything. I rarely use a terminal so I may not be the best to ask.
• Delicious Library - A very pretty database for your books, DVDs and games. I view it as a thick client app for amazon. It makes data entry easy and makes it fun to browse your collection. The next version won Leopard design awards last summer even though it still hasn't been released, but I've heard rumors it's coming out this month. I have 1500 items in it and it was slow on my PowerBook but is adequate on the MacBook Pro. The new version will be much faster. It was the first app to use a web cam as a barcode scanner which made entering info easy (it then looked up the upc in amazon and downloaded all the metadata and an image). I tried scanning a new book with the MacBook Pro's iSight and it couldn't read it. I'll have to keep experimenting with it.
• Quicken 2007 - Not very mac-like but still the only real option to track bank and investment accounts. Apparently Intuit is working on a rewrite to use Cocoa, though the first release will be feature poor. I use virtually none of the online features so it may be good enough for me.
• Reunion - Family Tree Maker was the last thing I used my PC for. Reunion was the premier genealogy app on the mac forever but hadn't been updated to use OS X. Reunion 9 is a rewrite and I think uses Cocoa and is a universal binary. It works pretty well though after importing my data I still have to check each person's info by hand.
• Stellarium - is a free star charting program (works on Windows and Linux too). Enter your location and it will draw the stars above you. It's quite pretty and works well.