It’s time to revisit my earlier list of Mac Software that I use on a regular basis. Some of it has changed, particularly with the advent of Tiger.
Firefox. Still my browser, though I hate that it doesn’t use the Mac OS Services. Camino and Safari are the two big other choices here, and Opera is now free, but none of them can beat Firefox with its extensions.
My mailer is still mutt. Didn’t make the list the first time, but it’s been my mailer for many years now (the only software I can say that about. Isn’t that funny?). I’m using it from Fink. I run a local mail server for several reasons, and Mail.app won’t read from a local spool, which is not only a deal-breaker, but pretty darn stupid. When I have tried Mail.app, attaching to our IMAP server, I found it pretty weak, particularly with filtering and searching. Spotlight is no where near all it’s cracked up to be.
Quicksilver. Still the coolest app out there for Mac OS X. Some people thought that Tiger bringing Spotlight to the OS would kill the need for something like Quicksilver. Definitely not. Spotlight might find data files alright, but Quicksilver is usually better. Quicksilver is the first third-party software I installed on my new hard drive. I can’t stand to be without it anymore.
I’m not using virtual desktops anymore; I find that SpiritedAway is a superior solution, as it hides inactive apps in a way that is totally supported by the OS. DesktopManager, as nice as it was, just seemed like a hack and didn’t always work as I had hoped. SpiritedAway works very well, and it’s easy to exclude a running app from hiding, on those instances when I need to see more than one app’s window at a time.
I’m still using SSHKeychain to manage my SSH keys. It’s so nice to be able to use that in conjunction with saved terminal sessions and Quicksilver. I just hit Cmd-Space, start typing the name of the host, hit enter, and Terminal connects via ssh to the remote host, authorizes my key (since SSHKeychain has it), and reconnects my screen session. All with a minimum of keystrokes, and no password.
I spent the money for DevonThink, and it’s been wonderful. Though is my organizational method of choice, I keep a lot of PDFs and websites in Devonthink, plus the little snippets of information that used to be sticky notes. It’s just really wonderful software, and as I spend more time in the app I find that it becomes a natural place for all my documents and information to gravitate towards.
iTunesAlarm is always running on my box. Set to start a “sleeplist” playlist from iTunes at one time, and sleep my laptop at another. I’d get much less sleep without that app.
While I used to use mplayer os x as my media player, I found that I was using VLC so much that I didn’t even put mplayer back on this machine when I replaced the hard drive. For encoding DVDs, I’ve been using D-Vision but Handbrake is getting so much press that I have them both on here, and the next time I need to encode a DVD I’ll look at both and try to decide.
For instant messaging, Adium X is still the way to go. Recent upgrades have made it very easy to get on Google Talk, my service of choice, but I still talk to people on the other IM systems as well. Having one client that can do it all is wonderful, but Adium does it in such a polished way, and there’s so many that it can be very highly customized.
One of the things that makes Adium and Quicksilver really work is Growl. A notification service will one day be part of every OS, and folks from Apple and Microsoft could do much worse than look at the wonderful job that Growl does. Improving all the time, now with networking support, it’s a piece of software that you might think at first is just a novelty, but as you use it you realize it’s almost essential.
MenuCalendarClock iCal is my replacement for the Menubar clock. Since my scheduling is now just paper, I don’t use the iCal integration anymore, but I still use this app because of two features: a custom date/time display, and the no-brains feature of the pop-up calendar.
WeatherDock sits in my menubar, keeping me abreast of the current conditions. There are lots of little weather applets for the Mac, not the least of which is Apple’s own weather widget, but WeatherDock seems the best choice for me. My favorite features are that it can stay completely out of the way, only popping up when conditions change, and that it can automatically adjust the location between work and home based on the day and time. It’s super customizable, too.
Dashboard Widgets
I’ll readily admit that, when I saw the Dashboard, I thought two things: one, that the Konfabulator guys were going to be pissed (they were), and two, that I really didn’t have need for such a thing, particularly since I was using GeekTool. Ok, I was wrong. Dashboard has replaced GeekTool for me. It is nicer to have that stuff on demand, rather than always displayed on the desktop. Far less distraction, and I don’t feel that I have to keep my app windows small and moved around to see the GeekTool displays. Plus, there are so many cool widgets, and they all look fabulous.
Well, not exactly. I’m not sure how much I need my dashboard, but it sure is nice. Here are the widgets currently running on my system:
. GeekTool wasn’t updated for Tiger for a long while, and I’ve just been using SysStat instead of my old GeekTool scripts, and haven’t looked back.
will display any image URL, and it keeps the US weather and the local radar images from the Weather Channel on my Dashboard layer. Separate times for refreshing the images is a nice feature, based on whether Dashboard is active or not.
searches the web for the lyrics to the currently playing iTunes song. Now that iTunes supports lyrics as metadata, pearLyrics will copy them into the song. It’s fairly accurate, not 100%, but good and very cool.
Sophestication’s displays the cover art for the currently playing iTunes song as a CD jewel case. Not as nice as the JewelCase plugin for iTunes but also a lot less resource intensive. Mousing over the artwork shows the track information, and allows me to adjust the song rating, upon which a lot of my iTunes smart playlists are based. Simple, beautiful, very nice.
shows me the current moon phase, both as a stunning visual representation and with text. An easter egg or two keeps it fun, and it’s a nice piece of artwork for the Dashboard.
has replaced the SlimBatteryMonitor for me (which further replaced the very bloated menu bar display built-in to Mac OS X.
The series of widgets from are nice additions to the Desktop, showing the schedules and results for some of my favorite sports teams. I really like that they can roll up to be very unobtrusive, as these are probably not something I’ll check very often. Nice to have.
Some other Dashboard Widgets are in wide use for me, but I create and destroy them as needed:
The is my primary time waster these days. I’ve really gotten in to sudoku, and this widget is about all I could ask for in a computerized version of the game.
DevonSearch and DevonJot come with DevonThink, and are great additions. I can see these being permanent additions to the Dashboard as my affair with DevonThink grows.
I find that I’d rather use the than go visiting the site. Nice to have that a click away.
I have the same feelings about the .
is a generic timer widget that I find I use more and more.
There’s a bunch of other little game widgets that come and go on my Dashboard, depending on what I’m doing with the computer.