Here’s a list of my favorite OSX apps.

Web: Safari — I’m a Safari fanatic, and really only for its speed and its synced bookmarks.

IM: Adium — I’m a sucker for tabbed interfaces, and this slick, tabbed, multi-protocol chat app is the best around.

NewsFire — As I’m sure you’ve read, Newsfire rox my pants. I’ve tried others, and I still think it’s the best.

Address Book.app — this is an indespensible app for me, especially combined with Quicksilver.

Launcher: Quicksilver — No other app truly gets to the heart of how different OSX is, and how powerful it can be, than Quicksilver. QS speeds up resource location to a point that the operating system feels almost prescient.

Music Player: iTunes — At its heart, iTunes is a GUI music player strapped on top of a database. It’s simple enough that Grandma can use it, but complex enough that I can do nested queries. My one complaint is there is no SQL command window.

Terminal: iTerm — iTerm has sweet, truly transparent terminals, and comes with my beloved tabs.

Calendar: iCal — iCal is another built-in, indispensable app. I love how it handles multiple calendars, and I’ve been tinkering with WebDAV to get collaborative published calendars set up for work.

Keyboard Remover: OSX2X — OSX2X lets you control two+ systems with one keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Very handy to have if you use more than one system at once.

Brief Notes: Stickies — I use Stickie notes constantly for short chunks of reusable codes, config scripts, and so on. If I stop using or needing a note after a while, I’ll save it and close the Sticky.

Advanced CD burning app : Firestarter FX — The built-in CD burning app, Diskutil, handles some things, but not other. For those, you need this industrial-strength solution. I’ve only had to use it once, but that’s because I hate creating dead media, like CDs or DVDs.

Photo Management: iPhoto — I didn’t like or use iPhoto until this most recent release. It’s fast enough now to be useable, and I’ve come to rely on it for managing my photographic media. After finding a duplicate set of photos from my Savannah vacation for the umpteenth time, I asked myself, “Why am I not letting this program handle media management for me?” I dumped every photo I could find into it, added them into ‘Smart Albums’, and haven’t looked back. And so far, no duplicate images are eating up space on my drives.

Work Email: Entourage — MS did a good job with Entourage, although it is sometimes pretty slow handling the ginormous amount of email I deal with daily. Still, it’s a very slick and polished app, incorporating some of the features of MS Project seamlessly into the mail client.

RDC: MS Remote Desktop Connection = MS makes an excellent RDC client for OSX, so if you need to manage a Terminal Services-enabled client machine from your Mac, get it. It’s a free download.

Notepad: SubEthaEdit — This is Notepad, on steroids. BBEdit always seemed too bulky for what minimal GUI-based text-editing I do [vi], but SEEdit is Just Right. I’ve not yet been in a situation where I could use its much-touted Rendezvous-enabled features, but I’m sure they’re cool.

News Reader: Unison — Unison is a very nice news reader, handling binary aggregation and multi-threaded downloads.

Movie Player: VLC — VLC is the Range Rover of movie players: if you’ve got a movie file that you can’t get to play in your standard player, try VLC. It may glitch out in spots, but it’ll almost always play the file.

Phase B is now complete!

The import from MT to WP went very quickly. The only ‘gotcha’ is that PHP hates importing text files of over 1MB (unless you screw with the php.ini settings), so I had to manually split the import.txt file into several smaller chunks.

As you can see, a few minor cosmetic glitches remain. I’m still not sure what’s up with the post title, but I’ll work on that later.

Phase One of the move to Wordpress is complete: all MT entries are imported, and the site is mostly active, although the main Index redirector still sends people to the MT page.

Tomorrow I’ll start working on the templates and such.

I’ve removed mt-comments.cgi entirely, because MT eats shit.

Comment-spammers using a distributed denial-of-service technique effectively took down the server today.

I’ll be switching to WordPress this weekend.

If you use MoveableType, I seriously recommend removing it today.

iTunes stutters. Y-Yu-Y-You heard me. It didn’t always do this, though. When I first ran iTunes on my PC, it was a wondrous revelation… but recently, probably after a software update, it developed a stutter. I got fed up tonight and searched until I found the answer buried in an Apple messageboard, away from Google’s prying eyes. The culprit: DirectSound.

Yes, Apple is now using Microsoft’s pitiful DirectSound via QuickTime to play iTunes music. I don’t know if it’s always been this way (I don’t think so), but the way to remedy the stutter is to close iTunes, open QuickTime preferences, and change the ‘Sound Out’ from DirectSound to something more reasonable, like ‘Wave Out.’ Close QuickTime Preferences, open iTunes, and poof! Stutter banished.
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GeekTool is a nice little prefpane applet that lets you display time-refreshed unix command outputs or Internet-based images on your desktop.

MenuMeters is a great set of system monitoring tools for OSX, displaying CPU, network, and disk utilization in the top menu bar. Sadly, menu real estate is pretty small on my iBook, so I only use it on my G4.

I tried out Bloglines with the OSX notifier, and was less than impressed. I like the persistency of a web-based aggregator, but I hate pretty much everything else. Bloglines doesn’t support importing from OPML, which makes setup a pain, and browsing via a standalone app like NewsFire is much faster [especially if you use keyboard shortcuts].

Wow! Holy crap! In a hat!

I’ve been using NetNewsWire Lite for reading RSS feeds for the last several months [and if you don't use a RSS feed-reader, please crawl out from under your rock and smell the sunlight] and though I’ve had no real problems with the application, I’ve not looked for other RSS readers either.

Today, though, I discovered NewsFire. Holy crap, this thing is cool. The UI is very slick and very easy to use, with good, intuitive keyboard shortcuts, and the whole app is very integrated into the OS. You can easily import your old RSS bookmarks, and you can instruct the app to “discover feeds” for a given site, or even the site currently displayed in Safari.

Go get it now!