Favorite OSX Apps

Apple

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.