Software I Recommend for OS X

Filed Under Apple on 2009-02-17, 14:38

Macbook Pro

It’s been over a year since I made “the switch” to OS X. I bought my Macbook Pro last January and while it’s been a struggle at times, I’ve managed to use it as my primary machine for over a year. I recently got an email from a friend who had just picked up an iMac and wanted suggestions on good software. I figure others might be interested in my favorite OS X apps. Here’s what I sent him as a response:
—
The #1 best app ever is Quicksilver. It’s super powerful and can do all sorts of crazy stuff, but I mainly use it to launch apps and files. Apple+Spacebar, start typing the name of an app/file and it’ll show up. Hit enter and it launches. It also ties in with other apps to let you control them in ways they weren’t meant to be.

For all my IMing, I’m using Adium. It’s not awesome, but it works.

Growl is also pretty neat to have. It will display messages as things happen on your machine. So like if iTunes is playing in the background, it pops up a brief message to let me know what song just came on.

For Twitter, I’ve recently started using Twhirl, but I still jump on the website every now and then.

For terminal/command line stuff, iTerm

For password management, 1Password is hands down awesome. It has single-handedly saved my sanity.

VLC is much better than Quicktime for video playback. Plex is also preferred by many for a fancier interface. It’s based off XBox Media Center.

Handbrake is my new favorite media conversion utility. If you have a DivX movie or something you want to watch on an iPod, Xbox, whatever, it’ll convert it easily.

Xee is good replacement for Preview for image viewing and slideshows.

iStat Menus is great if you want to see stats on your machine, how hot it is, CPU load, disk writing, etc. It’s handy for when my machine bogs down and I don’t know why. “Oh, Firefox is using 110% of my cpu. Kill task..”
—

Do any of you have any essential apps you recommend for a new convert?


Comments

  • I use DockSpaces. It's a little app that allows you to make custom docs and switch between them with key commands. Since you're using quicksilver, you might not need it. I personally like to see the icons I'm working with all together as I'm doing different tasks.

    I've got one doc that's everything I need to get work done. InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, TextWrangler, MindNode, Cyberduck, Acrobat, Sunbird, Firefox and Thunderbird (plus Adium cause I'd get bored working if I didn't have people to ping for questions).

    I've got another doc that's all fun toys and games as well as VLC and my media programs. This is my chillaxing doc. heh.

    I've gone a minidoc that's just photoshop, indesign, firefox,word and acrobat for when I'm editing copy in designs and I want to focus.

    http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_di...

    It's free and great for visual people like me. I think quicksilver is great but I end up spending more time being like uhhh, what was it I wanted? than just click open.
  • Oops, I checked out DockSpaces and then realized it's not really going to be useful to me. 80% of my work is done in Firefox or Coda. But the funny thing is it changed my dock so that it was down in the corner on the left side, rather than centered on the left like I have it. Finally figured out how to center it again. Had to drop to Terminal and type:

    defaults write com.apple.dock pinning middle; killall Dock
  • Lori
    Why not use the built in Terminal app?
  • Not sure what got me onto iTerm in the first place. I do know that I love the fact that the application quits when the window closes. I don't have to manually quit the application.
  • Colin
    Caffeine - easy to use quick disabling of sleep for whenever you want to watch a vid
    http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/maco...

    Dropbox - easy online file storage and sharing
    http://www.getdropbox.com

    Perian - adds quicktime support for numerous video formats (frankly apple should just buy this and implement it into quicktime)
    http://www.perian.org/

    Personally I don't use Quicksilver anymore. I never used it for anything other then app launching anyway so I switched to Namely. Adium is nice but until it supports AV chat I'll stick with iChat.

    For twitter I've been using Syrinx ( http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/28373/syrinx ) which has less functionality than twhirl but it has a clean UI and it's an OSX native app and hooks into Growl.
  • Just found an awesome app for flickr junkies that you might be interested in: Flickery
    http://tr.im/flickery
  • I've been using jUploadr for awhile for my Flickr uploading on multiple platforms. I've started using Lightroom though and now use the Flickr plugin for that for all my uploading needs.
  • "Oh hey, someone I like has software recommendations"
    "Oh, crap, I already use all of these."

    Although I have to give props to http://www.destroytoday.com , he has both my preferred twitter app and my preferred flickr app, and a design aesthetic awesome enough to make me build an icon set for the rest of my apps to match those two.
  • TextMate - the one, true text editor.
    Fluid.app - for Site Specific Browsers (SSBs)
    Anxiety - for Todos
    Little Snitch - lockdown your outgoing traffic
    MacFusion - easy GUI for MacFUSE filesystems.
  • Fluid.app has been pretty cool to use too. I have two of them configured. One for WeeWar and another for my email (Google Apps). My only complaint is that it acts kind of funky with Google Docs.
  • Quicksilver is my absolute favorite essential application. Pixelmator is a pretty good lightweight photo editing program. I love Grand Perspective for disk usage, and Ukelele if you want to modify your keyboard layout. Textmate is hotttttt for programming.
  • I've seen a lot of people suggesting TextMate. I'd probably be using it if I weren't using Coda, but the website organization of Coda is awesome. One app that lets me edit code locally, remotely, check in and out of version control, and even SSH into servers FTW.
  • Bean is a killer free text editor for basic writing. http://www.bean-osx.com/Bean.html It has the most awesome multi-select feature where you can command-select different parts of your text (non inline) and change styles all at one time. Gone are the days of making changes one by one to inline text.
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