Wes’s Life

Two weeks ago, my trusty crusty IBM ThinkPad T42 decided to stop work­ing. The screen went really twitchy on me and after a few attempts to turn it on, it wouldn’t even dis­play the BIOS screen and it wouldn’t even POST.

Fast for­ward to last Thurs­day, my new Mac­book Pro showed up! Some­thing that I had been think­ing about for a while and list­ing over. And the first thing i did was put in the 4GB memory upgrade.

I’ve spent a full week work­ing on the Mac­book Pro and I can say that I do truly enjoy it. There are a few appli­ca­tions I would rec­om­mend down­load­ing and/or buying. Some are more for web design, but there’s a few pep­pered here for every­one.

• App­Cleaner @ freeMac​soft.net (free) - Oddly enough Mac OS X does not come with an appli­ca­tion unin­staller. I know purists will say just drag and drop the Appli­ca­tion to the trash and it’s unin­stalled. How­ever, there’s lots of junk that appli­ca­tions leave around, and this takes care of just that. This will also take care of System Pref­er­ences panels and Dash­board wid­gets as well.
• Net­NewsWire @ news​ga​tor.com (free) - I love my RSS feeds and I’m always look­ing for a better way to read them. For prob­a­bly two years now, I’ve used Google Reader because of the porta­bil­ity of it. How­ever, Net­NewsWire is a much better way to read the feeds and better yet is semi-​portable. It syncs all of your feeds and the read/unread status of each item to Newsgator’s servers and is view­able from Net­NewsWire (Mac), Feed­De­mon (win) and News­Ga­tor Online. It sat­is­fies my porta­bil­ity needs and is faster then Google Reader all at the same time.
• Adium @ adi​umx.com (free) - iChat’s han­dling of mul­ti­ple accounts had me look­ing for an alter­na­tive IM client as fast as I could and this was the most rec­om­mended one. After using it, I can see why. It does exactly what I want: han­dles mul­ti­ple accounts, shows me min­i­mal con­trols, tabbed inter­face and log­ging.
• Fluid @ flu​idapp.com (free) - Some web apps we use so fre­quently that just treat­ing them like another web­site can be annoy­ing. With Fluid, you create “appli­ca­tions” for each web app and you can put that in your dock and treat it like an indi­vid­ual appli­ca­tion. I rec­om­mend this for Back­pack.
• Miro @ get​miro.com (free) - While iTunes is great for down­load­ing pod­casts, Miro is a lot better for down­load­ing all of your video pod­casts (vid­casts, vodcasts…etc). It has a guide that rec­om­mends dif­fer­ent shows and has a lot of HD con­tent as well. I rec­om­mend Dig­gna­tion HD, Macbreak, Tik­ibar TV, Unwired and Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel Video Pod­casts.
• Ever­note @ ever​note.com (free) - While this is still in beta this is a great little appli­ca­tion in the same vein as Google Note­book. The idea is you have note­books and within those you can have notes. You can create notes either from scratch or ‘clip’ web­pages which just copies all of the selected (or every­thing if you don’t select any­thing) con­tent and makes a new note from it. I use this for copy­ing snip­pets of code and var­i­ous tips so I have one loca­tion to view them from. Also, this is a lot like Net­NewsWire in that it syncs to the server and there are Mac, Win­dows and online ver­sions avail­able. If you would like an invite leave a com­ment and I’ll shoot one off to ou.
• Anx­i­ety @ anx​i​etyapp.com (free) - This is just a front-​end to iCal/Mail’s todo list, but it does it well and does it in a great inter­face. The inter­face allows you to add new tasks to cal­en­dars and check them off…that’s it. Any­thing more and you’ll have to go some­where else.
• Busy­Sync @ busy​mac.com ($19.99/$15.96 with Mac­SPARKY coupon) - Porta­bil­ity is an issue for me, I’ve stressed this with other appli­ca­tions here. This little tool allows me to make changes in iCal and then view them in Google Cal­en­dar and vis versa with­out doing a thing. After seeing alter­na­tive options cost upwards of $40, I gladly paid the rel­a­tively cheap price to get this funci­tonal­ity.
• Coda @ panic.com ($79/$69 if you own Trans­mit) - This is a great tool and what you’d expect to find in between a text editor and a WYSI­WYG editor like Dreamweaver. No design view fea­ture like Dreamweaver to mess up your code, but the pre­view fea­ture bests that any­ways. Snip­pets allow you to store fre­quently used code (Coda pre­loads DOCTYPE’s as exam­ples). By far though, the best fea­ture is Pub­lish All, which after edit­ing and saving the pages uploads all of the mod­i­fied pages…fantastic!
• MAMP @ mamp.info (free) - For those web­sites you’re devel­op­ing that use PHP and MySQL this allows you to run an instance of Apache on your Mac at the press of a button. While slim on fea­tures, it allows you to set the root direc­tory for the server, which I promptly set as my client direc­tory.
• VMWare Fusion @ vmware.com ($79.99/$39.99 on Amazon) - I’m sad to say it but I can’t com­pletely get away from Win­dows and even worse is the reason: Inter­net Explorer. No it’s not my browser of choice, I haven’t used it for that since Fire­bird 0.3. What I do need it for is browser test­ing since the vast major­ity of users still use Inter­net Explorer 6 and 7.

So there’s my non-​exhaustive list of Mac appli­ca­tions that I’m using and enjoy. If you’ve got any rec­om­men­da­tions that I should try, drop me a line in the com­ments.