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March 31, 2006
Essential Apps for Mac OS X
I was asked by a friend, who is about to buy a new Mac, to recommend some good software for OS X that I find useful. I decided to make a post here as my response with a top list of essential software. In no particular order, here we go...
(programs in green are free to download)
- Safari (even better than Firefox in my opinion if you're on OS X, as far as its ability to integrate with the OS)
- Adium (switched over to Adium from iChat a while ago and never looked back)
- Skype (best VoIP client out there)
- Mail (despite a few quirks, you can't beat Apple Mail on OS X)
- iAlarm (indispensable multi-purpose alarm tool, it will even speak the news and weather to you!)
- Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop CS
- OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle (amazing programs for organizing ideas and especially podcast show notes)
- Microsoft Office 2004 (use sparingly if possible, I wish Pages was just a bit better so that I could switch over to it)
- Macromedia Flash/Dreamweaver MX 2004
- Cyberduck (truly awesome ftp client, best free one out there for the mac)
- iPodderX (I use it to manage all my podcast subscriptions, there is a free "Lite" version available online)
- iLife '05 (notably iPhoto, iTunes, and Garageband for podcast recording)
- NetNewsWire Lite (great free RSS reader, simple and elegant)
- ecto (used to manage my blog and write this very post)
- Azureus (for all your torrent needs)
- Colloquy (best IRC client for OS X)
- sixtyforce (if you're a fan of N64, this is a great emulator)
- Google Earth
- VLC (for weird codecs that QuickTime doesn't support)
Posted by Alan Joyce at 10:55 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Upgraded to MT 3.2
Well, I finally got around to upgrading the site to Movable Type 3.2. I had a couple problems, including a failure to recognize the 100+ comments that existed before the update. However, I solved it by re-importing all my entries from a backup, which gave me a duplicate of every entry where the new copy was recognized to have the appropriate comments.
After this complicated ordeal and painstakingly deleting every duplicate entry, I think everything is working well. I am enjoying the new trackback/comment spam blocking features, which should make my life much easier.
Posted by Alan Joyce at 10:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack