Comments on: 17 Must Have Mac Apps

By: Peseng

Peseng — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 05:31:26 +0000

Textwrangler is another good text editor =) for those of u that are fans of BBEdit

By: Derek

Derek — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:52:36 +0000

@ring
That’s a good question. I’m not sure that I’ll upgrade to leopard for awhile. The things that it has that are interesting all seem to be reproducible in (understandably) less beautiful ways. Time Machine looks really nice but is rather unnecessary as long as I backup like I should be doing. Spaces is nice because it’s integrated but its function essentially exists for me as Virtue Desktops. The most intriguing features are the new Finder and the Quick Open. Quick Open is not a new idea, but it would be nice to have. I know that it’s useful for me on my Ubuntu system anyways. Are you planning on upgrading?

Oh and what do you think of my list of Mac apps?

By: ring

ring — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:07:41 +0000

plan on getting leopard? it has some really cool features. check it out on the apple website if you haven’t already.

By: Derek

Derek — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 06:48:14 +0000

@william
Well I think that it’s strange to have return (probably one of the more commonly and accessible buttons) to mean “rename” because the usual action for a file is to open it, right?

Oh and I’d say that Quicksilver is an awesome program. I’m only just getting into it, but it has a way to turn around your workflow. There are pre-written scripts to do all kinds of neat things! And it’s excellent because it goes through a single interface. Have you tried it out much?

Hm well I’ll keep that applejack in mind, but I don’t think that’ll i’ll be using it. Have you found it to be very useful to you in the past?

I just found another interesting one. Check out RCDefaultApp which will let you change the defaults for any application. It seemed harder than necessary for me to do it otherwise (and telling Finder to always open a particular type didn’t seem to have the desired effect).

What do you mean an open firmware password? I’m not sure I even understand what that would be. I might get some security apps. There are a couple of good, interesting ones out there.

By: william

william — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 05:42:58 +0000

@derek
hahah, whenever i use a windows computer, i wonder why i can’t rename things using return. old habit i suppose.

if i recall correctly, the shortcuts in x11 work, but they just require the ctrl-key instead of the command-key, yes? at least that’s what i remember doing in gimp. but yeah, i couldn’t stand going back and forth.

quite a few of these programs are actually new to me. the programming ones, especially. most of the web and media ones i’ve used, though. been meaning to give aquamacs a whirl. might have to use monolingual, too!

haven’t done this on the macbook yet, but i’d recommend installing applejack, just in case you need to run maintenance stuff w/o going through the gui. i also have onyx on my computer, but i rarely use it. i guess it could be handy. oh, also, if you ever pick up some anti-theft software, there should be an open firmware password utility on your install dvd. little bit of extra security.

By: Derek

Derek — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 22:04:28 +0000

@william
Good call on the NeoOffice. I’d heard of it before, but never tried it (for obvious reasons). I believe that Open Office is currently developing an Aqua version, but it’s unreleased yet so NeoOffice is appropriate for those who, like you, get annoyed with X11.

Do you get annoyed by X11 because the shortcut keys don’t work? I get annoyed about that sometimes, but I ultimately get more annoyed at how non-intuitive some of the Apple shortcuts are. Return changes a filename? Ridiculous. Nothing’s going to be perfect, and I can always be more nit-picky.
Have you tried all/any of the other applications that I posted here? Do you have must-have apps to add?

By: william

william — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 21:50:12 +0000

if you like open office, you might want to check out neoOffice, which is ported to run natively on osx. running stuff in x11 just sorta gets on my nerves sometimes.

good call on appcleaner. i’ll have to d/l that one.

firefox > camino.