Oyvind’s favourite Mac OS X applications
Since people are asking, I’m going to write about the applications I use on my Mac. This first article will be a list that I change from from time to time. I also will make posts on the advanced use of some of them.
More after the jump!
Here is a list of my favourite Mac OS X applications. Since you came here, you might want to check out some of my other posts about Mac.
(Clicking the name of the application, takes you to the homepage of that application)
Adobe Photoshop CS. I use Photoshop for everything, except doing the lawn. There are hundreds of sites featuring brilliant Photoshop tips, like this and this. One book on Photoshop I couldn’t live without is Katrin Eismann’s excellent “Photoshop Resturation & Retouching. When my grandmother left me a big box of faded old photos, Katrin’s book came to the rescue.
Another very good book if you use a digital camera and Photoshop, is Scott Kelby’s “The Adobe Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers”. You will learn alot, including retouching, color correction, body-sculpting, sharpening, noise removal, masking and special effects. My most used Photoshop book.
Addressbook. I love Addressbook, especially the fact that it syncs with Apple’s .mac service. I sync my addressbook automatically to the web EVERY time I have entered something in it. Addressbook still have some minor problems, which I have posted about before.
Automator. Automator comes with Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger). I have written a few posts about Automator. One of them is Getting things done with Automator and Spotlight, on how to set up an automatic Todo-list on your Mac, without any special software.
Backup. I use Backup to backup (big surprise). If you haven’t made a backup the last days, do it now. It’s amazing how much hazzle it is to recreate all your work if your drive fails tomorrow morning. You need to have a .mac account to use Backup.
BlogAssist This clever little app sits in your menu. You copy something, choose the right item in the menu, and BlogAssist “wraps” whatever you copied with proper code. Real timesaver. Only thing I could wish for was a global hotkey for my most used items in the menu (like weblink). I have tried assigning shortcuts in the “Keybord and mouse” control panel, but that didn’t work. If you know how to do this, contact me.
BurnoutMenu . This is also an app that sits in your menubar most of the time.
It’s a todo-list, a nice and clean one. The best part of it is the .mac syncing. You can even let it make an html file of your todo-list, and autopost that on a webpage. An improvement on this feature would be an option to passwordprotect that page from inside BurnoutMenu.
CandyBar lets you change the default icons of Mac OS X to whatever you like. Not just one icon for one folder, but every icon for ever app and document on your Mac. When I tell people about this app, they tend to fall into two categories:
1) “Why do you want to do that?”
2) “Wow! Cool! Tell me more!”
If you’re in 2), head over to Iconfactory and grab some iContainers. Icontainers are collections of icons, that lets CandyBar change the look of lots of Finder icons in one operation.
Example:
This icon set is called iSystem by David Lanham (he has lots of cool stuff at his site). iSystem also has a matching set called iSystem Extras.
Nitram+Nunca also makes some very good icon sets. If you have a RAID with several volumes. Or just lots of disks: Name the “Red”, “Yellow” etc. and stick a colored badge from Nitram+Nunca on them. It speeds up your navigation and helps you go straight for the right icon on your desktop.
Ok, I see that I need to make a seperate post on nice Mac OS X icons. Watch this space.
Colloquy is my choice of IRC client. It’s shareware but you can use it as long as you like. Donate if you like it! Colloquy is two best features are 1) it stores your IRC friends in your normal Address book. And 2) it looks very nice on the screen. You can download styles on the Colloquy site.
Cyberduck is fast, good-looking and free. As with Colloquy: Donate if you use it a lot. It’s my choice of FTP programs. I must admit that Panic’s Transmit is great too, but I haven’t tried it for some time as Cyberduck is more than enough for my simple needs.
Dashboard is something Apple started in OS X 10.4: A way to have small apps doing useful (and not so useful) things for you. Some people claim Apple stole the idea from Konfabulator, but John Gruber explains why it isn’t so.
I didn’t like Dashboard very much in the beginning, but now I use it all the time. I have set the lower right corner of my screen to activate Dashboard, a corner that isn’t used for much.
System preferences > Expose. That’s where you set it. It makes it very fast and easy to start Dashboard. I will make another post with my fav widgets.
DEVONthink Pro is an application I have download many times the last years. I have used it for a while and left it with that. But the new version of DEVONthink Pro is very interesting. Yo might have read how Steven B. Johnson uses DEVONthink Pro to see new connections in his work and research. It takes quite some work but is very interesting.
I have downloaded the latest beta and started adding data to it. And I will report back how it goes. You also may want to have a look at Pascal Venier’s GTD on DEVONthink photoset on Flickr. Seems like a smart way to use DEVONthink to organize your life the David Allen way on your Mac (here’s another way to do it).
Dictionary is one of the new features in Mac OS X 10.4. Try this: Park your mouse over a word in Safari or another application. Hit “Command + Ctrl + D”. A small window pops up and shows the definition of that word Click “more” to read more about it.
Or not: If it’s not written correctly, it will show you “No entries found”. Hit “more” and most times it will suggest some words that is similiar to the one you wrote.
Disk Inventory X 1.0. I downloaded this only a couple of days ago. If you need to see what is where and how much space it occupies on your harddisk, check it out.
Dock Dividers. Not really an application. Here’s how it looks:
See? Nice white dividers for your dock. Very good idea, Adam!The good thing is that is doesn’t involve installing any hacks or anything. Just download the dividers, put them somewhere on your drive, and duplicate the divider you like the most (there’s a couple of different one’s to choose from). Then drag them to your dock.
The ones I haven’t got around to write about:
iPhoto
iTunes
NetNewsWire
NovaMind
OmniGraffle
OmniOutliner
Quicksilver
SubEthaEdit
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
