My Mac Customizations II
The College upgraded my machine… I now have a nice MacBook Pro. I’ve had a few issues which I’ll blog separately about. First I thought I’d revisit my Mac customizations, which I first published last year.
Good free software:
- Cyberduck: Secure FTP
- StartupSound.prefPane: Silence the startup “bong”
- Growl: System-wide notifications
- NicePlayer: A clean movie player
- Codecs: Perian, Flip4Mac WMV
- iStat Menus: Shows CPU, network, memory, disk usage in the menu bar. It also supports showing the date along with the time.
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MacFUSE and sshfs: Mount a remote directory for read/write access. - Audio Recorder: In case I need to record something using the built-in microphone
- Eclipse: For software development
- GraphViz for Mac: Awesome GUI for an awesome graph layout tool
- Integrity: Link checker
- iStumbler: WiFi finder
- Pacifist: Extract files from packages. Useful if you need something from your install DVD
- Sightspeed: For video chatting with people who don’t have iChat
- Thunderbird: News reader, and graphical email viewer
- Spark: Control iTunes with the keyboard
- SimplyRar: Unpack rar archives
- Jing: Screen capture utility. It’s functional but doesn’t have a lot of options.
- SafariBlock: Adblock for Safari. It works with Safari 3.0, but you have to put it in /Library/InputManagers and chmod -R root:admin it.
- Gallery Remote: Upload photos to my gallery
- Fink Commander: For installing Unix stuff like subversion, tetex, etc.
- Apple OS X Developer Tools: gcc, plus a lot of cool performance tools like Shark. Link the /Developer/Applications directory to /Applications/Developer for easier access.
- TinkerTool: Advanced tweaking of options, such as not creating .DS_Store folders on Windows mounted drives
Non-free Software:
- Adobe Acrobat Pro
- Adobe Photoshop CS3. An interesting contender is Pixel Editor. Since I get a site-license discount for Photoshop I use that, but Pixel might be just as good
- AutoPano Pro: Expensive but really good panorama stitching software
- Quicktime Pro
- Saft: A relatively cheap way to improve Safari with features like type-to-search. Not Safari 3.0 compatible yet.
- Compost: Automatically manage the trash can
- Apple iWork: I’m sick of how MS Office for Mac is still stuck in 2004. I thought I’d try out Apple’s offering
- VMWare Fusion: For running MS Office when I really need to and other Windows-only apps. Their “unity” mode is pretty good although it has a few rough edges. I picked VMWare over Parallels because it’s a bigger company with a longer track record, my own good experiences with VMWare on Windows, and relatively less complaints about their VM.
- Adobe Lightroom: For folder-based management of digital pictures and (hopefully soon) videos. I like the interface better than Aperture’s. iPhoto is just too primitive. They won’t let me arrange photos into folders, for example (and “events” doesn’t fully solve the scalability problem). Pretty much the only thing I use iPhoto for is the redeye correction, which works great when it works.
Deprecated software:
- Quicksilver: It’s just too buggy. And on my new laptop Spotlight is usable as an application launcher
- Fugu: I switched to Cyberduck. I like the interface better.
- MS Internet Explorer: Not offered any more
- Norton Anti-Virus: Just not necessary
- iView MediaPro 3: Bought by Microsoft, and generally very clunky. I really like (1) how it can manage videos, and (2) its folder-based management. The second issue is handled decently by Lightroom (but not iPhoto), and I hope the first issue will be resolved soon.
- Synk: I’m using a hand-rolled rsync solution which works with my unRAID server to make backups take up less space.
- Missing Sync: I’m limping along without syncing my Palm for now. I’m hoping that Apple will add appointment entry soon to the iPod Touch so it can become my new PDA.
- RealVNC: You can connect with the vnc:// built-in now.
- iChatOnLogin: iChat has this functionality now.
- iCalFix: It’s fixed now.