Mac Installation Applications 101
This is the third part of a short series of posts about installing Mac OS X. Today’s article covers the third party applications I use, except for my email setup, which I’m saving for the next part, and some other goodies I’ll cover after that in the final part.
Since coming back from repair, my macBook has been much better behaved. It does still spontaneously put itself to sleep while I’m halfway through typing something every now and then, but it doesn’t bug me anything like as often as it did before the repair. I’m still twitchy about whether it will go the distance though, so I upgraded the coverage to the 3 year Apple Care last week incase there are any more shenanegins.
But, without further ado, in alphabetical order, here are the first applications I install on any mac I plan to spend any time on:
1. Adium
I’m sure Apple’s iChat is wonderful and all, but the sad fact of the matter is that not all of my friends own Macs. As a matter of fact, a few of them even have Windows. Worse, some of them even like Windows (I’m looking at you Stoney!), and that means they don’t all use AOL and .Mac! But, despite their faults, I still want to be able to IM with them, which is where Adium comes in, allowing me to chat to all my deranged Yahoo! and MSN buddies 
Price: $0
2. Firefox
When I’m surfing, I do actually prefer to use Apple’s Safari. There is no doubt that Firefox is a superb browser, but there are so many plugins and toolbars that it’s all too easy to get sucked into trying out the latest and greatest extensions or otherwise tweaking the browser, rather than getting actual work done with it.
That said, when I’m developing for the web I need to have firefox around to check that pages render correctly, and I must admit that I also use the firebug and web developer plugins… but that is a whole other post.
It’s also a sad fact that many web developers aren’t so diligent about cross browser compatibility, and sometimes I need to access a site that won’t work in Safari — my online banking is a prime example. 
Price: $0
3. Mac Ports
One of the things that first attracted me to OS X was that it’s UNIX under the hood, and the vast majority of the applications I became accustomed to using and writing code for on Linux work equally well on OS X. Mac Ports is to OS X as apt-get is to Debian Linux; that is, it will install Free Software (plus dependencies) from the command line without my having to compile things from source by hand.
It bears mentioning that I used to use Fink, a project with very similar goals, but they either fell way behind the current releases (or omitted entirely) a small number of packages I cared about, and which macports did carry. It’s possible to have both Fink and Mac Ports installed on the same machine if you want to mix and match, but I like to keep a tighter reign on the contents of my disk than that.
Price: $0
4. MenuCalendarClock
One of the many things I really love about the Mac is how all of the applications are so integrated. The standard OS X menubar clock is very basic though; showing only the time and optionally the date if you don’t mind losing 10% of the width of your menu bar. MenuCalendarClock makes the display itself much more configurable, but also displays a navigable translucent drop down calendar when clicked. I maintain my hard landscape calendar in iCal, plus birthdays for all of my family and friends, and this dropdown calendar is a real timesaver for me. It also integrates with iCal ToDo items, but I don’t use those myself.
Price: $0 for the basic version, or $19.95 for the advanced version.
5. Money Dance
Many moons ago I struggled with my own double entry book keeping code — written in emacs lisp of all things — but, as my finances became more complicated, I needed something with a lot more power. Almost a decade ago I switched to gnucash on Linux, but trying to keep track of my mortgage, taxes for two jobs and royalties for my first book, and mounting credit card debt proved too cumbersome. The first UNIX application I ever paid for was Money Dance, and I’ve been a happy user ever since!
Money Dance gets the job done and it’s written in Java, so when I migrated to OS X a couple of years later, all of my records came across seamlessly too.
Price: $29.99 after a 100 transaction free trial.
6. Nocturne
A while ago I wrote about using OS X’s built in accessibility features to make reading from the screen more comfortable. The Nocturne application adds a small button to the menubar that toggles a night vision mode, which not only flips the gamma curve, but optionally turns off shadows (which otherwise look like a sort of annoying neon glow) and goes into black-and-white (which reduces the funny negative look on images when the gamma flips).
Price: $0
7. Quicksilver
Quicksilver is the third-party application for the Mac. On the surface it’s a kick-ass application launcher, but the more you look into it the more it can do. If you haven’t yet discovered the joy of Quicksilver, there are some cool articles linked from 43folders that will give you a running start with it.
Price: $0
8. SSH Tunnel Manager
This is a nice front end for managing sets of SSH Tunnels. For each firewalled network that I have access to, with just a single click I can open and close tunnels to the mailserver, intranet webserver and internal fileserver. There’s no rocket science here, and certainly I could write a one line shell script to do that, however, SSH Tunnel Manager gives me a nice display of the status of each tunnel. Although the website advertises a stable version, I’ve been using the “unstable” 2.0b3 release without incident for a few months.
Price: $0
9. SuperDuper!
I’m still waiting patiently for Leopard’s much touted Time Machine, but after my recent backup nightmare, Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper! is closer to my heart than ever before. The free version is great for occasional full backups, but the license fee is well worth the cost for quickly updating a bootable external clone of your entire hard-drive. Either way, if you have a drive failure you can always switch in the external clone, or access any of the files on it without any special tools.
Again, a carefully crafted rsync script would probably do the trick (although I have no idea how well rsync copes with resource forks), but the convenience of automatic scheduled backups makes SuperDuper! a no-brainer. I’ve been meaning to figure out how to set up a folder action that automatically synchronises the backup drive whenever I connect it, but don’t seem to have found the time yet. Feel free to leave links or instructions in the comments…
Price: $0 for basic version, $27.95 for full version.
10. Textmate
Not your daddies editor!
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love emacs as much as the next guy, but somehow it just isn’t a Mac application. There’s no integration with the rest of the desktop, and it feels very heavyweight and cumbersome if I just want to edit a text file and exit.
Textmate, on the other hand is very mac-like: on the surface it looks very basic, and edits text very well, but once you start peeling back the layers it is chock-full of goodness. I can’t possibly do it justice in a few short paragraphs, but I assure you I tried a lot of editors on the mac before I settled on this one. And while you’re at it, the Pragmatic Programmers’ Power Editing for the Mac is a fun way to start peeling those layers!
It’s not without its drawbacks however, lacking syntax modes for various M4 and autotool files I spend a lot of time editing, but armed with the book I’ll likely find time to write them myself real soon now.
Price: €39 with a 30 day free trial.
11. Twitterrific
You either love twitter or you hate it. If you decide to use it though, Twitterrific is the best client bar none. I have it running in the background the whole time I’m logged in, so please do friend me (gvvaughan) and join in the fun!!
Price: $0
12. VMWare Fusion
Parallels was responsible for my buying a macBook, but VMWare was hot on its heels within a few short months, and I soon switched to Fusion (around March) when they were a nose in front with VM snapshotting and by displaying host battery status inside the virtual machine.
Fellow Brit Blogger James Urquhart has a nice post comparing mac virtualisation solutions at CuppaDev that explores all the alternatives.
Price: $0 for the beta, $39.99 for pre-orders of the final version, $79.99 for the final version at release.
Honourable Mentions
Until recently, I would have certainly put Journler on this list. But even though I’ve blogged about how I’ve put it to good use in the past, I’ve grown to dislike Journler since the recent 2.5 releases. It might suit you better though, so feel free to give it a try. Instead, I’m reverting back to using Spotlight with my Documents folder as a digital junk drawer, and will soon be migrating the digital third of my GTD processes to iGTD… in no small part because of the excellent integration with iCal and Mail. However, I haven’t really used it enough yet to know whether we will like each other in the long term, hence the omission from my list.
6 Responses so far
2007.07.16@3:46 am
[...] Link to Article firefox Macbook Installation Applications 101 » Posted at azazil.net on [...]
2007.07.16@5:33 am
1, 2, 3 – All sorted.
I did try out MoneyDance, however i found the transaction register a bit annoying to work with. Still, i thought the Dashboard was great! Speaking of Java based finance apps, i had a look round for free and/or open source apps. The only promising ones i found which appeared to still be active were Buddi and jGnash. The former being a little bit too basic (e.g. single currency only), and the latter having that goddamn awful Swing look, though being a bit more functional.
Also sounds interesting. Will have to check it out!
Not quite for me yet, though maybe i’ll change my mind in the future.
I have actually been looking for something to manage SSH tunnels, and this seems to fit the bill. Although the downloadable binary seems to be build for PowerPC, so i might have to grab the source-code and recompile for Intel – thus saving valuable CPU time by not having Rosetta running in the background (yikes!).
Not tried SuperDuper, though i did try Carbon Copy Cloner which surprisingly worked like a charm when i backed up my entire hard disk over firewire. In the past i have used rsync to synchronise my home folder to a backup disk, though i wasn’t entirely sure whether resource fork’s were being copied over (though reportedly they are). In any case, now i use FileVault i just copy over the .sparseimage file every once in a while which is much easier!
I’m not a Textmate convert yet. Still, from what i have heard it sounds like a great text editor.
Being a complete newbie with regards to Twitter, this is something i’ll have to look at.
Thanks for the plug. I appreciate it!
With regards to GTD, you could use a GTDTiddlyWiki which run’s self-contained in your web browser (which i think is neat). And on a similar concept, there is the todo.txt script.
I eagerly anticipate the next instalment of “Macbook Installation Applications 101″.
2007.07.16@3:36 pm
Hmm, what about 2.5 changed your attitude towards Journler? It doesn’t bother me that you would choose to drop the program, but as the developer I’m just curious.
2007.07.16@4:14 pm
Hi Phil,
Thanks for dropping by, and thanks also for all the fun I had using Journler. I don’t wish to sound like I’m complaining about Journler, which is a fine piece of software. There were a few things that made it harder for me to enjoy using it recently:
I’m sorry I didn’t take the time to file bug reports at the time rather than just switching to a different application, but hopefully you’ll find my criticism useful.
Cheers, Gary.
2007.07.18@11:34 am
All the apps I’ve pimped here have served me well for at least a few months… years in some cases!
I did try Buddi recently, but I’ve been such a happy Moneydance customer that I have no reason to cut over to something new. When I made a survey of the field, the main problem I had was finding something that handles multiple currencies properly, which is essential for me as sometimes I’m paid in US$ and sometimes in UK&sterling;, and I have accounts and investments in different countries I need to track. Moneydance does all of that admirably.
Try it for a week just as an application launcher. I promise you’ll never look back.
Hadn’t noticed that myself — but then I don’t know how to check, other than looking for ‘Universal Binary’ in the release notes! It would explain why it sometimes takes an age to respond to input though. If you do build a universal or intel binary, please put a copy up on your website
I picked SuperDuper due to a recommendation on YML, and honesly didn’t check out the competition… Having to log out of my filevault account and into another admin account to backup my sparseimage without fear of it changing during the backup is making me reconsider filevault, and maybe mount my own encrypted .sparseimage as my Documents folder so that nightly backups are easier, without compromising the security of my sensitive data. I’ll no doubt report my findings right back here!
The Ruby support is amazing… it is the editor used by all the rails developers. Plus you can extend it with ruby (or python, or bash, or perl – whatever your preference is) rather than having to learn elisp. I’ve owned a TextMate license for almost 2 years, but it wasn’t until I read the book last September that something clicked and I started using it by default. The simple interface makes it easy to overlook how much power you have.
I’m still on the fence. I’m belaying my decision on whether twitter is useful or a just a time sink until I have a reasonable circle of people in my twitter-friends.
You’re welcome.
With respect to GTD: Textmate has 2 GTD bundles that I’ve yet to explore. But (as you’ll discover in Macbook Installation Email 101) MailTags is integrated with iGTD, so I’m going to stick with that for a while.
2007.07.18@12:40 pm
Gary,