In the vein of CNet, and others, top apps lists, here’s my top Mac downloadable applications that enable or enhance my roving work experience with my MacBook Pro…
TextWrangler is a free, lightweight and highly capable text editor. It’s perfect for reading documents with unidentifiable extensions, or editing some code, and light years ahead of TextEdit, the crappy text editor that comes with OS X. The UI can be a little confusing and non-intuitive at times, but practically anything you’d want to do is in there somewhere.
NetNewsWire Lite is the free version of this top-notch RSS reader. All my friend’s blogs and geek news sites are aggregated into one window that I can browse like e-mail. I know I’ve railed on RSS before, but when you read as many blogs as I do, it comes in handy to be able to see them all at a glance.
Location X is a tool that allows you to change a wide array of system settings based on your Location in System Preferences. It can even automatically detect that location by looking at your connected wireless network. If you work in a draconian network like I do during the day, but also want to be able to quickly re-configure for a less oppressive network when you get home, this tool is for you. It’ll change everything from your proxy settings to your default printer, and will fire one or more AppleScripts for you to change things it doesn’t handle.
Handbrake is a dead simple DVD ripper. There’s lots of legitimate reasons for ripping DVDs — backing up your home collection, putting videos on your iPod, or extracting clips from movies to put in a video (within the constraints of fair use, of course) but before Handbrake it wasn’t very easy to do.
MacJournal is just that. It’s a simple note-taking tool that offers hierarchical organization of your notes. It’s little more than a rich text editor, but it helps you structure and browse things like meeting notes easily. There’s a free version, and it’s worth the click.
Parallels Desktop + Bootcamp = cross platform bliss. Even in beta, the latest version of Parallels offers astounding functionality. This software is not free, but when they ship their next major version, I’ll put down the $80 in a heartbeat.
CocoaMySQL is like phpMyAdmin only slicker. If you administer WordPress or other sites that use mySQL, and you’re on a Mac, get this free program. It’s not quite as user friendly as SQL Server, but it’s pretty darn close, and it’s a whole lot cheaper to use MySQL.
Honourable Mention: Fan Control. There are times when you want your MacBook to warm up — like when you get your laptop out of the car and put it on your lap and it’s freezing cold. Most of the time though, it’s better to keep your computer cool. When given the choice, Apple will always choose “runs quiet” over “runs cool” and they rarely give you the choice. That’s what Fan Control is about. It allows you to set thresholds for when the fans kick in, and it also allows you to change the minimum speed. Since installing Fan Control, my computer has been consistently cooler — except that one staff meeting where the room was freezing cold, then I turned the minimum speed way down so I could warm my hands up!
Anyone else know any good Mac tools?
Posted on January 23rd, 2007 by Jonathan Wise
Filed under: Digital Toys
jonandnic dot com uses:
So way to not give us links… lol
*cough* GOOGLE *cough*