Smashing magazine inspired this post. They listed 13 applications to make your life easier, but I really didn’t think any of them were that useful. Here is my list to help you trick out your new Mac.
- QuickSilver: I love this application. It’s a launcher on steroids and is probably the application I miss the most when I am using Windows. I can call up any file or application with just a few keystrokes. I don’t mean Ctrl-Alt-T-Left Big Toe and Nose, I mean Ctrl-Space and start typing the name of it. It’s a wonderful tool and I recommend not only installing it, but giving it a good effort, it might seem awkward at first, but within a week you will never know how you lived without it. Download
- Growl: Growl is your swiss army knife notification engine. You can style your notifications to display when, where and how you like, and tons of applications support it. It’s an essential add-in to Firefox and Adium. Download
- Cyberduck: Cyberduck is my FTP client of choice on Mac. It’s probably not a lot of good to a mainstream user who has little need to FTP, but if you are a webmaster, you will love it. Download
- Adium: Chat people, iChat is cool but serious un-equipped to communicate with your mass of PC friends. Adium supports it all, it’s infinitely skinnable and in a few years of my use, very stable. If you want to chat on MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, AOL, Facebook, MySpace, ICQ, and many more at once, this is the tool for you. Download
- Live Mesh: Forget .Mac or .Me or whatever they are calling it these days. If you just want to keep files in sync across a few machines, both Mac and PC as well as Windows Mobile, Mesh is incredibly valuable. I run it on every computer I own and use it at least once a day. Files in your mesh are located on all computers set up to syncronize and also in your free space on the web. Never wish you had that file again and save tons of wear and tear on your thumb drives. Download
- Text Wrangler: This is kind of like Cyberduck, your general user won’t need it, but if you ever touch HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript, etc. It’s a great color coding text editor. Download
- VLC: Let’s face it, not everything runs in Quicktime, even if it did, who would want to? VLC is your one player to show just about anything. This one of the first apps I install on a new Mac. Download
- Handbrake: Like to watch your DVDs when you travel but wish it was easier to get them on your iPhone, iPod, Zune, PSP, etc.? Handbrake will rip DVDs to just about any format you could need. Download
- Firefox: Safari is fine, but I just love Firefox, especially since I can mirror the setup on my PC and keep everything in sync with FoxMarks. Download
- Spaces*: Yea, this is a cheat, it comes with OS X, but that makes it free right? If you are not using multiple monitors on your Mac, you should be using Spaces, enable it and see what it’s all about. Download
Give some of these a try and let me know what you think? If I missed some, add them in the comments below!
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Thanks for the Foxmarks tip! I was wishing for something like it just this morning.
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I’d agree with all of that. But I’d substitute Live Mesh with Dropbox. I do like Live Mesh but it bugs me that it doesn’t just run as a menu bar icon, so its very easy to quite the program and lose sync. If they fix that, I might start to use it again.
So, what was the 11th to 13th application for Free OS X Apps?
Adium is the application for me. Since I have to communicate with my client always. Great post. be back to read more.
Note on FoxMarks… It’s now called “xmarks” and available for Safari and IE. I’m using IE8 on Win7, FireFox on Mac and Ubuntu… Xmarks keeps it all in sync.
FireFox is still a winner due to AdBlock+, NoScript and other such addons.