My Favorite OSX Apps of 2006

I know a couple of people that are getting new Macs in the next couple of months and said they would appreciate a list of my favorite tools. Instead of given that to them in email, I thought the masses would enjoy my favorite apps and tools of the moments. You know who the masses are — all three of you.

I have two categories — Free and Commercial. I didn’t break Free into “Free as in Beer” or “Free as in Freedom” because, well, it’s a big mixture of both. “Free as in Beer” software seems to be very common in the OSX world. So be it — you can investigate if they are Open Source or not.

On the commercial side, of the the software has demos that you can try before you buy. No, I don’t like to buy software anymore without trying it first. I should also state that I haven’t purchased many of them, but I liked them enough that I thought about it, and probably would if I worked on OSX full-time. And a few I have purchased anyway.

I’ve blogged about most of these apps before, so if they seem familiar to you, that’s why
Free Stuff

• iTerm — The first thing to install on your new Mac, if you think you may do command line stuff.  Seriously.  Macros, bookmarks, tabs, the whole ten yards.  Great tool
• Quicksilver — Sort-of a GUI/command line launcher.  And more.  Much more.  You really have to try it out on your own for a while before you get it.  This should be the second thing you install.
• MacPorts — This is the project formerly known as DarwinPorts.  Are you missing your favorite Unix tool?  Then install MacPorts and type sudo port install app_name and you are off to the races.  Using MacPorts makes install Ruby on Rails dead simple.
• Cyberduck — Easily the best GUI FTP app I’ve ever used.  And I don’t like GUI FTP apps, so that says something.  Point and click, or drag files from Finder to Cyberduck.  Easy as it gets.
• Pac the Man X — This is Gina’s favorite game.  A great Pac Man clone.
• Firefox — As of a few days ago, I switched from Opera to Firefox 2.0. Not 100% sure why — I still recommend both.  Firefox has all the comforts of home and work.
• VLC — VLC can understand more formats that Quicktime.  If you do anything with videos, you need it.
• Aquamacs — okay, only for Emacs geeks, but still — a great version of GNU Emacs.
• Yep — This is going to be commercial soon, so get the free version while you can.  It’s a great way to keep track of documents.

Commercial Stuff

• OmniWeb — I think it’s the best browser for the Mac.  If I worked on a Mac full-time, I wouldn’t hesitate to buy it.
• Textmate — The videos make it look very good, but I’m still stuck on Emacs.  If you aren’t an Emacs person, it’s surely worth a look.
• SQLGrinder — Manage any database in OSX style.  All you need is a JDBC driver — most of which come with it.
• NetNewsWire — I think it’s the best way to read your RSS feeds. Worth $30?  I’m not so sure.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t like it.

This list may change in a week, but there it is — the best of the best.  At the moment.

Getting Acquainted with Quicksilver

This is the first entry in a periodic series about Quicksilver, an application launcher/Swiss Army knife for Mac OSX.

“That’s vague,” you’re saying.  ”What is it really?”

Well, that’s hard to describe.  That’s what I think this periodic series will help to identify.

I’ve been a Quicksilver user for a long time, but have only recently been trying to really harnass it’s power.  Always before I used it to launch applications that I don’t use often enough to give it space on my Dock.  What I did was lauch Quicksilver (Cmd-. on my machine, but that is configurable) and start typing the name.  Generally the default action is to open, but that can be changed as well.  In fact Quicksilver will change it for you.  Yeah, you read that correctly.  Quicksilver monitors your patterns and choses what you usually chose as the default.

But you can do much more than that.  Start typing a name of someone in your Address book and you can compose an email to them.  Start typing the name of the file (like a NeoOffice file), and open that in proper application.  Or, instead of choosing ”Open”, choose “Email to . . ” and then type the name of someone in your address book.

So how does all of this work?  Here is my overview:

• Start Quicksilver (again, on my machine it’s Cmd-.).
• Start typing the name of your file.  Not the right file?  Hit right arrow to choose another file with the same beginning.
• Hit Tab to move to the Action field.
• Start typing the name of your action.  Not the right one?  Again, choose the right arrow to choose the appropiate action.
• If you are done, hit “Enter” to execute.  But in the example above, it needed another item (because it needs to know who to email to!).  So hit Tab and choose the item like the two above steps.

In the above example, an email will be started with me as the addressee with that file already attached.  Neat, huh?

There are other neat tricks.  If you start typing “Documents” as your first item, then hit right arrow, you will get a menu of all the files in your Documents folder.  Highlight one, then hit Tab to choose it.  Then you will be able to choose your action on it (Open, Email, Move to Trash, etc.)

I hope this is enough to get you started in Quicksilver.  The very initial curve is a little rough  (hitting Tab to chose things, for example, took me a bit) but using it a little bit you will find it becomes very natural.  Obviously there are more tricks than this, and I will share more in the future.

Not Disco, but Cyberduck

Confession time — I’ve never really liked GUI ftp programs. I don’t find ftp commands too cryptic (anymore) but have always thought that GUI ftp programs were too complex. Wanna get a directory? “mget *”. Simple and easy. I did use FileZilla briefly, but it really screwed up some files for me, so I stopped and then used ncftp and then lftp for a long time.

But I heard from a good source that Cyberduck is a great FTP app. I was dubious, but as said, the source was good. I downloaded it, played with it for a little bit and decided that I was decent, but then moved on. Because it’s GUI ftp, and I don’t like GUI ftp apps.

This week I was ftp’ing some files and the files were bad. I usually had good luck with lftp, but since it wouldn’t let me switch from binary to ascii and vice-versa, I couldn’t tell what mode they were in to start with. I needed to check and the only think I had handy was Cyberduck. So I fired it up

And, really, I’m impressed.

I was grabbing a huge amount of files but it queued them nicely and started. I could leave it alone and it kept going. lftp did this, but I could set my mode in Cyberduck but couldn’t in lftp. After this, I tried sftp and that worked nicely in Cyberduck, too. Very nice. I may use this more often.

Installing PHP5 on OSX: Many Paths, One True Road

A week or so ago, I needed to play with some PHP apps on my MacBook Pro. The hosting provider that this may go up on uses PHP5 but OSX comes standard with PHP4. So I decided to install it myself. I thought that this would be an easy task and I was quite wrong.

The Entrophy PHP build looked good. It had some good libraries attached to it and I wouldn’t have to compile anything. So I installed it. The install script worked nicely — I didn’t have edit any configs. It would have been better the Entrophy PHP package would have worked. I don’t know what happened, but I couldn’t get a phpinfo() command to work through the web (it worked fine on the command line). There was no error in the Apache log. It just flat-out didn’t work.

So next I tried the PHP5 build from MacPorts. It built fine, but it didn’t find my MySQL install by default. If I wanted MySQL support, it seemed I have to install MacPorts’ MySQL. But I already had MySQL installed! I could have fussed around with it, I suppose, but I could have compiled it manually by then.

And so installed PHP5 the old-fashioned way: ./configure --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql; make; sudo make install. Not pretty, not fun, but after editing the httpd.conf things worked.

This whole affair reminded me of DLL conflicts on Windows or RPM dependency woes on Linux. This is the first this has happened to me on OSX. And I hope that it’s not a sign of things to come.

Yep — it’s a good document keeper

I first heard of Kip from FreeMacWare.com and then ran into it again on a blog cast. Both places described it as ”iPhoto for PDF’s, only easier”.  When I went to Kip’s webpage this weekend and noted that it has been renamed Yep.  That’s okay — it’s still a great system.

It’s easy — tell Yep to import in your PDF file and then you can tag it to your heart’s content. But what it’s a paper your signing?   Well, just scan it in.   Yep has direct support for a scanner, but I have my printer-scanner on a different PC.  I scanned them in and saved them as EPS and JPG files and Yep was able to import them in and save them to a PDF (not as magic as you think, since Preview does it, so this is built into the OS).

Okay, so you have those receipts and paperwork in.  So now what?  Tag them to your hearts content.  Have a doctor bill?  Scan it, import it, and then tag it with the name, doctor, etc.  When you have it all done, you can display all the documents.  Hover over a tag and all the docs that have that tag will be highlighted.

As you can see, this is a lot better than a filing system. But it does dictate having a good backup system in place when that hard drive fails. If you have a Mac, I highly suggest you try it out (it’s free at the moment).  If you have Windows or Linux, well . ..I guess are just have to miss out.