art taylor

Inspired by the many "this is what I'm running on my Mac" posts, I felt compelled to sheep-up and add my own voice to the rumble.

• Path Finder

I just started using this based on an unremembered blog entry somewhere, but the big win for me is the "Drop Stack": rather than keep multiple finder windows open for copying, or having to drag a folder to the shelf for easy access, you can push files onto this stack, and then pop them off when you've navigated somewhere else. While the default intra-filesystem operation is "move", it appears only to copy between filesystems.

It also provides a "Processes" drawer, which is what you see above. I'm really not convinced of the utility of this other than grabbing quick screenshots, but I probably just haven't stumbled across the need yet.

• Cyberduck

  Astrogoth.com is running on a Linux box, and running SSH Secure Shell as the ssh server suite. For some reason I've not been that interested in tracking down, OpenSSH's scp doesn't work between my Mac and the Linux box. It was enough of a hassle getting certificate-based authentication working that having functional sftp and rsync over ssh was sufficient.

  That said, it's always been a bit of a PITA to do non-scripted file transfers between the systems. I like Cyberduck more than Transmit and friends, because I can bookmark remote directories and just drop files where I want to put them on the remote host. And it's free. For lightweight stuff not necessitating rsync, it's awesome.

• Camino

  I've had too many hassles from Safari and/or Firefox, and while Camino lacks plugins and extensions, it works, it never gives me the SBBOD, and it has only crashed once. (I wonder if that's related to the lack of plugins and extensions...naah.)

   

• Firefox

  Good god, you need a reason? The only reason not to use this is the rather poor extension support for OS X and the propensity to crash, two not-completely-unrelated things. I've been using Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox for almost two years now, on Windows and OS X, and have been pretty happy with it. Especially with Platypus.

• iCal

  It came out of the box, it's a little prettier than Entourage, and I don't need Exchange Free/Busy connectivity, which doesn't really work under Entourage anyway. I've just started hooking scripts to scheduled events, which is a lot nicer than cron if you want to use the GUI. I don't like cron on my desktop machine anyway, for some reason.

• IDEA

  I don't write much code anymore, but I still have a need to grovel through a lot of code written by other people. The Inspect Code functionality makes me appear smart during code reviews when I haven't had enough time to prepare. I can walk in with a few short complaints that sound deep, then I can think fast and ask the developer to explain the code. It makes me look, if not smart, less dumb than I naturally am.

• iTerm

  I don't really like this app, because it seems to cause refresh problems when I use it to ssh out and run screen remotely. Emacs is especially miserable under its influence. However, it's better than Terminal.app, and xterm/rxvt don't have tabs.

  I take it back, my problems appear to have been caused by using the default "VT100" terminal setting. Switching to rxvt solved all of my problems.

• iTunes

  iTunes kind of sat around on my machine for a while until I bought a 40GB 3G iPod in late 2003. Before then I used a Sony NetMD MiniDisc player, and if you have NetMD, you know Sony + Mac != True Love Always. With the iPod, I have about 20GB of music ripped or bought. However, I hardly ever listen to it from the PowerBook, but use it to rate the music, create smart playlists, and acquire music.

• Mail.app

  I used to use gnus for IMAP mail, but Mail.app is easy enough and pretty enough that I've switched. I still use mutt remotely, but I'm less and less enamored of curses-based MUAs at this point in my life. With so much spam that still makes it through spamassassin and bogofilter, I need to be able to do random-access bulk operations such as move or delete.

  I briefly played with some of the client-side naive bayesian spam filters, but they were a hassle and didn't process mail implicitly in the way I expected, so I deleted them.

• Missing Sync

  I am the unfortunate owner of a Treo 650, but this eases the burn somewhat. Not only did I buy a Treo, but I have AT&T GSM service, which charges approximately $0.04/kilobyte transferred if I choose to browse the web. Missing Sync allows me to dock my Treo, and surf out over the Mac's net connection, avoiding the AT&T bandwidth charge. There are a lot of apps that let you use the Treo as a modem, but not that many that go the other way, especially on the Mac.

  The other cool thing Missing Sync does is mount your SD card on the desktop as another drive, for easy copying back and forth. It's still much, much, much slower than using a dedicated SD adapter, but it's easier than Hotsync.

• NetNewsWire

  I have about 500 feeds, and I like NNW's hierarchy support. I didn't really need any of the features that full NNW offers, other than possibly the AppleScript support, but I use it enough now (especially with the NewsGator support) that it was well worth the subscription fee. I'd like to have a context menu in Firefox that allows me to subscribe to a linked RSS resource, but that's about it.

• OmniOutliner

  When Kat was in law school, and she got me hooked on outliners. OmniOutliner is sometimes brittle, and crashes not infrequently, but it's great for prepping for important last-minute emails to VPs and SVPs, and again, makes me look smart and prepared.

• I also use it for my desktop To-Do list, which is organised by category, and then decomposed further into immediate tasks. It maps loosely to project/next task, etc., for you GTD types, but isn't that refined as yet.

• Photoshop

  I have trouble wrapping my brain around GIMP, which I only use while on Linux anyway. This is the lingua franca, and the CS bundle is an absurdly good deal if you need Acrobat and/or Illustrator as well.

• Preview.app

  Faster than Acrobat Reader. Free. That's all. I wish it would close the app in the same way that Address Book does when the last document window is closed.

• Adium

  I used to use Proteus, but its lack of support for any but the most basic Jabber features sent me back to libgaim-based Adium. I'm also not using a mobile machine as my primary system anymore, so the need to support SOCKS and friends, which was one of the primary drivers for using Proteus, has lapsed.

  I tend to create an IM account for every company at which I have done work, to keep buddies separate, and to be able to hide from some, but not from others. I don't like running AIM/iChat, YIM, etc., because they all take up space on my Dock.

• Safari

  Safari is a free fallback for Flash and Java if Firefox poops itself. It's not my system-default URL handler, but Mail.app sometimes thinks it is. Known for frequent SBBOD.

• TextEdit

  Because xemacs isn't in my Quicksilver index, TextEdit is much faster to get to for quick notes. I use it on conference calls to keep tabs of what people said, especially when diagnosing a production outage, to log free-form statistics over the duration. It has no bells or whistles, other than some misspelling-flagging. It's free and out of the box, and those bells and whistles are music to my ears.

• X-Chat Aqua

  My secret shame is the amount of time I spend on IRC. Well, my previously-secret shame. Let's move on, ok?

• Mathematica

  I grew up with this on the NeXT Cubes at school, and since I really, really suck at Excel, this is what I turn to for any numerical analysis whatsoever. It's slow, it's way too expensive, but it makes me feel hardcore.

• X11.app

  I've been using emacs for 14 or 15 years now, and I can't quite shake the habit, although I've moved to XEmacs. Unfortunately, for free Lisp IDEs on the Mac, it's MCL or SLIME, and did I mention that I like free?

In addition, the ubiquitous Quicksilver, Salling Clicker (less useful since the Treo 650 (and all Palm devices) lack a lot of the cool push-type bluetooth support, and GeekTool (used only to put the current month's calendar on the root window) are not captured in this display. I use the CLI very heavily, but I won't go into the list of tools (awk, sed, ruby, sbcl, ssh, rsync, etc.) I use there.

In terms of "server apps" running locally, I primarily use MoinMoin for local notes capture for things that graduate from TextEdit above. Other than ComSwiki, it's the easiest wiki to install, and doesn't require a separate Smalltalk image to be running.