Essential Software List

[apple] 

Mirroring Mark Pilgrim's move to Linux, I have six months ago moved from Linux to OS X and have never looked back until now. Last week I sold my iBook and while waiting for my Macbook, I am typing this on my Debian GNU/Linux Etch box.

It's quite a difference.

Similarly, lots of friends are buying Apple computers right now and they usually don't know where to look for good software, what to get and what not to get. Here is my essential list (I have posted an initial version of this before on R-win.com):

Cross Platform

• Firefox, is best used for heavier browsing and web development with Firebug, Linky, SessionSaver, Live HTTP Headers.
• MS Office, I wouldn't spend any money on it (DUT provides it for free here), but in today's world being able to read and write these files unfortunately still is essential.
  One time I had to give a presentation at a research colloquy and the university provided laptop would not do anything. So I presented using Keynote and all subsequent presenters presented on my iBook using the installed PowerPoint version without a hitch. Sufice to say this was, great advertising for Apple.
  Update: DUT unfortunately discontinued the free Office plan. This is a bit of a shame because I have been hearing some very good stories about Office 12. Anyway who needs Office, author your documents in Markdown or HTML.
• LaTeΧ, for writing anything beyond one page and containing more than five headings.
• Vim, oddly enough, the Windows version of Vim for me is the best version. Getting the Linux and the OS X version to work sanely always seemed too much work for the hassle.
• Skype, the best and easiest VoIP client I know of. Skype sucks, Gizmo might do stuff but I don't know anybody who has it. Most serious Asterisk based real VoIP software is pretty much unusable.
• Plazer, share your location easily. Plazes has lost most of its relevance in todays microblogging presence world.
• Gaim no the new Pidgin, is the best substitute for Adium and available on both Linux and Windows.
• Python, for all your scripting needs.
• Eclipse is a very nice solution if you want a monolithic IDE.
• Subversion

OS X

• Quicksilver, with its plugins will vastly accelerate the most common actions you take on your system.
• Adium, essential cross protocol IM client, the best I have ever used.
• Textmate, one of the best all purpose text editors I have ever used.
• Saft, essential add-on for using Safari, session saving is essential in any browser.
• Keynote, best presenting software around. I cannot stress this enough. If you're a professional presenter, Keynote alone is worth buying a Mac for.
  I might be tempted to use S5 but it's a lot of hassle and only provides added web geek value.
• Flip4Mac, for when you need to play Windows Media files and DivX tools to add a load of codecs to your native Quicktime.
• Colloquy, simply a great IRC client.
• Subethaedit, it's nice to be able to edit text files together. Makes you wonder where else you could apply this kind of technology.
  Update: I have never managed to really use this piece of software. The lack of a free version may contribute to that.
• Witch, nice task switcher add on.
• Virtue, if you need multiple desktops Virtue is it at least until Leopard Spaces are in, and throwing around the cube is just plain fun.
• Xyle Scope, seems to be a great HTML/CSS editor.
• Omnigroup, the omni group makes great software. OmniGraffle is a nice diagramming tool.
• Aperture looks yummy judging from the movies on the site but it is very heavy weight, Adobe's Lightroom looks like a worthy competitor. For when I finally buy the SLR.
  Update: I have bought my 350D and I have been using the Lightroom betas for a while now. My conclusion is that Lightroom is a fantastic product for anybody who is serious about photography. I could not live without it.
  Update2: I have yet to try out Aperture seriously but I have already read several reports of people switching from Aperture to Lightroom because Lightroom does not block on any of its operations and therefore offers much more flow.
• Corripio, searches for matching album art for your music. For all those peole who do not want the lockin of the iTMS.
• NetNewsWire, the essential news reader, but Endo is getting some jazz recently.
  Vienna is a freeware reader which does all your offline tasks rapidly.
• SuperDuper!, backing up made easy.
  Update: Do the backup people! Reinier's Macbook recently suffered from a crashed HDD. Very painful.
• MPlayer for OS X is a neatly packaged version of mplayer and if that fails VLC which also looks pretty polished on OS X, will play it.
• Seashore, nice GIMP wrapper for light weight image editing tasks.
  Update: Removed this, because every time I tried to use it, it managed to frustrate me even more than the GIMP normally does.
• DoubleTake looks like a good image stitching program. I haven't really come around to shooting some real panoramas yet so this is preliminary.
• Gawker is a very cool camera recording and sharing tool.
• iTuneSleep has a clumsy interface but it is one of the best and most versatile alarm radio programs there are.
• Cyberduck is a free and solid SCP/FTP program.
• MAMP is a nice local web development setup with Apache, MySQL and PHP neatly packaged in one bundle.
• Parallels Desktop is the leading virtualization solution on the Mac. Useful if you want to run any other operating system on your Mac.
• MacFUSE with SSHFS is a nice way of attaching remote servers to your local system for easy access.
• Transmission is a very solid Bittorrent client.

Linux

• Debian GNU/Linux is the OS of choice for my servers. The people at Debian care and work so you don't have to. My desktop has been broken for a while now and I have been meaning to replace it with Ubuntu but have not gotten around to it yet.
• Apache 2.0, my web server of choice.
• Wordpress, the default blogging application, large community, easy to setup and use.
• MediaWiki, quickly start a collaboration annex content management system.

I'll be updating this list as I go. Probably lots more stuff will hit when I have my Macbook. Suggestions welcome.

Updated list: 2007-7-15

Made by alper at 2006-06-30 00:51 | Place comment (0)

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