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Some useful OSX Applications

Besides the iLife Suite, here are some applications I’ve found useful lately. Here they are. I will update this in the next few days.

These apps I just can’t live without (in no particular order):

  • Spanning Sync.- Syncs your Google Calendars and iCal. $25 per year, or one-time $65.
  • Ecto.- If you do a lot of bloging, you can use TextMate as I have mentioned before, or you can just use a blogging app. This is a good one. $17.49
  • Notebook by Circus Ponies.- A good outliner that also lets you bring in disparate information from the web, link files, etcetera. $49.99
  • Adium.- The instant messenger client for OSX that is multiprotocol and open source. Free.
  • Coda.- An excellent web development app for PHP types. $79
  • Fluid.- A lot of us use a lot of different web applications. This lets you make a site-specific browser that only runs on this application. Free.
  • Free Ruler.- A simple screen ruler. Simple, efficient. Free.
  • iShowU.- Records anything going on on your screen into a movie. Excellent for showing “why things aren’t working”.
  • OfficeTime .- Tracks your time by project. Useful for accurate time accounting. $47.00
  • VLC.- A video player that does it all. Because life is too short to worry about video codecs. Free.
  • VMware Fusion.- Virtual Machine. Run any intel OS on your Mac. $79.99
  • iWork.- If you don’t have giant excel files with Macros and you don’t live by the MS Office suite, this is very good. I don’t have office on this machine anymore and I don’t miss it. $79
  • MacPorts.- Requires the OSX development tools installed. If you are a Linux, Unix or BSD switcher, get this to maintain your more unix-y software. SVN, Git, colordiff, languages. Basically the whole ports tree ported over, plus a lot of Mac-specific stuff. Free and Open Source.

Here are others that I have been playing with, which you may find useful or interesting:

  • Journler.- Kind of interesting, journaling software. Lets you keep a journal and add video/audio to it. Some todo type features. $34.