I was nosying back through some old posts on my site and came across this one from 2006 regarding my favourite Mac OS X applications, and figured it’d be interesting to update this for 2009 / 2010. While the ‘way’ I work feels like it hasn’t changed, the range of core applications I use to accomplish daily tasks certainly has:
- Google QSB. Yes, I’ve recently ditched Quicksilver since moving to Snow Leopard on my MacBook, mainly for performance as it seemed particularly sluggish for unknown reasons. I may switch back, but for now I’m using a customized version of QSB with Google’s obnoxious branding removed.
- Adium. Still the best multi-protocol chat client.
- Apple’s Mail.app. I moved all email for my domain to Google’s Hosted Domain service about a year ago, and with that stopped using mutt and started using Apple’s mail client full time instead. It has its quirks, but the Spotlight integration etc. makes up for it.
- Fever (+ Fluid.app). I’ve also ditched Newsfire and started using Shaun Inman‘s Fever instead, which does some clever stuff that makes wading through a mountain of RSS feeds that much simpler and quicker. It also plays nicely with my iPhone, another important consideration.
- Firefox. My main browser on OS X, it’s quick enough for the most part but wins mainly because of the plugins that I can’t live without. Losing the Delicious menu feels like I’ve lost an arm.
- Things. I use this to organise all my ‘tasks’, both at work and outside. The iPhone synchronisation works a charm.
- Tweetie. Since Twitter has taken off this is now part of my ‘core’ applications that I feel lost without. While the desktop client is in need of an update, it’s still about the best there is.
- VMware Fusion. Always handy to have around, I’ve got a minimal Windows XP install which I use daily (still no fucking VMware Infrastructure Client for Mac or Linux) as well as an OpenBSD VM and an Arch Linux VM.
- Adobe Lightroom. I now do the vast majority of my photo sorting and editing all from within this one application, only switching to Photoshop when there’s some pixel-specific task at hand.
- Yojimbo. You should probably read this post by Shaun Blanc on why you need Yojimbo in your life.
- Simplenote and Justnote. Together these provide the perfect way to keep notes synchronised between my iPhone and anywhere else, the Justnote client on OS X being a neat little HUD-type application that’s minimal and unobtrusive. While you can pair Simplenote’s web-interface with Fluid to create a little desktop application, the Justnotes client is a little neater and works better.
- Dropbox. Great service which provides a seamless way to synchronise files and folders with their cloud service. It’s not just the synchronisation though, their whole service is amazing from being able to restore multiple versions of the same file through to proper clients for Mac, Windows and Linux.
- iTunes, Growl, Terminal.app, and the same core console applications – GNU/screen, lftp, vim, and irssi mostly installed via MacPorts. Stuff like OpenSSH, bash, and so on also go without saying :)
So there you have it, that’s the definitive – for now – list of applications that I couldn’t live without. I’ll look back in another year or so and see how that’s changed….
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Nice one, Nick. Bookmarked and will investigate some apps I’ve never heard of from this list.