Favourite applications for the Mac
LemurGirl has got her hands on a shiny new iBook courtesy of her brother so I thought I’d give her a heads up to my Mac favourite apps blog post only to realise I never finished it… Okay, so here goes.
Internet
Browsing
While Safari might serve most needs it’s not perfect and occasionally you’ll want a second opinion. Camino is a fast, native Mac application that utilises the core of Firefox. Hardcore browsers may want to check out OmniWeb or pick-up a development build of Safari!
Chat
iChat AV may look pretty and do video conferencing but it only supports AIM and Jabber. If you use Messenger you could grab the new 5.0 Mac release and give it a whirl. If you use more than one network then check out Fire or Adium X both unifying MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber, IRC and AIM in one user interface (Adium also supports Lotus and Novell chat protocols), much like Trillian does for Windows. IRC users however would be better off looking at Colloquy.
News feeds
Keep an eye on what’s going on RSS-side with NetNewsWire and it’s free little brother NetNewsWire Lite.
Media
Organise
Delicious Library will manage your media collection like no other. It can draw lovely virtual shelves of your media by grabbing images from Amazon, syncs the lists to your iPod, managed loans by integrating with Address Book and iCal. It also lets you scan your collection in via the iSight camera or Bluetooth scanner, search via Spotlight or voice, get details for your titles out of Amazon and let you add your own notes and ratings for each.
Play
Apple’s DVD Player came on in leaps and bounds in Tiger but even with that and QuickTime you’ll want to install Windows Media Player for Mac for those WMV files and VLC for everything else unaccounted for.
Album art
It’s all very well iTunes and colour iPods displaying the album art for tunes you’ve purchased but what about the ones you ripped from your own CD’s? Well Album Art for iTunes does just that, trying (with varied success) to grab the correct album art from Amazon. While you’re at it why not throw album art all over your desktop and use it to choose what next with Clutter.
Tweaking
User interface
If you don’t quite like the default look of your Mac, change it. ShapeShifter is my personal favourite tool for this job and you can choose from a whole host of themes. Some favourites include mes (based on Apple’s Architect) and Gerswhix (based on Mac OS 9).
Options
There are a host of hidden options in OS X and TinkerTool will reveal them for your tweaking pleasure.
Integration
Mobile phone
While Tiger has all sorts of goodies for syncing address books and calendars with your Bluetooth mobile BluePhoneElite takes this one stage further giving your Mac caller ID, turning down your iTunes when a call comes in, sending SMS from the desktop and much more.
Power users
Unix tools
While OS X comes with a bunch of tools normally found on Unix variants some are a little out of date, others are not included at all. Try Fink or DarwinPorts for your favourite tools (Windows guys can try Cygwin or UWin if you can understand the installation procedure).
Net control
Want to keep your network under control? LittleSnitch will rat out what your applications are doing on the network, where to and what for. You decide what they can connect to and what for.
Battery monitoring
If you’re using a PowerBook or iBook then before too long you’ll be cursing Apple and their seemingly quick-to-degrade batteries (and if you’re an iPod owner too). Use coconutBattery to see how much of a charge your battery can produce compared to when it was new, how many charge cycles the little blighter has been through and how long you’ve had him.
There are plenty of other apps out there, check out Apple’s Downloads, MacUpdate, VersionTracker and SourceForge for more.
Let me know if you find anything good I’ve missed ;-)
[)amien
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