Comments on: MacOS X Essentials

By: Casey

Casey — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 21:59:44 +0000

I would add Fugu as a file transfer tool, it's very good. I replace the standard menu bar clock with JetClock so that I can have four world times easily available. I second the vote for Quicksilver, but I am still running Panther and have been told that Tiger's search makes QS less amazingly better.

For text editing, one must keep in mind that vim is already available, and clearly superior to emacs.

By: alastair

alastair — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 21:59:44 +0000

There is a bit of overlap between QS and Spotlight, it’s true. If you want to launch an application, you can use either of them. But QS is just so much better set up for actions other than finding stuff. And Spotlight indexes a lot more of the filesystem than QS does (though it is by no means perfect). So I tend to use spotlight for “find a file containing this phrase” and QS for everything else. Clearly some better integration is called for…

By: marxy

marxy — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 21:59:44 +0000

Despite being a long term BBEdit user, I've come to like TextMate (the editor used in that amazing Ruby on Rails "woops" demo video) a lot.

A few others: OmniGraffle for drawing pretty pictures, OmniOutliner for outlines (until Dave Winer's OPML editor for mac gets a serious facelift), skype for ringing people for free (but don't leave it running), Acquisition for P2P goodness, CocoaMySQL and Chicken of the VNC.

You mention built in apps, don't forget: Calculator is amazing - check out the advanced mode which does everything a programmer needs, Dictionary is just lovely, Automator is incredible but I've only used it twice.

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 21:59:44 +0000

I discovered and installed QuickSilver yesterday, and have already concluded that it is the best OS tool for any system, anywhere. Simple, but brilliantly done. Demonstrated it at home last night, to the instant response “I don’t suppose they do one for Windows?”

By: alastair

alastair — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 21:59:44 +0000

All good recommendations marxy, especially Dictionary and Calculator.

Chris, there is a Windows equivalent (I forget the name), but it was nowhere near as good as QS the last time I looked at it. You can also get a similar effect by training yourself to use alt-ctrl-G to invoke google desktop's search. Again, not as good as QS though..

I'm wondering why the GNOME folks haven't yet copied this for their Desktop?

By: marxy

marxy — Wed, 23 Nov 2005 21:59:44 +0000

On the ftp/sftp side, I’ve just been turned on to CyberDuck http://cyberduck.ch/ really nice implementation. Check it out.