My Mac OS X Bling Saturday, February 17, 2007

I am now about 2.5 weeks in to my MacBook Pro owning experience. I will say that I am really really happy with the experience so far. I have tinkered with the idea since OS X was introduced and finally decided to give it a go. I am going to provide a rundown of apps I have installed and use. This is everything (I think) that I use that isn't part of the standard OS X install that came with the hardware. If you are an OS X user then at least some of these you already know about but maybe there will be a couple new ones here for you.

Firefox
To be honest, I didn't even give Safari a shot. One of the first things I did was download Firefox. Maybe I should look at Safari, but I probably won't unless at some point I hear/read something that gives me some specific reason to do so.

Desktop Manager
This is a virtual desktop switcher with nice effects (bling) when switching desktops like the rotating cube and others. VirtueDesktops has some nice features but it crashed more than once for me. I may look again when the next release comes about.

TextMate
TextMate is The Full Schizzle. If you edit text (xml, java, c, ruby, groovy, screenplays, etc...) TextMate is for you. If you aren't familiar with TM, visit the site and watch some of the screencasts.

SnapZ Pro X
This is really nice software for recording screencasts.

Adium
Adium is an IM client that allows me to connect to MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber and others.

Skype
Skype is another messaging client. The only reason I have this in addition to Adium is that I have a meeting once a week with some folks overseas and we do that over Skype using its group voice capabilities.

NeoOffice
OpenOffice for the Mac. I haven't used it enough to say for sure if I really like it, but so far it is fine.

iRed Lite
iRed Lite is a utility that lets me use the standard MacBook remote control to control more applications than it otherwise does, like NeoOffice, PowerPoint and others.

QuickSilver
A slick utility similar to the built in Spotlight but a little nicer to use, at least for some things.

Spanning Sync
This lets me sync my desktop iCal with my public Google calendar, which I really like. The main site says "coming soon" but betas are available now.

Goban
I don't play computer games, except for Go. This is a nice Go client.

Blender
An awesome 3D animation tool. The movie Elephant's Dream was created with Blender. The entire movie is distributed under a Creative Commons license so you can get all of the production files for free and monkey with the movie if you want to.

StuffIt Expander
I don't have much to say about this one but I use it and include it here for completeness.

Standard dev tools that really aren't peculiar to OS X but I happen to use on my MacBook Pro...

Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ IDEA
I have installed all 3 IDEs. I use Eclipse primarily. I installed NetBeans because I am about to start doing NetBeans Platform development and need to get familiar with the environment. I installed IntelliJ for no particular reason other than I have a license for open source development, though I haven't used it in a couple of years.

I also use Groovy, Grails, JRuby, Ant and the Subversion Client.

I would be happy to hear about your favorite OS X applications.