Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What apps are essential for mac?

news.ycombinator.com

141–143 of 143 posts

Re: Ask HN: What apps are essential for mac?

#141

I'm recommending only free software here. 1. Adium for chat. It is just awesome. http://www.adiumx.com/ 2. Quicksilver. if you just want an app launcher spotlight is already good at that. http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-alchemy/downloads/list [edit: updated link to point to the recent versions] 3. Caffeine is small program which puts an icon on menu bar on which you can click to prevent your Mac from going to slee…

Why does anyone recommend Quickisilver? It's suffering from massive bitrot these days. Most users report frequent crashes, hangs, problems waking from sleep, and general slowness compared to Spotlight and LaunchBar? I really wish it wasn't the case, but Quicksilver seems to have had its run and no one is stepping up to the plate to preserve it. Most everything else you list is awesome though (although I think Evernot…

Why, Dave Fayram (http://www.google.com/profiles/dfayram), does anyone use Windows anymore? "It's suffering from massive bitrot these days. Most users report frequent crashes, hangs, problems waking from sleep, and general slowness."

Hmm. Sounds familiar. Or it would if I were still eating your company's dog food.

Re: Ask HN: What apps are essential for mac?

#142
I've got my Macbook pro 6 months ago. The best thing I ever buy. I'm programming and I use to use a Windows and a FreeBSD box before. Here, some free and commercial softwares I use everyday:

1. Terminal: Visor - Quake-style terminal http://visor.binaryage.com

2. Uninstaller: AppTrap http://konstochvanligasaker.se/apptrap/

3. SFTP: http://www.expandrive.com/mac

4. Quick remote filesharing: http://www.getdropbox.com

5. IDEA: NetBeans or ZendStudio

6. Virtual machine: Parallels - http://www.parallels.com

7. Text editor: TextEdit or TextWrangler - http://www.barebones.com/products/TextWrangler/

8. VPN: The native OSX thing does the job

9. Mobile sync/Addressbook: iSync does the job (Use http://www.feisar.com/ to find your mobile plugin if iSync doesn't have it natively)

10. SIP softphone: Telephone (works with Googlevoice+Gizmo5 and my local UK SIP provider) - http://code.google.com/p/telephone/

11. Notifier: Growl - http://growl.info/

12. Movie player: VLC or Quicktime+Perian codecs - http://perian.org/

13. Chat: Adium

14: Desktop display: GeekTool - http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/

Re: Ask HN: What apps are essential for mac?

#143

Stuffit Expander.

I prefer The Unarchiver http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html

I've seen many time Unarchiver saying a archive was corrupted or was unable to decrypt with the right password. Now I use unrar in command line. (imported from macport) . Much better!
Post reply on HN