Ask HN: What apps are essential for mac? • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by albemuth » Mon, May 18, 2009, 5:13 AM UTC

KirinDave wrote: post #23

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #8

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…

I'm surprised people can speak ill of Quicksilver, it is one of the things I just can't be without, I'm running an out of the box QS with just a couple plugins installed and have no complaints at all.

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

#132

Post by swombat » Mon, May 18, 2009, 8:05 AM UTC

KirinDave wrote: post #100

swombat wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QuickSilver is quicker than Spotlight. I don't want to have to wait a few seconds for Spotlight to find stuff... QuickSilver is usually instantaneous or very near it. Also, it doesn't depend on the spotlight indexing, so this means I can disable the spotlight indexing jobs which have a nasty habit of using up 100% of my CPU at random times while I'm doing something. Also, I haven't had any problems with crashes or an…

Spotlight is, generally, only slow the first time you search. Usually it's as fast as LaunchBar except for the very first time it is used. It has a reputation of being slow from 10.4 that is no longer justified.

I've found that it is consistently a few seconds slower. It's not slow as such, just slower than QuickSilver. And when it come to app launching, these few seconds kill, imho.

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

#133

Post by appl3star » Mon, May 18, 2009, 12:44 PM UTC

Developer: Coda, Cornerstone, TextWrangler or BBEdit, iTerm, ForkLift, Querious, Changes, iChm

Web Designer: CSSEdit, Flux, Dreamweaver, xScope, Xyle Scope, Picturesque

Researcher: Evernote, DevonThink Pro, ConceptDraw MindMap

User: LaunchBar, Overflow, Little Snitch, Super Duper

Web Junkie: 1password, Firefox, Tweetie, NetNewsWire, ClamXav, DoorStop Firewall, Net Monitor

Freelancer: TimeLog & GrandCentral

Photographer: Photoshop CSx, Portrait Professional, Aperture 2, GraphicConverter, PhotoReview

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

#134

Post by appl3star » Mon, May 18, 2009, 12:49 PM UTC

elai wrote: post #35

sirsean wrote: post #12

MacFUSE w/ sshfs, and MacVIM.

Or ExpanDrive. It's alot cleaner than MacFuse + sshfs.

no way. Never had more issues with a software (v1) - Now they tried to charge again for v2. And it was still unreliable :/

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

#135

Post by abyssknight » Mon, May 18, 2009, 2:52 PM UTC

Quicksilver (App launcher)

Onyx (Maintenance scripts)

Apple Developer Tools (Terminal/GCC/XCode)

SubEthaEdit (Collaborative Editing)

Textmate (Defacto standard editor)

Cyberduck (SFTP Client)

Perian (Codecs)

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

#136

Post by coopr » Mon, May 18, 2009, 4:48 PM UTC

tortilla wrote: post #13

Others mentioned here are great. In addition, check these out: http://perian.org/ - adds native support to QuickTime for many video formats http://www.fluidapp.com/ - Fluid, SSB (site specific browsers) http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/ - LittleSnitch, Monitor and block outgoing internet connections http://www.skitch.com/ - Skitch, screen capture and sharing http://derailer.org/paparazzi/ - Paparazzi, Full s…

http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com - SizeUp also moves windows with keystrokes - you pay what you like

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

#137

Post by jemmons » Mon, May 18, 2009, 6:10 PM UTC

maximilian wrote: post #48

boundlessdreamz wrote: post #8

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…

Transmission - bittorrent client http://www.transmissionbt.com/ I used to use transmission, but then I started using uTorrent, which I find has better performance. http://www.utorrent.com

I gave up both for Xtorrent, but YMMV.

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

#138

Post by jemmons » Mon, May 18, 2009, 6:29 PM UTC

Jakob wrote: post #16

tortilla wrote: post #13

Others mentioned here are great. In addition, check these out: http://perian.org/ - adds native support to QuickTime for many video formats http://www.fluidapp.com/ - Fluid, SSB (site specific browsers) http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/ - LittleSnitch, Monitor and block outgoing internet connections http://www.skitch.com/ - Skitch, screen capture and sharing http://derailer.org/paparazzi/ - Paparazzi, Full s…

Dont’t use Transmit. It’s slow and they haven’t released an update for months (years?). Yummy FTP ist the fastest and feature-richest FTP-client for the Mac. It’s synchronization feature is really good. (I bought both)

Transmit is every bit as fast as Yummy downloading and uploading a 10Mb file (S3 and SFTP), so I'm not sure what your impression is based on.

The last release was 11/24/08. It's always updated to take advantage of/fix bugs introduced by new OSes. There hasn't been a release in a whopping 5 months (?) because Leopard's been out for a while and there aren't any outstanding bugs.

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

#139

Post by jemmons » Mon, May 18, 2009, 6:35 PM UTC

crad wrote: post #19

boundlessdreamz covered a lot, here's a few more (mostly commercial but still awesome): 1. Things - Awesome task management - http://www.culturedcode.com/ 2. Mailplane - If you use GMail this is a must. - http://mailplaneapp.com/ 3. AppZapper - Remove everything about an app - http://www.appzapper.com/ 4. LittleSnitch - Filters and prompts on outbound ip connections - http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.h…

Things' lack of reliable, convenient syncing killed it for me. OmniFocus, while not as sexy and certainly more complicated than Things, has rock solid syncing to your iPhone or Mac via MobileMe or any other webdav server you choose. And its robust configurability means you can set up a very Things-like workflow if that's your bag. And the iPhone version is sweet!

If you want to have todos available in more than one place, Things will bring you nothing but tears.

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

#140

Post by juliend2 » Tue, May 19, 2009, 6:14 PM UTC

Oompa wrote: post #112

juliend2 wrote: post #64

I just reinstalled my mac today. Here is what i installed so far : 1-quicksilver 2-iTerm (terminal. with tabs) 3-Photoshop CS3 (cs4 is slow on my macbook) 4-Transmit 5-DropBox client 6-Textmate 7-Git 8-The Hit List (best osx app for lists) 9-LimeChat (irc client)

As of Leopard, Terminal.app has tabs.

Didn't know, thanks!