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Ask HN: What apps are essential for mac?

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

#31

Post by robin_reala »

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…

Thumbs up for Fluid. I use it for Google Reader and BBC iPlayer. Reader in particular works well as Fluid has built in support for it: it tags the Dock icon with the number of unread entries (à la Mail.app).

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

#32

Post by jhickner »

asciilifeform wrote: post #17

Home and End Key Fixer. I found my machine to be nearly unusable without it. Quicksilver, to avoid the terrible GUI as much as humanly possible. (I have my MacBook because it is the only non-Windows notebook with fully working suspend mode and peripherals. Why did you buy yours?)

DoubleCommand works great for this as well, even in Firefox 3, and includes a lot of other handy key-remapping.

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

#33

Post by papa »

Lots of excellent pointers from others...I'll add a few I haven't seen posted:

- InstantShot: nice little screenshot utility (I use it daily)

- VueScan: swiss-army knife of mac scanning apps if you need to hook up a scanner. Costs a little, but you get lifetime upgrades. Well worth it.

- LittleSnitch: network monitor. tracks what kind of network activity your apps are up to. Costs a little, but also worth it if you value your privacy.

- JollysFastVNC: fast and free VNC client (I've been using it over Chicken of the VNC).

- OmniDiskSweeper: Disk utility shows you which files are hogging up the most hard disk space. Free. I also recommend many of Omni's other products. Omnigraffle (not free) is also excellent for diagramming.

Also, not mac specific, but the sqlite manager plugin for Firefox is also very helpful.

I don't know where others go to find different Mac apps, I usually hit macupdate.com (and sometimes versiontracker) these days, mostly out of habit, but would love to hear other recs for this.

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

#34

Post by elai »

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…

I would use uTorrent for a bitorrent client now. I find it's just more effective as a BT client. NetNewsWire is a good RSS client. And I would use VMWare Fusion as a virutalization software vs. Parallels.

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

#36

Post by elai »

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…

Cornerstone is a good alternative SVN client. Cyberduck is a pretty good general purpose SFTP/FTP/S3/etc client. I like billings better than on the job personally.

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

#37

Post by njharman »

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…

> 1. Adium

Doesn't do IRC. In fact I've been unable to find any osX chat client that does IRC and IM.

Anyone found a solution?

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

#39

Post by swombat »

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…

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 anything like that... works great here.

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

#40

Post by mcav »

njharman wrote: post #37
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…

> 1. Adium Doesn't do IRC. In fact I've been unable to find any osX chat client that does IRC and IM. Anyone found a solution?

Colloquy [http://colloquy.info/] works well for IRC. Doesn't do IM though.
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