Now That You're a Mac User….

If you scan the web you’ll find quite a few web pages that give you a list of Mac software that is just plain useful. Some lists show free stuff only – there are many good free software products for the Mac. Some give you a mix of paid and free. All such pages are incredibly useful to the Mac newcomer, because they help you get started..

Here’s mine. It’s different from the others in one respect, at least. It lists all the software products that I actually use.

This makes the list a little skewed because, for example, it doesn’t include much software for manipulating sound and video, because I don’t do that. However it has the virtue I’ve used every product listed for at least 6 months and I find each product mentioned to be worth owning, whether it cost something or nothing:

Generally Useful Software

This is where I put everything that doesn’t classify easily.

FireFox: I tried using Safari for a while and not using FireFox. In the end I just gave in. FireFox is better, for me at least. If you do web development you need Firefox for its developer plug-ins anyway. I tried IE but it was hopeless. Of course I use them all and Opera for testing the web pages.

Quicksilver: This is a launcher but it does a great deal more if you really want to plumb the depths of the program. If you do nothing more than install it to launch programs then it’ll be worth the effort of downloading it. It makes you more productive and it’s free (it would be worth paying for).

1Password: This is damned useful. It allows you to have different persona and it maintains and remembers passwords for each. It also keeps your financial info for filling in orders on web sites. It encrypts everything. You end up not having to remember passwords any more.

KeyCue: Either you use keyboard shortcuts or you do not. I use them a lot so KeyCue is for me. This utility throws up a menu of all shortcuts in the current application when you hold down the command key for a second. If you don’t use shortcuts, forget it.

WireTap Studio: This turns your Mac into a tape recorder and you can record outside sounds or any sounds the Mac makes from any applications. Nice simple interface. I use it to record technology briefings I have – in case I need to quote someone accurately.

Parallels: This runs Windows or Linux on the Mac. I use it for Windows. It can run Windows apps in Windows itself or in the Mac environment. I have a few Windows apps that I still run, but not many. So it’s useful to me. I doubt if I’ll use it in a year or two.

VMware Fusion: This is the same as Parallels. I got them both out of curiosity. I run VMware on the laptop and Parallels on the big Mac. They both work fine. If I had to choose I’d choose Parallels but I’m not sure I could tell you why. Parallels has a better logo?

Office Software

Journler: For me, this is the best piece of software currently available for either Mac or PC. You can organize everything except photos, music and software development with it. You can organize yourself; nearly all your files, and all your work. Because of Journler, I now have 4 distinct areas of activity:

• Photos: I manage all the files in Aperture and then mess with them in Photoshop.
• Music: I manage all the music in iTunes.
• Web Development: I use the directory structure dictated by WordPress, adding in extra directories where necessary.
• Almost everything else: By that I mean all text, all diagrams, all spreadsheets, presentations, saved web pages, odd files of any kind. All done with Journler. It’s a huge productivity win.

I will do a detailed review of this software at some point to explain why I’m so impressed.

iWork: A better designed set of office software from Apple. Apple claims that about 10% of Mac users use iWork. I’m not surprised.

Pages: Pages is what Microsoft Word should have become but never did and probably never will. U is for Usability. It’s not perfect but so much easier to use than Word that , at first, it surprises you. Word has fits and get confused with diagrams. Not Pages.

Numbers: No point in pretending that Numbers is as powerful as Excel, because it isn’t. Numbers has far better graphics than Excel and it’s got a better interface, which means it’s easier to use. It works as an Excel replacement unless you’re really into spreadsheets.

Keynote: There’s not much to choose between Keynote’s presentation capabilities and PowerPoint. Keynote has better effects and understands multimedia well, but PowerPoint is by no means shabby. I use them both, but most of the world uses PowerPoint.

Office 2004 (Microsoft): I keep this for compatibility issues. iWork exports to Microsoft formats, and it will read them, but in the rare event that there are problems, I fix them using Office. I don’t intend to upgrade.

Word: I’ve never got on with Word because it’s never been easy to manipulate diagrams in Word – and I need to do that a lot. It’s been over 15 years since the GUI became the standard interface and I expect to be able to drag and drop diagrams. I can with Pages, but with Word it messes up.

Excel: I’ve never been a spreadsheet geek, but if you are you’ve probably got macros up and down the Yin Yang and there’s gonna be no substitute for Excel. If all you do is add columns of figures every now and then, I’d use Zoho or Google. I use Apple’s Numbers, but it’s no Excel. I use Excel if I have to.

PowerPoint: Powerpoint has always been good software and I still use it for keynotes and other public presentations that I get to do. I’ve taken to Keynote for video/podcasts, none of which I’ve posted yet, but that will happen. Keynote gets multimedia more than PowerPoint does.

Linotype FontExplorer X: This gives me all the capability I need to manage my vast collection of fonts, most of which will never be used and shouldn’t be. Managing fonts is troublesome and Linotype provided this for free. It works well. Kudos to them.

Photographic Applications and Utilities

Aperture: If iPhoto is not good enough for managing your photo collection, you need Apple’s Aperture. It allows me to manage all my photos (over 10,000) in a single library. In my opinion it is also the best software available for cropping, and getting the color and light right on photos.

PhotoShop CS3: It’s overpriced, I know, but the truth is that it has a very healthy ecology of plug-ins that do just about anything to a photograph – and, there is nothing better. The new version is worth getting too, for its quick selection capability. It makes a perfect complement for Aperture.

CorelPainter X: I bought CorelPainter X because I figured it would have some different photographic effects than Photoshop. It does and some of them are pleasing. It does not pretend to be a PhotoShop replacement, just a painting program for those like me who like to mess with images.

Downsize: Doesn’t do much, but what it does it does well. It shrinks an image to a given size and puts a border round it with shading. You could set a workflow up in Photoshop to do exactly the same thing, but I bought this instead, because it’s simple and intuitive.

GoogleEarth: It doesn’t really fit in here, but I have it so I can mess with it when I’m bored. I deleted it once and then I brought it back when I read that Google now owned the sky at night and had included it in GoogleEarth.

Graphics Applications and Utilities

OmniGraffle Professional: This is the dominant drawing/graphics program on the Mac. It is far more usable (much better interface) than any other graphics product I’ve used. It’s also lot more powerful than it seems at first glance. I don’t use anything else for diagramming.

Art Text: I bought this on spec. It does just one thing; allow you to mess with text so that it looks funky, cool, classy or whatever. You need this or something like it if you do a fair amount of design work, which I do. You can probably do it all in PhotoShop but this product has a minimal learning curve.

FlySketch: I bought this to take snapshots of parts of a screen. I tried it and liked the way it worked. You can also draw on the images, but I rarely use it that way. A capability for doing this comes with the Mac and there are free products for doing this, but so what?

GraphicConverter: It’s a utility for converting any graphic format to any other – it supports formats that I never knew existed, so it does nearly everything. Either you mess with lots of formats or you don’t. If you do, this is worth the ticket. If you only do it a little, like me, it’s a toss-up. I like utilities like this, so I got it.

PDFPen: This is an application for editing PDF files and adding notes to them. Adobe’s Acrobat Professional does far more for you. But this has proved good enough for me. I rarely need to mess with PDFs, because all Mac software prints to PDF without problems.

Color Schemer Studio: A nice simple color selection tool. I use it for selecting simple matching colors for web page design and also for drawing diagrams. Matching colors is easy but matching shades is not so easy. This is a simple functional solution.

Development Tools for Web Site Building

MAMP: If you intend to develop with PHP on a Mac just get this. It just works and it costs nothing and you don’t need to mess with anything, if Apple creates a new version of OS X. I downloaded it and it worked in one minute flat. No more messing with parameters.

BBEdit: Probably the best source code editor ever created. Some developers (I’m told) switch to the Mac in order to use this editor. It has more features than the deluxe edition of the swiss army knife and it’s clearly designed “by developers for developers.”

CSSEdit: Brilliant cascading style sheet tool for adjusting the look and feel of a web site. It locks together a page and the associated CSS file and allows you to gradually adjust the design, pixel by pixel. It’s worth having even if you already have Dreamweaver.

Transmit: You need an FTP ultility. This is regarded as one of the best – although it’s not free and you can get “free” if you want. I tried it and it just worked so I just kept on using it. I wouldn’t be willing to part with it now and I’m still not sure whether that’s because it’s really good or because I got used to it.

Utilities

OmniDiskSweeper: This tells you which directories and files are taking up most of the space. Sometimes you just don’t know why you’re out of disk space. This tells you. You’d think that OS writers would naturally include this, but not Microsoft, not Apple.

Onyx: This does the computer maintenance work that needs doing every month or so. Apple seems to believe that the Mac is self managing. Compared to a PC it is. But caches still fill up and log files get bulky and so on. Best keep them tidy. Onyx does it all and more besides, and it’s free.

Click on this link: PDQ Mac to see a list of other postings on Apple Mac productivity.