A couple of weeks ago Tim posted his must have software and tools. Always one to steal a good idea, and wanting to balance out his Windows focus, here’s my list.
General Apps
Safari – I’m not a huge browser plugin guy and Safari is pretty darn fast.
Firefox – The above being said, having a backup browser is a good thing.
Mail.app – Solid mail client with excellent free form searching.
iChat – I never got into Adium because this guy has always worked for me.
iCal – Really looking forward to true Exchange integration with Snow Leopard. Google Calendar integration means I actually know what is scheduled at home now.
iTunes – Does a wonderful job with podcasts and video podcasts.
Bloglines – All my RSS in the same place on any computer.
Twitter – Still not sure why I like it so much.
OmniFocus – No program has saved me more often than OmniFocus. Plus it integrates perfectly with Mail.app which makes Inbox Zero easy.
OmniGraffle – People always ask if there is a Visio for the Mac. The question is wrong. It should be is there an OmniGraffle for Windows? (Answer: No.)
Comic Life – If you have ever read one of my design documents you’ll know how much I love this one.
MS Word – Word is the standard for business documents.
Keynote – All my presentations and screencasts are done in Keynote. The animation support alone is worth the price of admission.
Snapz Pro X – Speaking of screencasts, this is my screen capture program…
QuickTime Pro – …and since I’m unable to do anything in a single take you gotta edit.
BBEdit – As far as editors go BBEdit is old school. Sometimes it is good to be old school.
Parallels – For those times when you have to run Windows.
Transmit – An FTP program that costs money? I know, but it makes up for it by being brilliant.
Developer Tools
Terminal.app – Before OS X I was on Linux/Unix. You can give a guy a great UI but you can never take away the command line.
TestTrack Pro – I have used this just about every day for the last seven or eight years.
Surround SCM – Well, since I kinda work on it and all…
Xcode – It baffles people coming from Visual Studio world but it has really turned into a nice IDE.
Instruments – Because sometimes we all leak memory.
Shark – And sometimes we just run slow.
UnitTest++ – Best cross platform C++ unit testing framework I have found.
BuildBot – Nothing more fun than getting emails about broken CI builds. Wait, there’s lots of things more fun than that.
For a free, lightweight version of BBEdit, I would recommend TextWrangler.
Or you could use a real man’s editor:
http://code.google.com/p/macvim/
The full power of Vim wrapped in the beauty of Aqua.
I knew the apple fan boys would show up for this post
That’s running really short of creative blog post ideas Apple fanboys to you bub.
I’m also loving Cyberduck for my FTP needs. Classic FTP sucked big time but Cyberduck is fast and stable.
…and standard old Preview does the job much quicker for viewing PDFs than Adobe Reader.
Still looking for decent software for viewing and organising photos in one go, like the interface provided by Windows XP that lets you see a bigger version of the image instead of just a thumbnail.