Trusty Applications
I have several handy applications that I use on my mac daily. Obviously a mail app and browser. Safari is very nice. I’m using Apple Mail, but Thunderbird is really a nice mail app, too. But for me, much of the business of computing is storing information, and being able to get to that information when you need it. One reason I started this blog was to put scripts that I was writing in a place where I could get to it easily from work or home. I often times refer to my own blog to get information when I am building scripts. Another thing I need to keep track of are serial numbers, passwords, urls and such. I’m sure most of you use some tool for that. A simple way to do it is to create a folder in your Documents and just save text files into there with descriptive titles. But if you have a little cash to put towards the problem, there are a number of good orgainzers out there. I use Sticky Brain by Chronos as an app for storing these kinds of information. I can highlight and copy stuff and have it insert directly into Sticky Brain using a contextual menu or a command key combination. Sticky Brain is sort of like super stickie notes. It has become more of a database type of application of late, with a gui like a mail app, or rss reader.
For conceptualizing, I do a lot of outlining and charting. Two tools that are great for that are Omni Outliner and Omni Graffle from The Omni Group. Omni Outliner is really great and affordable for outlining ideas, presentations, lesson plans, notes or whatever you have need for.
I love to write scripts and have a few tools that I use for that purpose. Affrus is a great IDE for Perl. It is from Late Night Software. For php I like to use Zend Studio from Zend. But really, to write scripts for Macintosh you don’t need these tools. They just make some things a little easier to debug. A great free text editor is Text Wrangler by Bare Bones Software. I use their text editor BBEdit which has a little more functionality than Text Wrangler. But Text Wrangler will do syntax coloring, balance quotes and parens, you can run scripts from a menu within the program, and it has a command line tool to go with it. It is really a great tool for writing scripts in nearly any language. By the way Bare Bones has recently released a tool similar to Sticky Brain called Yojimbo. check it out when you visit their site. Of course you have a great tool with XCode already available right on your Mac if you’ve installed the Developer Tools that comes with your System Disk.
I’ve found a great tool is Oxygen for writing XML. It is a java app that behaves very nicely on Mac OS X. XML and XSLT is very powerful and Oxygen has everything built into it to do transformations and syntax checking. If you are just trying to learn these languages SynchRo Soft has a nice stepped licensing plan that allows you to pay for an educational/individual version until you actually start using it for commercial work. Then you can step up to the professional license at that point.
For ftp I really like Transmit. There are some other very good ftp applications available on the Mac. I have just become very accustomed to the side by side panels of this application.
One last app I’ll mention that I have been using of late is Navicat. It is an interface to MySql. There is a great free web browser interface through PHPMyadmin but I wanted a cocoa or carbon application. There is an open source app CocoaMysql is nice, but it has a tendency to get a little behind. The jury is still out for me on Navicat, but so far I like it. It is very responsive and seems to do what I need it to do. If you want to organize you life, the great open source database Mysql is freely available to you. Navicat just makes opeing the door to it a little easier.
I would like to hear from you. What applications are you using? Anything making your life so much simpler? Post a comment.