As a collection of links & reminder to myself and also by request from a friend – enhancements, utilities and applications I installed on my new Mac Pro:
System Enhancements
- iStat Menus Menu bar extras (free) – in particular I use the ‘Date & Time’ in the menubar to replace the system time display as it means you have an ‘at a glance’ date without needing to click on the time. The monitoring menus are also useful to keep an eye on what the system is doing.
- Growl System-wide notification system (free) – allows applications written to take advantage of it to display notifications and messages in a unified style.
- Butler Launcher & keyboard shortcuts (free) – less relevant as a launcher now that Spotlight in 10.5 is actually useable (it works great as a launcher) but Butler still has a place in my workflow – in particular controlling iTunes.
- Mailtags Mail.app powerup (21 day free trial, $29.95) – tag messages in mail with keywords and assign them to projects – for example make a project called ‘waiting for reply’ and then make a smart mailbox which filters all messages with that project assigned. You can then just set the project on all emails (sent or received) and file them away wherever you want – they will all be displayed in the smart mailbox as a reminder of what needs following up!
- Mail Act-On ‘Associate mail rules to keystrokes’ (free) – customisable keyboard shortcuts for assigning rules in Mail.app – 2-key email filling!
- Quicklook plugins – there are a couple of sites listing 3rd party plugins – one is www.qlplugins.com/. A couple which I have found to be particularly useful are:
- BetterZip – view inside .zip (and other) archives
- Folder – view the contents of a folder
- EPSQLPlugIn EPS Viewer – view EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) files
- Adobe Illustrator Viewer – .ai files
- QLColorCode – syntax highlighting/code colouring for a range of formats
- ClamXav antivirus (free)
- FontExplorerX font management (free)
- Little Snitch reverse firewall ($24.95)
- SpamSieve client-side spam filter ($30.00)
Web Development
- svnX OS X GUI svn client (free) – it doesn’t have every feature (ignores and props come to mind) but it handles everyday svn commands nicely
- PHP – Marc Liyanage’s Entropy version – on a 64bit Intel machine with OS X 10.5.x you will need an alternate version (Leopard: PHP 5.2.5 Release 6 BETA is the latest at time of writing)
- MySQL – following Marc Liyanage’s instructions I successfully installed MySQL 5 (package name mysql-5.0.51a-osx10.4-i686.dmg). I then used Joannou Ng’s instructions for using launchd to start the database server on login.
- PHPMyAdmin web based database admin tool (free)
- XDebug php debugger/profiler (free) – see my previous posts for Installing Xdebug for PHP (Entropy.ch build) on OS X and Compiling & installing Xdebug for PHP 5.2.5 (Entropy.ch build) on OS X 10.5 (for 64bit OS X 10.5.x installations)
- Xyle Scope webkit based css/structure inspection tool (free trial, $19.95) – load a webpage (locally or from the net) and examine the structure (css) with views showing hierarchy, cascades, calculated values and more.
- Coda web development tool (free trial, $79.00) – combines a code editor (a licensed version of subEthaEdit), webkit based previews, reference materials, Transmit based FTP client and terminal.
- Firefox extensions
- Operator Michael Kaply’s extension for using & debugging Microformats
- Web Developer Toolbar Chris Pederick’s extension is an essential for web development – css, javascript, cookies & more are exposed & tweak-able.
- Firebug Joe Hewitt’s Firebug allows you to debug javascript, css and html in the Firefox browser.
Utilitites & Apps
- Paparazzi webpage screenshots (free) – loads a webpage and saves it in many common image formats – particularly useful for capturing webpages which extend down the page lower than your viewport, it also has handy bookmarklet to capture the front-most page directly from the browser.
- Pukka – del.icio.us GUI client (free trial, $14.95) – use a bookmarklet to post the front-most page in your browser directly to your del.icio.us account.
- XScope screen measurement tools ($26.95) – on-screen ruler overlays, colour picker and more.
- Adium instant messaging (free) – instant messaging application for OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.
- Skype VOIP & IM (free/subscription services)
1 Comments
Not a particularly interesting one but I always install OpenOffice.org. :)
posted by Nathan Pitman, Jul 2, 06:03 AM