Feb 27
A lot of blogs have lists of essential things and sheep like, I’ve done the same for my take on apps, one list for the Mac and another for Windows.
Which is all fine and good.
But it’s nice when you see a different take on this sort of list genre and these two lists caught my eye and attention today:
The wonderfully named 43folders has a take on apps to reduce your daily distraction on a Mac although some of the comments are a bit severe including one poster who suggested modifying your system so you could only surf certain web sites during your working day. Surely the whole point is it’s your computer and besides, whatever happened to self control?
On a slightly different note Heading East lists 10 Mac apps which you shouldn’t be without and which aren’t common sights on people’s top 10 lists. While there’s a few Safari plugins, which aren’t too much use to me as I use Firefox as my browser of choice, and a mention of Flip4Mac which I’ve included in my list, there’s a couple of gems I’d not heard of such as Applejack and Witch, which especially appeals to the keyboard jockey which lurks deep inside.
Feb 16
I’ve already written about my choice of essential apps on the Mac and so, in the spirit of cross platform-ness, I thought I’d do the same for Windows. It’s proved a bit of an education. With one exception; the list of apps seems to fall into two distinct categories.
Firstly, there’s those apps which are available on both Mac and Windows, so there’s no surprise that both Firefox and iTunes make an appearance.
Secondly though, the remaining apps seem to be provide features which I’m used to on the Mac or on UNIX in general but which are missing from a stock Windows install.
It’s probably due to my too many years of UNIX experience that I seem to automatically install apps which make Windows more UNIX like or maybe it’s making Windows less Windows like?
Cygwin
Imagine UNIX on your Windows machine. You’ve just imagined Cygwin. There’s a Bash shell of course, with all your favourite shell tools; less, sed, awk, grep and all the rest. But there’s also a full POSIX subsystem to link your apps against and there’s more. There’s a full X Window system; you can even run KDE under Cygwin under Windows and there’s more. There’s all of your Windows drives, both physical and network, mounted under /cygdrive and there’s more. There’s full UNC path support and there’s more. You can even have all of your domain or Active Directory permissions in your Bash shell. What’s there not to like?
Continue reading »
Feb 10
What makes an essential app? One that you use every day? One that sits in your Dock and has the open at login flag set? One which will make your life just that little bit less difficult or consume a little bit less time? Probably; and I daresay a lot more besides. An essential app is a deeply personal choice.
These then, in no order other than the order I thought of them, are my essential apps for my Mac.
Firefox
The choice of a web browser can be a thorny issue; but I don’t want to get into the Internet Explorer vs. the rest of the world flame war. I just want a web browser that, err, browses the web. I want to like Safari and I’ve really tried to get on with Camino but I keep on falling back to Firefox for my browsing needs. It’s fast, it’s flexible, it remembers my passwords, it has great plugins (Adblock anyone?) and I get to keep a consistent browser interface across all the other operating systems that I use on a day-to-day basis.
Continue reading »