My Essential Mac Software

Aqua and Mercury

Before you do anything else, install Quicksilver and learn how to use it.

No, really, do it now. I’ll wait… Done? Good. You can thank me for it later.

When I started using my Mac I really hated the Dock and the apparent lack of keyboard only control compared to PCs and Linux machines. With Quicksilver I can do more, faster without a mouse on a Mac. If, on the very rare occasion that Quicksilver crashes, I get quite disoriented.

What? Why can’t I start Safari? I’m pressing Ctrl-Space and typing S-A-F… Oh, Quicksilver’s not on. I know, I’ll just hit Ctrl-Space and type Q-U-I… Oh. Damn. How do I open a Finder window again?

To go even more mouse-free you can also set up your keyboard preferences to access any menu item by hitting Ctrl-F2 then typing the name of the menu you want to select. Once you get the hang of it it’s faster than the Window’s way: Alt + … look for the underlined letter… + etc.

Of course, all this pounding of the keyboard means a higher chance of RSI, so you should also get Anti-RSI. It’s a elegant app to make sure you take a break every now and then. My shoulders and wrists are eternally grateful…

It’s Academic

If you do any kind of academic research, your first stop should be BibDesk. This is a free and really, really well-made application for managing your references. It’s written by academics for academics and helps manage that growing collection of papers you might read one day. Possibly my favourite feature is the ability to drop PDF copies of papers onto an reference in BibDesk and have it automagically named and filed away using a directory structure and naming convention of my choosing.

BibDesk is also very extendible. So much so that I even wrote a script that lets it play nice with Aqua LyX which is worth getting too if you need to write anything in LaTeX. This allowed me to select one or more references in BibDesk and have them pushed as citations into my LyX document.

I basically lived in the above two applications in the final days of my PhD write-up. Two other useful applications were the R language and editor for statistical analysis and graph plotting and OmniGraffle for diagrams. Both do high-quality PDF output which works seamlessly with LyX.

Workin’ on the Web

With all my post-thesis free time these days I’ve been playing around with some web design and development and generally trying to write more.

Up until recently, I used to use SubEthaEdit for text editing and programming. However, they no longer release a free version so I decided to shell out and buy TextMate. It’s fantastic. If you asked me a couple of years ago if I’d feel happy paying for a text editor I would have laughed and kept banging away in Emacs.

I believe the writers of TextMate were also big Emacs fans but hated the amount of cruft it had accumulated so wrote their own, aiming for it to be as powerful and extendable but also very simple and Mac-like. They did a great job. It’s got templates, “snippets” (code-completion), project management, syntax highlighting for everything and, to top it all off, it’s scriptable with ruby!

Keeping a web site synchronised between your local development machine and a remote host can be a real pain. In the past I’ve tried rolling my solutions from the command-line with rsync and unison but, well, it’s a pain. Nowadays, I use the formidable Transmit. It’s simple yet powerful, slick yet solid, sexy yet… a piece of software. Ahem.

Tools of the System

No developer’s arsenal is complete without a good terminal program and backup routine.

For the first of these I use iTerm. Tabbed terminals, bookmarks for your favourite commands (think SSH commands), and plenty of configuration options all make it a good, free replacement for the standard Terminal application that comes with OS X.

For backups, I used to use Synk which was great for regular backups of my thesis to my keydrive. However, for larger backups to an external hard drive I use SuperDuper!. (Yes, that exclamation mark is part of its name).

Make Words Not Code

I’ll sometimes take time out from hacking and try to journal a little to reflect a bit. For this sort of writing I’ve found Journler to be a great application. It’s free, integrates well with all the Mac iLife stuff, plays well with the MetaWeblog API (so you can blog from it) and offers tagging, encryption and password protection for your entries.

I’ve also recently had an idea for a piece of interactive fiction I’d like to write. I had planned to try to enter it in this year’s competition but I gravely underestimated just how complicated a task it can be (especially when you’re on holiday). Surprisingly, when it comes to languages to write IF in there’s quite a lot of choice. My favourite at present - mainly due to its excellent documentation and slick development environment - is the Inform 7 IDE.

Music Machine

My latest and greatest addition to my Applications folder is Live. I kinda, sorta, accidently guessed what I was getting for my birthday this year and got this “sound compositing tool” a week before my actual birthday.

The scare quotes in the previous sentence are there because I’m not quite sure how to sum up a piece of software that lets you arrange pieces of music down to the millisecond and then also let you to drop in clips, edit effect parameters and record new tracks over the top. It’s all very exciting.

I’ll probably post more about Live as I figure out how to use it. Expect to see some more tracks appear in my music section at a later date.