Thursday Thirteen #47

1. Camino – this is the web browser I use so I suppose it’s one of the programs I use more than any other. Hehe, it’s okay to use something other than Firefox (as long as they make an effort to be compliant).

2. Smultron – beautiful text editor, it has all the things I want, nice interface, syntax colouring, line numbers, it can even do split window for comparing documents. It’s a native mac program so it uses all the shortcuts that you’re used to. It’s great!

3. Adium – instant messenger client, it has all the main protocols and is just generally spiffy. Although I’ve had problems getting it to use the system wide proxy settings, I need to manually set the proxy in the program when I get to work.

4. Marco Polo – speaking of network settings, this program was a life-saver after a few days of taking my computer to work (I could be accused of bias since my husband wrote it, but I don’t think I am biased 😛 ). It was quite annoying having to remember to switch my location from work to home (I couldn’t leave it on automatic because work uses a proxy). MP does it all for me :up:

5. Plot – I spent days trying to find a simple yet powerful program to plot graphs, then I spent days trying to learn to use gnuplot, then I finally found Plot. It comes in a bit handy for science things.

6. Preview – You might think it’s just a viewer and it’s a bit annoying that picture files automatically open in it and so on. I’ve found it very handy for making notes on lecture slide presentations. My uni lectureres tend to make lecture slides available and Preview has a handy text annotation and circling tool. I’ve seen reviews for software such as PDF Clerk, which migt be better, but so far I haven’t gone out on that pay-for-software limb.

7. NeoOffice – the mac port of OpenOffice.org. It works much better than OO.o under X11 and it can use the open document format as well as Microsoft Office formats and others.

8. Gimp – I’ve mentioned it several times before, but seriously, this program is free and it’s powerful, you don’t need to fork out hundreds for Photoshop. I’m sure Adobe is wonderful and I’m not being sarcastic, but this is gooood.

9. Vienna – so far this feed reader program has served me very well with no complaints.

10. Cyberduck – FTP transfer software. It’s free, simple and smooth. The only problems I’ve had with it have been when the netwoek is playing up or the proxy is a poop head. The software itself is sweet.

11. Inkscape – I have also, of course, mentioned the beloved vector graphics program, which is free and totally schweet. Again, it’s very powerful, Adobe might be good, it might be better, it’s also about $800 if not more and you can do lots of things in Inkscape that you can do in Illustrator if you just use your noggin.

12. Handbrake – I’ve only used this once to rip a DVD (so I had it on my computer to watch on the train), but it was so simple and easy and worked first time. It’s advertised to rip for iPods but really it rips at any size and quality that you tell it to.

13. Quinn – very cute (and powerful, even has networking) tetris game for mac.

One for luck: you must have Quicksilver on your mac!

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