The essential Mac
How's this for an exercise...if you had to pick ten essential applications to install on your Mac, beyond which you would never get to install anything else, what would they be?
A couple ground rules...no standard Apple applications are allowed. Assume you have a new Mac which came with Tiger and iLife, so you already have things like Safari, iPhoto, and so forth. But "Pro" Apple applications are allowed. Apps can be freeware, shareware, or commercial. Open source is fine too.
With that said, here are the 10 things I would take with my Mac to a desert island (as long as the island had a good DSL connection).
BBEdit
The ultimate text processor. I use this for editing web pages, configuration files, scripting, and ever a certain level of basic word processing!
Graphic Converter
The BBEdit of graphics. This can read and write pretty much any graphic format in existence, and is essential for preparing graphics for the web, as well as doing some very basic manipulation of images.
XRay
The all-purpose file manipulation tool. XRay is a bit long in the tooth (when will it be updated to handle Tiger metadata) but for graphical manipulation of file flags, owners, and permissions it is still great.
NetNewsWire
The best all-purpose RSS reader for the Mac. Until a few months ago, I had never used it. Now I can't live without it.
Timbuktu
Remote control any other Mac or PC. It's often better then being there (especially if "there" is far away and it is late at night).
Pseudo
Does one tiny thing well: launches GUI apps as the root user. Yeah, you can do this in Terminal, but not as fast or easily.
Azereus
The best BitTorrent client out there. Super technical and gives you details til you puke. Allows for very fine control of your BitTorrent experience.
VLC
This open source media player handles pretty much any form of audio or video you can throw at it. It also allows the playing of DVDs from other regions, and makes it easy to stream audio or video.
Interarchy
The internet swiss army knife. Whether sniffing packets or downloading an entire web site in one click, Interachy can handle it.
Windowshade
This brings back the old "Windowshade" behavior for minimizing windows that was present in the Classic Mac days. Can't live without it.
Honorable mentions:
Microsoft Office (if I ever had to do any actual word processing or spreadsheeting)
Toast (the best media burner)
Unreal Tournament (gotta frag)
Script Debugger (if they ever updated it, it would be in the top 10)
Media Rage (for organizing and tagging media files)
How's this for an exercise...if you had to pick ten essential applications to install on your Mac, beyond which you would never get to install anything else, what would they be?
A couple ground rules...no standard Apple applications are allowed. Assume you have a new Mac which came with Tiger and iLife, so you already have things like Safari, iPhoto, and so forth. But "Pro" Apple applications are allowed. Apps can be freeware, shareware, or commercial. Open source is fine too.
With that said, here are the 10 things I would take with my Mac to a desert island (as long as the island had a good DSL connection).
BBEdit
The ultimate text processor. I use this for editing web pages, configuration files, scripting, and ever a certain level of basic word processing!
Graphic Converter
The BBEdit of graphics. This can read and write pretty much any graphic format in existence, and is essential for preparing graphics for the web, as well as doing some very basic manipulation of images.
XRay
The all-purpose file manipulation tool. XRay is a bit long in the tooth (when will it be updated to handle Tiger metadata) but for graphical manipulation of file flags, owners, and permissions it is still great.
NetNewsWire
The best all-purpose RSS reader for the Mac. Until a few months ago, I had never used it. Now I can't live without it.
Timbuktu
Remote control any other Mac or PC. It's often better then being there (especially if "there" is far away and it is late at night).
Pseudo
Does one tiny thing well: launches GUI apps as the root user. Yeah, you can do this in Terminal, but not as fast or easily.
Azereus
The best BitTorrent client out there. Super technical and gives you details til you puke. Allows for very fine control of your BitTorrent experience.
VLC
This open source media player handles pretty much any form of audio or video you can throw at it. It also allows the playing of DVDs from other regions, and makes it easy to stream audio or video.
Interarchy
The internet swiss army knife. Whether sniffing packets or downloading an entire web site in one click, Interachy can handle it.
Windowshade
This brings back the old "Windowshade" behavior for minimizing windows that was present in the Classic Mac days. Can't live without it.
Honorable mentions:
Microsoft Office (if I ever had to do any actual word processing or spreadsheeting)
Toast (the best media burner)
Unreal Tournament (gotta frag)
Script Debugger (if they ever updated it, it would be in the top 10)
Media Rage (for organizing and tagging media files)
posted by Mike at
2:37 PM
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