Recently, I got one of the brand new MacBook Pros. Even though I had been planning on this for a long time and waited patiently for the new line to start selling, it surprised some people since I’m mostly known for being a Linux guy. I guess they didn’t know that my first computer was a Mac, I never stopped using Macs, I have always said that I like Macs, and that this doesn’t mean I’m abandoning Linux (you better believe I already put Linux on here).

Anyway, before it even arrived, I had spent almost a week just diving into various articles about Macs so that I would know all about the obscure, power-user programs that the savvy users had. I’m a geek like that. Then when the Mac actually arrived, I immediately grabbed all the programs that I had marked and began to test them and tweak them.

One of my friends also recently got a MacBook Pro, and he asked me to post up the results of my experimentation. So that’s what this blog post will be. You’ll notice that these are all free and most are open source too, so enjoy them without inhibition.

Web Browsers

• Firefox - This should be your primary browser. Safari is good, but I’ll go on the record as saying Firefox is superior. Not only does it have extensions and advanced options for power users to tweak, but if you frequently visit JavaScript sites like those that belong to Google, you’ll notice that it’s basically the fastest browser on those sites. The next version of Firefox is supposed to be even more crazy fast on those sites, too. Anyway, there’s a reason why Firefox is basically the premier example of why the open source development process produces the highest quality software. There are a few Apple zealots out there who will ostracize you for not using Cupertino’s products for everything possible, but for every one of these extra-extra-extra hardcore Apple fanboys, you can find a hundred Mozilla fanboys and open source fanboys to back you up. At the end of the day though, the non-fanboy will acknowledge that both browsers are very good.
• Opera - Another good free browser worth having. The thing you’ll notice about all the arguments and essays about web browsers on the web is that everybody basically agrees that Opera is impressive. In the Linux community, it seemed to me that it was pretty much everybody’s second favorite browser even though not too many people had it as their first favorite. In the Mac circles it seems similarly respected by all.
• Shiira – This is an interesting browser developed in Japan that uses the WebKit engine, just like Safari. Which makes sense since project’s ambition is basically to be a more awesome Safari. I say check it out. It’s different, but not in a frightening or confusing way.
• Flock - A Firefox-based browser with a lot of unique features specifically aimed at people who use social networks, blog, and that kind of thing.
• Camino – This is basically Firefox, but “more Mac integrated.” It’s nice, but it always seems to be a step behind the most current version of Firefox, and the truth is that with all the themes available for Firefox to make it look however you want, it’s not like you can’t make Firefox blend in, though Camino gets a few more points for integration since it actually uses your OS X icon libraries and whatnot. Nice to have. Notice how I’m a browser collector yet?

Email

• Thunderbird - This program and Mail are really almost exactly the same in terms of functionality and look-and-feel. Mozilla and Apple both obviously make outstandingly high quality stuff. The truth is that aside from just generally preferring open source software, I just always liked the Thunderbird icon a lot. There, I said it.

Instant Messaging and Chat Clients

• Adium – I’ve always loved Adium. It actually might be my favorite instant messaging client on any platform. It’s very customizable, so if you don’t go on the web site and check out some of the optional themes, then you’ll really be missing out. And admit it, the duck is adorable. The lack of audio and video chat is disappointing, but most of my communication is just regular instant messages…
• Skype – …and when I do want audio or video, the truth is that I’m probably using Skype anyway.
• Colloquy – After having used Konversation and Pidgin (depending on my mood) for connecting to IRC rooms when using Linux, I didn’t think I’d find anything I liked more for the job. Needless to say, I think that Colloquy might be my new favorite. I was not expecting a Mac IRC client to do that since I just don’t really think of Mac users as being IRC people, but there you go.

Office Suite and Text Editors

• OpenOffice - Your fully featured suite for the most comfortable essay writing experience. If Microsoft Office was free, I’d still opt for OpenOffice.
• Smultron - Your zippy, lite, speedy text editor. There were actually plenty of featherweight editors for Mac, but this was my favorite. And yes, it’s better than Text Edit in every way (not that Text Edit is particularly bad or anything).
• Bean - Your middleweight text editor. Nice to have, although I don’t actually use it very much to be honest. I usually use OpenOffice or Smultron. I don’t plan on uninstalling it though, and you might like it a lot. It has a rather enthusiastic niche community.

Quick Flowcharts and Brainstorming

• XMind - I started using these kinds of programs to quickly and easily make site maps, but there is a growing number of people out there who use these “mind-mapping” programs to seemingly turn every aspect of their life into an easy to read flowchart. So far, XMind is my favorite because I found I could do a bunch of cool things to change the way flowcharts look without having to actually study how to use the program. The whole point of this kind of program is basically to let convey information to others (or organize yourself) with the least amount of effort, after all.
• FreeMind - Another good, free mind-mapping program. I found it to be just a little bit less intuitive and pretty than XMind, but I think it actually has a larger and more established community. Also, it’s worth pointing out that there is only one version of Freemind with all the features enabled, as opposed to XMind, which has a “Pro” version that gives you functionality that you almost certainly weren’t looking for in a mind-mapper anyway. Anyway, I say grab FreeMind just to have it around.

Audio Players

• Cog – Alright, look. The fact of the matter is that iTunes is bloated and severely lacking in features. It’s obviously the most common player and has its admirable qualities, the truth is that elitist audiophile communities and mainstream technology journals alike agree that it’s not hard to do a lot better. The biggest thing that determines audio quality will be the format your music is saved in and the speakers or headphones you listen on. Obviously Cog won’t be able to do anything about your hardware, but it does support much better formats than the severely limited iTunes. My favorite lossless audio format is FLAC, so if you can, you should try importing from the CD directly into that format and see if you don’t notice a difference yourself. If you don’t have the hard disk space for lossless audio, then try Ogg Vorbis, or if you want to make sure it’ll play on any device or in any program, use the LAME encoder to make high quality MP3 files.
• Songbird – If you felt like the interface to Cog was a little too utilitarian, then Songbird might be for you. It also supports a wide variety of formats and offers a lot of cool features. And since the designers were inspired by the interfaces of Firefox and iTunes, you’ll probably feel pretty comfortable with it right from the start. The release candidate for the milestone 1.0 release was recently made available, so if you download it now, then be sure to grab that version instead of the silly 0.7 beta. Otherwise, just wait a little bit longer for the final version.
• Amarok - This is the king of all music players and I’m not just saying that (go ahead and find a negative review, I dare you), but right now it’s Linux only. A Mac version is coming very soon though, so I felt I should definitely include it on this list. You can get an unsupported testing version for Mac going right now if you can’t wait.

Video Players

• Perian Quicktime Plugin – This is a very easily installed plugin for the Quicktime player that allows it to play more video formats, and even supports SSA/ASS subtitles (which look amazing enough that I’m actually bothering to mention them). Grab it.
• MPlayer – This is a very, very efficient video player that deserves all the adoration it gets from the demanding ubergeek crowd. If you’re watching a video and it starts to get choppy, open it up in MPlayer and watch as it handles it better. And yes, it supports tons of formats.
• VLC Media Player – I have a lot of respect for VLC. It can play back lots of formats, has a very active developer community, and is praised by all the mainstream technology journals. However, if you really delve into the movie and anime communities, you might notice that the patriarchs and matriarchs of those communities actually look down on it a little. My conclusion is that it performs well and is worth having.

BitTorrent Clients

• Transmission – If you’re using something other than torrents for your peer-2-peer needs, then you’re silly. Anyway, Transmission is an attractive and efficient client with very healthy community and some features that I’ve come to demand, like a built-in automatically updating IP blocklist and the ability to ignore unencrypted peers. No matter what BitTorrent client you use, don’t forget to tell it to use a nice, high port number (like 34567).
• μTorrent – The Mac version of this program isn’t actually out yet, but it should be soon, so I’ll provide a link to where you’ll be able to get it (and where you can sign up to be notified when it is, if you want). But when it is, there’s a very good chance I’ll be switching to it. I actually have the privileged of being able to say that I knew one of the lead developers before μTorrent got big, and he’s actually the guy that taught me pretty much everything I know about tweaking torrent client settings for maximum performance.

File Transfer and Server Information Management Tools

• Cyberduck – Easy, friendly, good. A pleasure to use.
• FireFTP – Although I’ve come to prefer Cyberduck, this extension for Firefox is good to know about.
• Serverskine – This is not actually for connecting to servers. Instead, it’s for storing information about different servers, like usernames, passwords, port numbers, and so forth. You can see how potentially great this might be for web designers with lots of clients.

Utilities and Tools

• The Unarchiver – Mac OS X and Windows both come with very basic but functional compression and decompression tools built in. However, they leave a lot of cool features to be desired that once you start using, you won’t remember how you managed before. The Unarchiver is a must-have for any savvy Mac user.
• Temperature Monitor Widget – It’s always good to have an easily accessible temperature monitor. Hardware problems and instability almost always seem to be the result of high temperatures in my experience, so rather than wait for your computer to freeze or, worse, the hardware to get fried,having this little dashboard widget will let you know what’s going on. After you’ve familiarized yourself with the computer’s temperature when things are good, you’ll have something to turn to if things go wrong to help you find out of it’s a hardware or software problem. Note that you should grab the actual Temperature Monitor program too.
• OnyX – Alright, my honest feeling is that Macs really don’t need tweaking. But I’m a geek, and I’m compelled to optimize and intelligently customize whenever I can, even if the benefits are relatively tiny.
• TinkerTool – More hidden options for you to fiddle with, if you have the same compulsions as me.

Random Goodies

• Cappuccino – This is one of the most wonderful little things you can get for your menu bar. You click it, and your screen won’t dim or turn off. Click it again, and your computer will go back to automatically applying power saving modes when you don’t use your mouse or keyboard for a while. This is great for when you’re watching videos online.
• Dropbox – There is a reason why so many people suddenly seemed to go crazy about this. What it does is make a folder on your computer that is automatically synced with their servers. You can install it on a bunch of computers (Mac, Windows, and Linux!) and it’ll work to keep them all synchronized without you having to do anything at all. You can also access the files in it from their web site, and selectively make some files public if you want. Furthermore, it has automatic version control, which means that you can go back and look at old versions of files and restore them if you need to. It’s just a great program. Really, check it out. If you need an invite, just ask me.
• Last.fm – Like music? Then you should be using Last.fm. It actually can integrate into most audio players (many players even have it built in) to automatically upload to your profile what you’re listening to. Very cool and fun, especially if you’ve got friends that use it to since it’s always interesting to look at what they’re listening to. If you sign up, be sure to add me to your friend list. My username is “square_bottle”.
• AppFresh – I was spoiled by Linux’s package managers. The ability to update every single thing on my computer with a single click (or command), from the operating system itself to the drivers to the programs I’ve installed, is awesome. AppFresh sort of attempts to bring this functionality to Macs. It’s still in beta and isn’t perfect though.
• HandBrake – One of the most famous and friendly of all the DVD rippers. I don’t really backup DVDs myself to be honest, but I figure it’s still nice to have.
• Burn – A good CD and DVD burner. Disk Utility does a fine job of burning ISO files, but Burn has more features and is a bit friendlier to use. It’s most often recommended to people for how easily it can turn your video files into DVDs that will actually play in your DVD player, but it’s good for all kinds of burning, really.
• TrueCrypt – Rather than enable the FileVault feature of your Mac and thus sacrifice considerable performance, use TrueCrypt to protect your privacy. Not only do you not take the speed hit, but it’s much stronger encryption, and it’s open source (so you don’t have to worry about backdoors). If you have clients that you manage on your computer but don’t use any encryption at all, then not only are you kind of a dumb/naive/inconsiderate jerk, but you’re also technically breaking the law most likely.
• KisMAC – This is an advanced tool for sniffing out wireless networks and getting information on them, even when those wireless networks are set up to be invisible (you’ll have to tell it to use your wireless card in passive mode though). It’s based on the Linux tool Kismet, but I dare say that KisMAC is actually more easy to use. Perhaps a little too easy, given what this type of program is designed to do. It will even crack the passwords for networks if you tell it to do so with just a click. Be responsible and have fun with this, and if you can’t figure out how to use it or how to read the manual to learn, then you shouldn’t be using it. Seriously, when it comes to penetration testing tools, I don’t think it gets easier.
• PeerGuardian - In short, this is a specialized mini-firewall. More precisely, it’s an IP blocklist. It’s very well maintained, and once you install it, you can just leave it alone and it’ll update the lists of evil IP addresses all on its own. It has a couple different lists that it works with too, so if you want you can have it only block nosy anti-P2P groups, or you can have it also block known ads/spyware/etc. There are a couple other lists of bad IPs, and enabling and disabling particular lists is as easy as checking a box. I found the webspider and bots list to interfere with Thunderbird’s ability to check Gmail, so I have that one off, for example. And of course, it’s also easy to enable and disable the whole thing if you want.
• Tor and Vidalia - You know when you’re watching any movie with hackers how there’s always a scene that shows somebody trying to trace somebody else, and you see the little line go from city to city on a map of the world since the person was connecting through a series of random international proxies instead of a direct connection? That’s basically what Tor is, only Tor is actually does more. Vidalia is just the name of an interface that makes controlling Tor really easy, and it’s included in the bundle when you download it, along with an extension for Firefox that puts a little on/off button in the bottom corner so that you don’t even need to set up Firefox to use it (though you’ll still need to start up Tor or Vidalia in the background for the button to work). It all works very well and doesn’t really even require brains to use, but expect any activity you route through Tor to be slower.

Honorable Mentions

• NeoOffice – Sort of like how Camino just takes Firefox and integrates it more by having it use your system’s icon and widget libraries, NeoOffice is a native port of OpenOffice. And as with Camino, it always seems to be a step behind the most current OpenOffice. I say just use OpenOffice, but I figured I’d include it on my list for you.
• Quicksilver – Alright, look. I installed this because so many power users swear by it. Maybe it’ll grow on me. It’s not that I dislike it, but rather that I feel like Spotlight already does exactly what it does, and less obtrusively too (not that Quicksilver is exactly the most obtrusive program as it is). Yeah, Quicksilver can definitely do more advanced things, but all I wanted was something that would let me type the name of a program and hit enter to launch it.
• Xee – This is a fast, lightweight picture viewer. Preview really does work very well though, so it goes unused.
• TextWrangler – It’s a lightweight text editor. Lots of people like it, and it’s nice and all. But I decided I liked Smultron.
• WikiNotes – Another lightweight text editor. This one is remarkable because it uses wiki formatting, so if you use wikis a lot then maybe you’ll love it.
• Skim – Really, I feel that Preview does a wonderful job dealing with PDFs, but Skim is nice to have too since it has more features. It’s designed to let you take notes while looking at PDFs mostly.
• MacLibre – I already mentioned how I was spoiled by the package managers of Linux, but I only talked about how great they are for updating. Obviously, they’re also for easily installing programs in the first place (and in fact are the best, easiest way to install programs on any platform). MacLibre brings this concept to the Mac. The only thing is that it doesn’t seem to be super actively maintained.

Recommended Reading

• A Few Handy, Hidden OS X Shortucts – There are plenty of shortcut cheat sheets out there, but they all seem to just list the same obvious shortcuts that you already knew. You know, the ones where you just substitute the CTRL key when on Windows for the Command key on the Mac. This very short list by LifeHacker has some handy shortcuts that should be mentioned on the other lists, but aren’t.
• 5 Most Useful Terminal Commands – These are nifty and all, but I’m mostly putting this on here in the hope that it’ll get you to open up the terminal. Us Linux folk are always talking about how easy the command line is, and that’s exactly what the terminal is. No, seriously. It’s the same thing. We call it a terminal too, and it uses the same console-based programs and everything. The point is that when we say there’s really nothing to be afraid of and that it can actually do a lot of things faster and easier, you should listen to us instead of dismissising us as being hopelessly nerdy and clueless. Of course, you can do more with a terminal on a Linux system, so you probably won’t use it very often on a Mac, but it’s there for you to see and fiddle with!
• 22 Useful Lists of Mac Applications – Just in case you want to experiment with even more programs than I’ve recommended, here you go! I’m not just linking you to a single other list here, people. This is a list of lists, so you should definitely be able to satisfy any lingering needs to really explore what’s available for you to play with.
• Triple Booting Your Mac The Right Way – Anymore, Linux is the easiest operating system to install of all (seriously). However, I will grant that it’s a little bit different and thus slightly harder than normal to do on a Mac. You can just use Boot Camp to install it super easily if you want instead of Windows, but every time you turn on your computer the little button will say Windows since that what Apple thinks you’re using Boot Camp for. And what if you want to have Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux? Well, you could use Boot Camp again and just have the Windows button go to a second boot loader to let you choose between Windows and Linux, but that’s lame. So here’s a guide on setting it up so that your computer will present you with the options that actually say Mac, Windows, and PC. And it has pretty icons to go with them, too. That’s important, right? Right?

If you’ve got any other programs that you think I might like to see, then by all means, please do leave a comment with a link to it for me!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.