Posts tagged with "mac"

My Must-Have 25 Mac Apps

Over the years I’ve had to mess with many OS X installations, backups, failures and restores. That’s just the usual life of a OS X geek in a place where people are scared of leaving their Windows PCs, but really would like to get a Mac. In fact, I’m quite proud of all those friends of mine I’ve managed to convince to get on the other side, but I’m even more proud of them because now they’re teaching the basics to someone else. This is the usual chain of events in a life of a standard OS X geek.

Having to deal with installations and restores, I’ve come to the point where I know exactly which apps to install depending on what that user needs, and how. A good friend of mine was so used to Firefox I had to bet (I’m serious) that he would like Safari more if only he gave it a chance. But that’s not the main story here. Over the years I created some sort of personal list of the first apps I install on a fresh new Mac every single time, right after the Network preferences are set up and ready to go. This list, which by no means used to exist on a physical side, is now embedded below for future reference (either mine, or my friends’) and you, who may find a couple of hidden gems in there.

It’s not a huge roundup, and it’s not for every one. These are not my favorite apps: these are first 25 Mac applications I install every time I have a fresh OS to play with, and they’re pretty great. You can call them my must-haves. Read more

iTunes: Apple’s Weakest Link→

The problem is that iTunes is now a pretty ancient piece of software. When it first appeared in 2001 as a reworking of SoundJam, a program Apple bought from a Californian company in 1999, it provided an elegant way of doing just one thing: getting songs from CDs on to your computer’s hard drive. But over the years, more and more functions have been added: first the management of iPods, then the Apple online store. Then iTunes became the conduit for managing one’s iPhone. The latest addition is the Ping social-networking function.

This is what the industry calls “feature creep” on an heroic scale.

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GrabBox Automatically Uploads Screenshots to Dropbox

Dropbox is the greatest invention of this decade. I mean it: it allows you to effortlessly sync thousands of files and folders between computers and mobile devices, and I know a few business that depend on it for all their work material. I depend on it as well. And it’s not that iOS and OS X developers didn’t spot the huge market: Dropbox-based applications are flourishing in the App Store.

GrabBox is a Mac app that lets you easily upload screenshots to your Dropbox Public folder and share the link with your friends. Read more

Do We Really Need Tweetie 2 for Mac?

Last week I wrote that Tweetie 2 for Mac is alive, and should be released soon. Finally, I would say: after a quite embarrassing “MacHeist beta” delay and a series of announcements from Brichter himself and other personalities over at Twitter, we should definitely we able to get our hands on Tweetie 2 in a matter of a few months. And I repeat, we should. We don’t have any more information about this besides the fact that the app is alive and will be free under Atebits’ name.

My question is, though: do we really need Tweetie 2? Read more

TotalFinder: What Mac’s Finder Should Have Been

Over the years I’ve tried many solutions to make the default OS X file manager, Finder, better and more suitable to my needs: PathFinder, a 3rd party application that can live on top of Apple’s Finder and brings dual-pane navigation and tabs to the mix, plus some custom Applescript and Automator workflows that allowed me to easily perform certain tasks like “move these files to another location” or “copy newly downloaded files with .pdf extension in Dropbox”.

None of the aforementioned apps and scripts managed to work for me for more than a month. I grew tired of them, and most of all I grew tired of PathFinder living as a layer above Finder, but not really replacing it. I even tried to completely replace Finder.app in CoreServices, you can guess how it ended. I wanted a better Finder with dual-pane navigation and tabs, but I also wanted to be able to tweak it and customize it, yet retaining the stability and efficiency of the default Finder.app. I didn’t want a standalone app, I was looking forward to something that would let me modify the native app without replacing it. A few weeks later TotalFinder by BinaryAge came out (as an alpha build) and I immediately started testing it.

A year later, here we are with a final 1.0 build of TotalFinder and months of reinvented workflow to talk about. TotalFinder reinvented the way I interact and work with OS X so much that I cannot imagine going back to Apple’s default file manager anymore. Read more

Ars Technica Reviews Parallels 6→

Ars Technica Reviews Parallels 6

Parallels has had their eye on Windows 3D gaming from the start and, with this release, they’ve finally converted me. I’ve been a virtualized-gaming skeptic, but the results with this new version are what every delusional Mac gamer was hoping was achievable in the days of VirtualPC on the PowerPC.

The usual 10 pages review from Ars, perfect for Instapaper (although many screenshots are in there). I bought Parallels 6 three days ago and it looks like a huge improvement from the 5.x version so far.

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