This started of as a comment on Robby’s post about his experiences starting off with a mac and TextMate’s somewhat nebulous features, but I need something in my “software recommendations” section anyway, so I’ll try the “trackback” thing. I use a ton of different software on my mac and am always trying new software. Everyone has their own taste in software, but I’d love to hear any suggestions people have. Here are just a few of the more developer-oriented tools I use.
TextMate has some definite similarities for me to Rails regarding their features. For both, their features are very powerful, somewhat obscure/hidden, lacking in documentation and difficult to figure out (for me), but generally very quick and easy to use once you figure it out. Nice in a way because it leaves a very unobtrusive interface and you don’t have to deal with a bunch of features you’ll never use. But I’ve posted feature requests for things and later found that they were already there. The cool thing about TextMate for mac users is just that there exists a text editor with a simple interface and substantial underlying power and extensibility. Previously, such a product didn’t exist. Someone should pay somebody to sit behind someone that knows all it’s features with a video camera, interrupting him all the time to ask questions about how he did that. I’ve seen doing things in screen-capture movies that I don’t know how to do.
Tip: There’s a Subversion repository of all the extra bundles for TextMate. You can check it out directly into your ~/Library/Application Support/TextMate/Bundles directory and you get a ton more (obscured) functionality.
SubEthaEdit is a text editor that allows you to work on the same document concurrently with other developers. You can use it via Rendezvous or over the internet. I haven’t had a chance to try it yet so I don’t know exactly how it works. Sounds cool though.
I use CyberDuck for SFTP. It’s open source and has a feature where you can assign and editor (TextMate) and then edit files psuedo-directly on the server. It stores the file in a temp directory and then automatically uploads it whenever you save.
I’m currently using Conversation for my IRC client. I can’t remember, there was something about Colloquy that didn’t work for me. Conversation seems to fill my needs.
I also recently discovered Growl , a global notifications system for mac. I like it because it shows me a brief preview of my mail as it’s recieved, keeps me from looking at my mail client and then being distracted by something that doesn’t need my attention at the moment. It also has hooks into most of the other software I mention in this article, notifying you of completed processes and such.
NewsFire is my RSS news reader. It has a pretty interface. It’s shareware. I ended up giving the guy some money cause I liked the way it looked.
FileMerge comes with the Apple developers kit, stored in /Developer/Applications/Utilities/. It’s a nice GUI for looking at diffs. It shows them side by side with a nice little scaling graphic thing in between them to show you what goes where.
I use Aquisition for p2p filesharing/leaching. It also has a nice interface. It automatically puts your music downloads into you iTunes directory and adds them to a playlist, and puts movies in your movies directory. It’s nag-ware but it nags very politely, unlike Saft which nagged so bad I immediately unistalled it.
Adium is my instant messaging client. It connects to all the major IM’s, has a lot of nice themes (which are just css, btw. very easy to make). Be sure to check out all the extras . I very much like the Tokyo Train Station sound set , it’s calming. I also downloaded a bunch of scripts, the pun and yo mamma scripts make me laugh. The define script is also a little bit handy.
A lot of people like Quicksilver but I can’t figure out how it works. I think it’s a finder/application launcher thing. I’ve seen people use it to quickly launch applications and files, but for me it never finds what I’m looking for. Maybe there’s a special secret language or something. I guess I have enough of those nebulous and obscurely powerful things to figure out at the moment.
I have not found a nice blogging client yet. I just use the WordPress web-based interface. I’m gonna check out BloGTK.
I also haven’t found a good sticky note organizer thing. I’m giving StickyBrain a try at the moment. I want tags though, and it doesn’t directly have tags. Although it seems you can add items to more than one folder, simulating tags. I did it by accident, but I don’t know how I did it.
Anyone got any better ideas? Comments are welcome.