The Apps I Use

I’m pretty sure it’s borderline illegal for an Apple geek with a website to not write about the applications they use frequently, so here goes. And, since I always find myself recommending programs to friends when they make the switch now I can just point them here.

And since I’m a total voyeur when it comes to other people’s writing on what they’re using (or reading), I figured it’s only fair to turn the spotlight on myself. Just about all of these apps I use at least once a week, and I omitted the obvious such as iTunes, iPhoto, Calculator, TextEdit and Word. I broke my list down to three main functions; Communication, Utilities, and Development. Listed alphabetically since I’d be up all night trying to order them by any kind of rank.

Communication

These are the apps that are almost never shut down, what I use to avoid all personal contact and interaction as much as possible.

Adium

Without a doubt the best all-inclusive Instant Messaging application for the Mac. I can keep all my contacts across all the different services in one handy customizable list (running down the left of my screen). Combine that with the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Icon extension and you’ve got a winner. Ridiculously extensible and a nice, clean interface. Top notch all around.

Mail.app

OK, honestly all the email addresses I maintain are actually ran through my Gmail account. I keep mail running primarily to send emails, since Gmail insists on sending emails from separate domains as “On Behalf of“ me instead of just spoofing the address.

The spam filter is horrendous, recently it actually marked an email I BCC:ed to myself as spam. One of these days I’ll give Thunderbird a spin, but right now the Gmail spam filter is unparalleled and I can check all my inboxes anywhere, so that’s how things will probably remain.

Snitter

Don’t Twitter without it. Snook’s little client is quite slick (I run the Leopard theme). I started out with Twitterific but wasn’t down with the ads. I don’t however, see anything wrong the ads. If you don’t want to pay for it, write you own client. Or use Snitter.

One of these days I really want to try my hand at making my own theme. One of these days.

X-Chat Aqua

Yea, so I use IRC. If you know what that is you’re a total nerd. Most of the rooms I used to be active in are pretty much dead, but every now and then a familiar face pops up and we reminisce about the good old days. There was a time when I was part of a global community that would hang around all day/night and we’d all help eachother out with whatever we were working on. And play trivia.

The first time I truly grasped how amazing and powerful the internet is was in that IRC room. Sitting in Bowling Green, Ohio. I was chatting it up with web nerds all across the United States as well as Canada, England, Thailand, Australia, Norway, Belgium, Germany and Ireland. At the same time. Seriously, think about that. It was mind-blowing. Story for another day.

Utilities

These are the apps I use for general geekery, to optimize my workflow and/or that didn’t fit in the other categories. The everyday apps that define everything I love about this platform and are no small part of why most of my waking hours are spent sitting in front of a computer.

Desktop Manager

A handy little app that gives you multiple desktops, available in the taskbar or from a small popup in the corner of the screen. I’m completely lost without this one. Since I usually have a ridiculous amount of programs open at any given time, Desktop Manager lets me keep a somewhat sense of organization.

Usually I run three desktops, The primary one for just about everything, the second for just FTP and quick edits live on the server (I like to live dangerously) and the third as a “clean“ desktop – where I organize or hunt down files or just open a little-used app for a quick session.

But what I really get out of this app is when I need to put my nose to the grindstone and get stuff done. I use one desktop for development only, one for any and all distractions that I need to get out of the way (but can’t quit of course) such as chat, music, and the like, one for file transfers and one for file management. When I need to get in “The Zone” Desktop Manager is my go-to app. And it’s free. Solid.

FontExplorer X

When you have an absurd amount of fonts you could never possibly have a need for, keeping them organized and not bogging down your system is a must. It might be because I’m old school and learned to manage fonts through Adobe Type Manager back in the pre-OS X days, but it’s great for keeping my go-to non-system fonts available and my sometimes fonts organized.

Definitely worth a look for anyone who keeps a large list of fonts.

Mega Man Effect

What, you’re still using Quicksilver to launch your applications? Rookie. If you didn’t think your Mac could be any more awesome you’re clearly not using this app. I could spend all day talking about the pure liquid awesome that this program brings to the table. But I won’t.

All I’ll say is I lost ten pounds in a week, met the woman of my dreams, ranked #1 in Google and bought property with no money down within 30 minutes of using this app. It’s fucking rad is what it is.

Safari

Yes, I’ll admit it, I pretty much only use Firefox and it’s myriad of wonder plugins for browser testing. Safari is light, fast, blocks pop-ups and passes the ACID2 test. Couple that with a bunch of handy little bookmarklets and it’s all I need in a browser.

I will admit however that I’ve been sharing flirty glances with Camino recently. Safari seems to be crashing more and more frequently and doesn’t seem to like having a massive amount of windows and tabs open for days at a time. Safari is definitely on notice and in danger of being replaced if it doesn’t get it’s act together. Perhaps upgrading to Safari 3 will cure what ails me….

Sidenote

After Desktop Manager, this is the second application I immediately install on any new computer. All it is is a little drawer that sits on the side of your screen, with an open text file always at the ready. Passwords, code snippets, email addresses, URLs – any refuge from my clipboard always ends up in Sidenote.

Originally I used Sidenote to keep my affiliate IDs handy and organized for my online marketing ventures (yes, believe it or not I do do more than just complain about shady agency practices on the internet), but it’s become a catch-all for any information I need to hang onto but not make a separate file for. You can keep multiple files going through a dropdown menu in the drawer, this tiny app has become crucial to my workflow.

Solitaire XL

Believe it or not, yes a game can help with productivity (and I don’t need to add another section to this massive list for one app). In college I learned pretty fast you get nothing but bad results if you try to “force it“. However, if I distract myself with little games or puzzles, eventually my mind clears and my subconscious takes over. And then BAM! Out of nowhere I get a mad rush of inspiration and stay up all night in sketching or coding or comping in Photoshop.

Also, Solitaire XL might be the one thing I think anyone actually misses when they make the switch from Windows. Now you don’t have to give it up (or boot up Parallels).

SuperDuper!

An app I didn’t start using until after I really could have used it. My harddrive crashed right in the middle of my biggest freelance project at the time. No backup. Cats and dogs living together. Mass hysteria.

Rather moot now (maybe) if you have Leopard and Time Machine, but for those of us who can’t afford the upgrade yet SuperDuper! is a free, awesome alternative. I’m probably going to purchase the full version soon. Yes, I still can’t trust myself to back up regularly.

Development

My hobby, my livelihood, when it comes to web design/web development these are the apps that you just cannot find equal to on any other platform. These are the apps that make rabid fanboys pay $30 for grey shirts with a little star on them. Fierce, savage pointless arguments with the people that just don’t get it, the tools that can define a person.

While these are my own personal preferences, I don’t doubt for a second that the alternatives are of any less quality (and this goes for any app on my list). The apps you happily pay $30-80 for even though you could easily pirate them for free. because they’re just that good. These are the programs I use when it’s time to make the donuts. Some of these have almost become extensions of my mind, I’ve used them so much.

Coda

Debating text editors with developers is like arguing religion or politics; you just cannot win. I don’t doubt that the alternatives are solid apps (and I want to try them out), but Coda to me has really changed and improved my workflow.

By now you’ve probably read the epic Coda review Shawn Blanc wrote on this deceptively lightweight app. If you haven’t go read it now. As a front-end developer finally moving from bloated Dreamweaver to a text-editor, Coda just feels right. I’ve used the included books once. The Terminal and FTP a few times. I’ve never used the CSS editor (I prefer to code everything by hand).

I only consistently use 3/5 of this program and I not only paid for it when there are plenty of decent free text editors available, I cannot imagine developing without it. I can’t even explain it, Coda just feels right. The only lacking feature (in my humble opinion) is code-collapse, and it will be the Perfect App. I’d be willing to get a Panic logo tattoo for code-collapse (and maybe some free Panic swag). Seriously. Steven? Cabel? You out there? I’ll do it for a shirt, some stickers and code-collapse. hit me up.

EasyBatchPhoto

Yes, I know I can use Photoshop Actions to customize all sorts of batch processing, but sometimes I’d rather not fire up such a resource-intensive beast just to rename, resize, organize, whateverize a bunch of images.

The first profitable website (technically second, but this site was built only to generate the bling) I ever built revolved around all sorts of images/image collections that I usually had to compile myself. To standardize and organize them a friend recommended EasyBatchPhoto. Like many solid Mac Apps, it does one thing and does it extremely well: Makes batch processing super easy.

iStache

When you’re almost there but for whatever reason it’s just not popping, it probably really needs an authoritative mustache. Using a vacation as a cover for your top-secret government mission, and your wife’s stupid Flickr obsession threatening to blow your cover? Can’t grow your own and no one will take you seriously?

Fire it up and watch how fast a good mustache handles the business.

Again, only on the Mac is this level of thoughtfulness and professionalism available. And free. Win.

Photoshop

Like I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been using Photoshop for about 10 years now. More than a third of my life. Depending on who you ask, it’s either impressive or depressing how second nature this program is to me. Yes, I’ve worked with Fireworks and freely concede that it’s a better tool for pure web development.

But Photoshop is pretty solid as well. No matter which path I take (sketchbook, Illustrator, even Fireworks) it always ends up coming back to Photoshop at one point or another. Give me 5.0 or CS3, I can work some cool stuff. Also, unfortunately in this industry sometimes it’s what programs you know and not what you know, and in that context Photoshop is king. Another story for another time perhaps (yessir, come to think of it got a mind-numbing good one in fact).

SiteSucker

While I did go to college, I’m almost entirely self-taught technically speaking. And most of that comes from reverse-engineering other people’s work (in private, as in not posting others work as my own; a disturbing trend by some “designers”).

With SiteSucker I can grab full archives of not only my own work to archive and tuck away before I mangle it with live editing on the server, but I can also grab other peoples work and file structures to dissect and learn from. I also sometimes use this as a poor-man’s version control (when I ‘m in the middle of the aforementioned terrible practice of editing live files).

Transmit

Yes, Coda has a built in Transmit engine for FTP work, but I just can’t let go of the two-window interface. Especially given my habit of test-driving open source CMSs or when I’m digging through files online that are a couple years old. And no one does it better than Transmit. A tabbed, intuitive interface (I have server space stashed all over the ‘net for my various projects) that just blows every other competitor out of the water.

Like I mentioned before, I dedicate a whole desktop to my FTP activities. I’d put money on the reason there’s a lack of solid competitors for this application is that the Panic crew just nailed it with Transmit. Even when I was using Dreamweaver with it’s built-in FTP capabilities, I was using Transmit additionally to handle all the file transferring. It’s just that good.

Conclusion

Wow, if you made it this far, thanks. I actually wrote this last week but wasn’t sure if I should break it up into multiple posts or publish the giant beast in full. If you’ve got a similar arsenal or want to tell me what a fool I am for using Coda instead of TextMate, fire away in the comments. Or write your own apps list up and I’ll link it up.

Also, any other applications you think I’m a fool to not be using, let me know. I love shiny new toys.