I read a nice post from Alex Payne [link] on software he purchased but no longer uses and was inspired to highlight the software that I’ve used the most this year. I think it might be interesting to some as I’ve made the leap from windows to OS X this year and am also currently using an iPhone as my full time phone. I use software outside of this list but these are my heavy hitters that I am using on a daily basis.
OS X:
- Adium is a chat client, some love it some hate. It is a pretty decent free chat client.
- iStat monitors your mac, temp/processes everything free but donations encourage
- EventBox is a new on the scene social network client that has got real promise I’ve been using it for the last few weeks and like it pretty well so far. I paid for it while it’s only $15 hoping they work out the rest of the kinks and expand it further.
- smcFanControl2 , my macbook pro (late 2008) runs super hot especially when I’m trying to play a game in emulation mode which I do on occasion. This little utility lets you set the default fan speed to a higher rate keeping your laptop cooler
- Qumana is a really nice blog editor. I’m using it to write this post and it has spell check and a bunch of other nice features. I like the wysiwyg wordpress online editor but I’ve lost to many posts to bad network connections and strangeness so I like to use a client editor instead when possible.
- 1Password is an awesome piece of software. turn off password saving in firefox/safari and use this. supports unique passwords per site and auto fills in forms as well as syncing to an iPhone client.
- iTunes, I’m not a huge fan, but it works for what it does and having an iPhone and iPod nano for nike+ means I’m using iTunes, surprisingly it works pretty well on the mac. Totally different than my windows iTunes experience.
- (updated) InsomniaX is an awesome utility I forgot about in my initial post. It keeps your macbook/pro awake when you close the lid and has preferences to tune how your power settings behave when on/off power based on lid closing. By default its not possible to run with the lid closed.
Multi platform:
- Emacs, if you don’t know emacs then man up and start learning. It’s a fantastic editor and a great tool once you get some basic learning down on it. -> [learn]
- TiddlyWiki is a personal wiki that works on your own local machine inside your web browser. No web connection is required and it has been a great organizational tool as well as a notebook. It’s a great place to store little coding routines and methodologies you used to write something that you’ll want to reference in a year.
- Microsoft Mesh is a great way to keep files in sync across several machines and it supports several platforms and those it doesn’t directly support you can access via the web. Drop a file into a folder on your desktop and it appears everywhere you have mesh setup in a few minutes.
- Firefox is a good web browser. I’ve tried others and chrome shows some promise but it’s unfortunate it isn’t out for other platforms yet. I like safari on the mac but I miss my extensions to much.
- Evernote is a multi platform notebook that has some very nice tools to integrate into browsers and phones allowing you to view and add information across platforms. I wish it had a decent todo template built in but it seems a bit outside of what most people want to use it for.
- SVN is a code versioning system that allows you to version and manage source code,
Windows:
- Spaz – one of the best twitter clients I’ve used. Not the most feature rich but its fast if Adobe AIR isn’t freaking out and it has the best font/color scheme out of the box for being able to read things without any eye strain which is a problem for many twitter clients imo. It’s open source so if your so motivated you can customize to your hearts content. Spaz is cross platform also.
- Visual Studio – I use this to author/support ceTwit as well as for my day job
- Putty – hands down the best ssh terminal for windows with fantastic tunneling and its free
iPhone:
- Tweetie is a good twitter client but has some sloppy implementation on a few things that will hopefully improve in a newer version. It’s very powerful with multi account support and built in saved searches but I’ve been recently bugged about mailing myself links to tweets and when I launch tweetie again it didn’t remember where I was even though I had just sent myself a mail to a link.
- 1Password is the iPhone client for the above desktop component.
- BeejiveIM is a multi platform chat client that as some nice features. One of the things I appreciate most is it’s ability to leave me logged in even if the client software isn’t running. It will email you alerts if you get messages when your not running BeejiveIM if you are logged in.
- Shovel is a decent way to waste time browsing digg stories.
- Facebook offers a nice way to keep up with your facebook account. I heard the first release of this was bad but this one seems ok to me.
- i.TV is neat for finding local movie show times and browsing tv listings, you can also set remote Tivo recordings
- TapDefense is a nice free version of the classic tower defense game.