Month: July 2012

More for my own notes than yours, and because I’ve done this before and it was useful to some other people, here is what I have running and installed on my MacBook Air. I’m not done yet but for the most part I’m happy enough with this lot.

My workflow is dominated by Apple devices, MacBook Air is my home computer, I have iPhone and iPad, but all of my personal tasks, email and calendars need to be accessible from my work machine (a Windows laptop). That’s very easy these days and I rely on Google to host most of that, pulling the info into various apps on my different devices.

For now.

So here is the list, and this time round it’s not all free. That’s one thing I’ve realised in my time with iPhone and iPad, some apps are well worth paying for and I’m happy to pay for them (same as some services, Instapaper being an excellent example).

• Moom – gives me Windows 7 style window positioning options which I’ve grown used to.
• Growl – still THE notification engine it seems, highly configurable.
• Caffeine – one click to stop your Mac going to sleep until you say so, handy for viewing movies etc.
• FuzzyClock – change the time to an approximation, seems to help me be less ‘minute’ obsessed.
• Alfred – quick launcher, file finder, all round awesome tool. Seems to have overtaken QuikSilver.
• The Unarchiver – deals with most archive file formats, nice and simple.
• Witch – window switching made easy, a must have if you are moving from Windows.
• TimeMachine Scheduler – lets you schedule timemachine backups… obviously.
• Air Display – extends my screen to my iPad or iPhone (still playing with this one).
• Microsoft Office  – much as I love the Apple versions (Excel still rules though), most of the files I work with are Office formatted. Home Use Program got me this for £10!
• Twitterific – Twitter Client. I have Tweetbot BETA installed but prefer the lighter design touch of Twitterific… however Tweetbot has a MUTE filter for hashtags which may sway me.
• CyberDuck – FTP client. Transmit gets a lot of plaudits but this one has a duck as an icon. It also now supports WebDAV and Google Drive.
• Notational Velocity – stores and retrieves notes. I use this primarily to access SimpleNote notes (a web app) as it’s synced to Dropbox.
• Adium – IM client. Another duck.
• Carbon Copy Cloner – used to create a bootable backup of my machine.
• Dropbox – quite simple, I don’t know where I’d be without this service. Hosted files, apps on all my devices. Drop something in a folder and it’s synced everywhere.
• TextWrangler – powerful text editor. Looking at Tincta for something a bit simpler though.
• uTorrent – for downloading torrents. Duh.
• VLC – video player, supports a multitude of formats.
• Google Chrome – I use it on my Windows box, so syncing keeps my ‘web environment’ the same wherever I go.
• Day One – Journal app, only downside is no web app, syncs with iCloud and/or Dropbox.
• iA Writer – a ‘focused writing app’, clears the screen of distractions. Syncs with Dropbox and/or iCloud.
• Reeder – already on my iPad and iPhone, my RSS reader of choice. You can post out to InstaPaper, Pinboard and other services from there.
• Read Later – an Instapaper client for the Mac. A nice companion to Reeder (you can use it for Pocket as well).
• Skitch – fantastical app for screenshots and image tweaking.
• Postbox – current email client. Hooks up to GMail well. It’s not as nice as Sparrow though, which Google has just bought so still not sure what I’ll settle on.
• HandBrake – video transcoder, for converting video files. Simples.
• Calibre – eBook management, for my Kindle.
• Spotify – because sometimes listening to random playlists created by someone else is all you wanna do!
• CamTwist – bit of a daft one, but lets you add effects during video chats. Also lets you share your screen on a cam session so potentially useful? YMMV!
• BetterTouchTool – I love the touchpad, multi-touch gestures are changing how I work, this add-on lets you take that to the next level, still figuring it all out!
• ControlPlane – context based configurations, change your setup depending on where you are, what you have plugged in and so on.
• Bartender – file under, why didn’t Apple fix this? Removes a LOT of visual clutter (it’s the small bar on the top-right of my screenshot above).
• Fantastical – I’d be lost without my calendar, but iCal is less than great, this makes using the calendar quick and easy.
• Skype – because it’s Skype..
• Crashplan – web based backup. Still trying to figure out how to include my NAS drives in my plan but feel much more secure already!
• Cobook – fed up managing your own Address Book? This will hook into FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter (more services on the way) and keep things up to date for you. Sync to iCloud.. sync to devices. SORTED.
• Last.fm scrobbler – cos I can’t stop logging what tracks I’ve listened to now!
• AppCleaner – for when I want to remove some of these apps, it’ll find all the related files and get rid of them too.

Still to find

• Image Editor – iPhoto is fine for tweaking photos but I need something for when I’m building out websites. Seashore is a likely candidate.
• To Do – I use Astrid these days, but they don’t have an OSX app. I’ve flip-flopped on To Do list apps on my iOS devices a lot recently so expect this to change again (been through RTM, Orchestra and a couple of others).

One thing that struck me, whilst writing this up, was how loyal I am. Not to Apple, but to services or applications that I like. I know there are other RSS apps out there but I will not budge from Reeder, same for InstaPaper, Chrome and a few others. Once I find something I like, I tend to stick with it until I don’t have the choice (Sparrow being the most recent example).

Still a couple of things to sort out, I need a nice thin sleeve for my MacBook Air, but I’m very happy to have made the switch.