My Mac OS X setup

Browsing through Twitter I noticed that many IT professionals (and more evidently many Virtualization professionals) use Macs for their day-to-day computing duties (especially Macbooks).

I’m a (very) long time Apple user and sometimes people ask me what kind of software I use to do daily tasks, I tried to compile a comprehensive list in this post with a few comments for each software.

Let’s start with the list:

LittleSnapper – A fantastic screenshots manager, you can annotate and create callbacks, organize and export the screenshots using a familiar iPhoto-like interface.

CoRD – Great RDP tool, it manages multiple connections and profiles, it’s based on the open-source rdesktop so it’s self contained (it doesn’t call the Microsoft Remote desktop Connection client).

AppZapper – Like they say on their website it is “the uninstaller Apple forgot”, it cleans your Mac from leftovers when you need to uninstall a software or a plugin.

Dropbox – A free / paid (subscription) tool to keep a synchronized folder on a cloud-based storage, it gives you 2GB free with paid plans up to 100GB. It perfectly integrates with the Finder and its network de-duplication capabilities are wonderful.

Echofon – Ad-ware Twitter client, if you have an iPad or iPhone this is the definitive twitter client, supports unread syncing between all the platforms supported.

Evernote – A great notebook that syncs over the air with its iOS counterparts (iPhone and iPad) with free and paid subscription plans.

1Password – THE password manager, I simply can’t imagine my computing life without it. It syncs natively with its iOS counterparts and can use Dropbox to do the same as well.

MarsEdit – Blog editor, the best in its class for the Mac, written in native Cocoa it’s very stable and feature rich, provides WYSIWYG editing and more. Supports all the major blog platforms available, is it also extendible using Applescripts.

NetNewsWire – I used to use Google Reader as my RSS aggregator of choice but I found that it didn’t fit my needs, also, not having a working 64-bit Google Gears plugin for Snow Leopard’s Safari I was unable to read my feeds when offline (something that happen quite often when you’re on a train). I was using NetNewsWire Lite a long time ago and I decided to give it a try to see if it was improved over time, In my opinion it is the definitive RSS aggregator for Mac Os X: it’s integrated with Google Reader (so I can still see my feeds synchronized when I’m without my laptop), It’s integrated with Delicious (which is my bookmark platform of choice) and, of course, it’s extensible using Applescript. Also it’s now an ad-ware (there’s no Lite version anymore).

VMware Fusion – Obviously this is a no-brainer. I deal with VMware on a daily basis, and if you’re a regular reader you will already know that I’m currently pursuing the VCDX certification. On the Mac you can find an interesting challenger which is Parallels Desktop. I used Parallels in the past and it’s surely more integrated, and sometimes, more Mac-Like, but if you need stability and rock-solid support for USB peripherals you absolutely need Fusion.

TextMate – This text editor saved my life a couple of times, when I was a developer I used to praise the Ultraedit functionalities, one of my favorite features was the vertical editing, well Textmate provides it, and it’s also extensible behind imagination, it’s a bit pricey (If I recall correctly it’s in the €39 price range) but it’s worth every penny.

Microsoft Office – The Office suite is a must for everybody working in a professional environment, I didn’t mention OpenOffice (even if I use it rarely) because it’s not a real alternative. Right now I prefer to create presentations with Keynote rather than using the ol’ Powerpoint, but as far as word processing and spreadsheets are concerned, Word and Excel are still the best out there.

iWork – As I mentioned previously, Keynote is a killer application for me. It still miss a couple of features from Powerpoint, but it’s still the king of presentation software in my opinion. The transitions, the build up effects on tables and the ability to create stunning charts without leaving the applications are the top functionalities in my list. Numbers and Pages are worth a mention, especially if you need to create some nice looking short documents, I use Numbers to create checklists and similar, it’s pretty quick and painless.

Delibar – This small utility sits on the top menubar, and it’s the perfect companion for Delicious (which I use extensively), it gives you network updates from your peers, and let you browse your bookmark collection without having to resort to open the website.

Shimo – Shimo is a multiclient VPN manager, It supports OpenVPN, PPTP, IPSEC, Cisco (either natively using vpnc or making a frontend to the official Cisco Client, works with AnyConnect too), Hamachi and even SSH tunnels (as someone said: the duct-tape of the Internet ). I use it almost exclusively for OpenVPN which in my opinion is still a mess.

iStat Menus – This utility used to be free until the last version, I decided to pay the $10 fee to upgrade to the version three because it’s worth it, the network monitor menubar item is fundamental, I also keep the disk activity, the CPU and the Memory monitor for a quick overview of my system.

DaisyDisk – Another small but very useful utility. DaisyDisk scan your hard drive and provides a quick visual overview of where your data is stored, it helps you get rid of those big files forgotten in a nested directories that you created as a backup-of-a-backup (happens all the time to me). Definitely it’s worth a try.

Money – Money is a personal finance program that helps you track your expenses and even investments, it also has a very interesting features for people like me that do consultancy for a living, it allows you to create personalized invoices and keeps track of them in your cash and banking flow. A bit pricey but a trial is available, so if you’re a freelance consultant you should definitely give it a try.

SSHKeychain – Starting from Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, a system-wide SSH keychain was made available in the Darwin portion of the OS (for beginners, Darwin is the underlying open source foundation of Mac OS X) but I was so accustomed using SSHKeychain that I didn’t bother changing. Also SSHKeychain is free of charge, provides has automatic keys loading capabilities and a nice GUI.

Growl – You simply cannot have a Mac without having Growl installed. Growl is a system-wide alerting and notify system that almost every app on Mac use, many of them carry Growl already bundled so check in your System Preferences if it’s not already installed .

Perian – If you’re switching from Windows to Mac you will immediately miss the many video and audio codecs available on that platform, yes VLC is a possibility (VLC has every of its codecs built-in) but Perian, in my opinion, is a better suited alternative. It gives you a Quicktime component that can decode almost everything available on the internet, and it’s functionalities are immediately available to every Applications that use Quicktime components.

Omnigraffle – And Last but not Least, the Visio replacement for Mac: Omnigraffle. Well, reality is that Omnigraffle is not a *REAL* substitute for Visio, if you’re a heavy user of Visio you simply cannot switch seamlessly to Omnigraffle, but it’s getting there. Right now Omnigraffle can handle Visio files and sometimes even Visio stencils (watch out for EMF which is not supported), many of the features of Visio are available and sometimes is even quicker and easier to use, definitely worth a try, which is available for 30 days.

I hope this list would benefit people that switched to Mac recently, maybe the next time I’ll try to post my Mac OS X tips which I collected in the last 10 years .

Technorati Tags: Mac, Macintosh, Mac OS X, laptop, Macbook, Macbook PRO

Related Posts

• No Related Post