-
The tools I use: Mac
I’d love to have something meaty and heady to write about today, but I’ve got nothing. So, because some folks have asked for it, and because Kenny did it, how about a simple list of the tools I use on my Mac everyday and couldn’t live without? I consider myself a bit of a software minimalist—I don’t use a lot of the geeky tools many web pros do. I try to only have what I think I really need. Note that this only includes native Mac software, not web apps I use regularly. Here goes:
More -
@behoff’s tools and services for 2010
Brian writes up some tools and services he’s been using this year — I need to check several of these out.
Visit -
Web Dev App Reviews from the Pros – Part 1, Mac
Fuel Your Apps asked me, and several other web pros including Dan Rubin and Tim Van Damme, what apps we code in on OS X.
Visit -
mxcl’s homebrew
Interesting-looking alternative to MacPorts and Fink.
Visit -
understudy
An in-progress plugin for Front Row that adds Hulu and Netflix streaming support. I’ve recently moved to a tiny studio condo with no TV and no cable, so I’m in the process of trying to set up a good iMac-based TV solution. Once I get it all figured out, it’ll probably be worth a blog post about my experiences.
Visit -
Tools We Use: Textmate
Kenny has a nice post over the Blue Flavor blog detailing a bunch of reasons why TextMate rocks our socks off. I sort of hate to admit it as someone who identifies as a designer moreso than a coder, but TextMate is probably the single most-used and most important piece of software on my Mac. I use it for everything.
Visit -
Eric Florenzano’s Setting up a Django environment screencast
Eric’s got a terrific screencast about setting up a Django development environment on Mac. He goes through it step-by-step from the very beginning, and it’s all very easy to understand. There are a million different ways to set up your dev enviroment, but I really liked some of the things Eric was doing in his setup — it’s actually making me rethink the way I usually set mine up.
There’s also a screencast of Eric’s app django-pagination, which looks really sweet. I’m definitely going to look into it more and see if it’s appropriate for my projects. You should, too.
Visit -
Cornerstone: GUI SVN Client
Another Mac SVN client. This one, at a glance, looks more interesting than Versions, to me.
Visit -
Preview of Versions SVN Client
I had been excitedly awaiting Versions for a long time, until I gave up and declared it vaporware. Now, it looks like it may be for real. This preview is very enticing. Want.
Visit -
Macworld: The new rules for buying a Mac
Great Mac-buying advice from the guys at Macword. There definitely are still a lot of people out there who seem to think you need a Mac Pro or Macbook Pro for even moderately heavy use, such as that a typical web designer does. In reality, a Macbook or iMac is plenty of computer for 90% of users out there. General rule: unless you’re a hardcore Mac gamer or doing professional-level video editing or 3D modeling, you probably don’t need a pro-level machine.
Visit -
Django Admin Omnigraffle Stencil
If you use Django and Omnigraffle and find yourself mocking up Django admin screens, this could be useful.
Visit -
Cabel Sasser: Coda Confidential
I’ve had this one in my “to watch later” pile for several weeks, and I finally got around to it last night. Cabel’s one of the more entertaining speakers I’ve ever head the pleasure of seeing in person, and this talk about the development of Coda certainly lives up to that. He’s insightful, funny, and interesting. Check it out. In my opinion, Panic is still synonymous with great Mac software — even as I was never the target market for Coda and Expan drive has largely made Transmit unnecessary for me.
Visit -
Daring Fireball: ExpanDrive
As much trouble as I’ve had with sshfs being slow as balls, I think I’m going to splure for this $29 app, which Gruber gives a glorius review.
Visit -
Silverback: Guerrilla usability testing from Clearleft
Silverback, from our friends at Clearleft, is a really nice new Mac app for usability testing that makes uses of Macs’ built in iSight, the Apple Remote, and more. It’s a simple app, but it’s extremely well-designed (as you’d expect from Clearleft!), and appears to do what it does very elegantly. If you do usability testing with live subjects, you really should check it out. Also noteworthy to an animals lover like me: Clearleft is donating 10% of the profits to saving the gorillas. Awesome.
Visit -
Noodlesoft: Hazel
Hazel is a neat-looking little Mac app that let you do e-mail rule-like filtering on your filesystem. Sounds cool.
Visit -
Anxiety: lightweight to-do management for Mac
I’ve only played with it for about 60 seconds, but this little app looks great, so far. Simple, fast, and uses the built in Leopard system-wide To-Do service. Love it, so far. Thanks be to Gruber.
Visit -
Leopard Stacks “overlays”
This is a freaking great idea. Sadly, it’s a pain in the ass to implement, so I won’t bother. But this is exactly the sort of thing Apple should have built-into Stacks to make them better. I love the concept of Stacks, but the implementation is definitely lacking. I’m sure it’ll get better over the next few releases of OS X — just like everything else has.
Visit -
Spotlight Strikes Back: In Leopard, It Works Great
Matt Nuberg on what makes Leopard’s Spotlight so great. I agree with every word: Spotlight in Leopard is freakin’ badass. Love it.
Visit -
Apple to release iPhone/iPod touch SDK in February
With an official SDK in place, mark my words: Mac OS X mobile (or whatever you want to call it) is about to become the most significant platform in a long, long time.
Here’s hoping it’s pretty “open” to lots of developers.
Visit -
iPhone Popup Growl Style by Wilson Miner
Wilson has created a sweet little iPhone-esque Growl notification style. I love it! First one I’ve ever seen that convinced me to switch away from the Music Video style.
Visit -
Marc Cuban: Once you go Mac
NBA owner, dot-com millionaire, and all around crazy celebrity Marc Cuban has switched to Mac, and is quite happy. Nothing too special in here, but I’ve always loved Marc Cuban, so it’s kind of a cool read.
Visit -
Font rendering philosophies of Windows and Mac OS X
“…Windows looks sharper at the expense of not actually being a very accurate representation of the text. The Mac with it’s design/DTP background is a much more accurate representation and scales more naturally than Windows which consequently jumps around a lot vertically.”
The piece includes a great example of just how true this is. It also includes this great quotes:
Visit“The issue is reminiscent of the ‘I hate black bars on wide-screen films’ brigade who believe that the film should be chopped, panned, scaled and otherwise distorted from the artists original intention simply so that it fits better on their display.”
-
Vista puts Mac OS X font rendering to shame
George Ou puts an image of Vista’s sub-pixel anti-aliasing next to Mac OS X’s non-sub-pixel anti-aliasing and declares Vista the winner. No shit, Sherlock. How about a level playing field?
Visit -
EA officially backs off of Mac releases
It’s one thing to not release your games for Mac. It’s another thing entirely to stand on stage with Steve Jobs Himself™ and promise you’re going to release your games for Mac, and then not do it. How lame.
Visit -
Home office in the new apartment
-
Home office in the new apartment
-
Home office in the new apartment
-
Subtraction: Unsung Software
Khoi’s post about has favorite Mac software you’ve never heard of has generated a ton of comments with other suggestions. Can’t wait to go through this list!
Visit -
Inman: Hacking the iPhone on an Intel Mac
Shaun gives the best instructions I’ve seen yet on how to do all sort of nifty hackery on your iPhone. And I say “your iPhone,” because I wouldn’t dare try it on mine.
Visit -
Things: A forthcoming Mac GTD app
Assuming this sees the light of day and is as good as it appears from a single screenshot, it may well give OmniFocus a run for its money. Looking forward to giving it a try, anyway.
Visit -
Leaflets Blog: Mobile User Experience
Keith Robinson writes about why we made the decisions we did, how it fits (or doesn’t) into the “one web” strategy, and why we built Leaflets with web standards — even though some of those standards are only surrently supported by one browser.
Visit -
Daring Fireball: Non-Top-Posting Reply Scripts for Apple Mail
If you’re one of those people (like Gruber) who hates top-posting but wants (or has) to use Apple Mail for some reason, John has written and released a couple of clever AppleScripts to invoke bottom-posting, instead.
Personally, I’ve never much minded top-posting. I usually top-post, unless I specifically want to respond point-by-point, in which case I reply inline. According to Wikipedia, people who have been online since the heyday of Usenet are supposed to be crotchety old farts who hate top-posting — but it really doesn’t bother me (and yes, I was a Usenet fiend back in the early 90s — still am, to some degree).
Visit -
How To: Use IRC On The iPhone With Colloquy
I haven’t complained much about the lack of an SDK for the iPhone, mostly because the iPhone already has 90% of the apps I’d want on it. But IRC is one of the three biggies it’s missing, for me personally (the other two are instant messaging and a good RSS reader). This is definitely a hack, but it’s a fairly elegant one and Nathan reported success with it. Worth giving a shot, if you want to IRC on the road.
Visit -
Spanning Sync: iCal, meet Google
I wish I’d known about this a while ago. We used Google Calendars at the Journal-World, but I now have no need for it (Blue Flavor is straight iCal). Jason Santa-Maria says it works really well with iPhone, too — events are editable in all three places (Google, Mac, iPhone). Nice.
Visit -
Home office
-
iPhone: Unlimited data starting at $60; activation exclusively through iTunes
Nice. Both of these make me very happy. Voice, SMS, rollover minutes, unlimited data, and unlimited mobile-to-mobile starting at $60 a month is definitely less than I expected. And activation through iTunes hopefully means those lines won’t be too ridiculous to wait in on Friday.
Visit -
Apple WWDC iPhone Development
Some nice notes on a WWDC session about web development for the iPhone. Nothing terribly interesting here, but it’s nice to have some of what I expected confirmed.
Visit -
Versions: Mac Subversion Client
Although the tools built into TextMate cover most of my needs, this appears to be a tremendously-designed and full-featured SVN client for the Mac (of course, I’m going off tiny, partial screenshots, so take it with a grain of salt). I can’t wait to try it out. Private beta coming soon.
Visit -
Daring Fireball: WWDC 2007 Keynote News
Gruber has basically the same take as me on this year’s WWDC: meh. Leopard looks neat enough and I certainly do want it, but there’s nothing I’ve seen that really feels revolutionary. Everything is just nice incremental changes. The one exception — maybe — is Time Machine, but we saw that a year ago, so it didn’t feel that exciting this time around, either.
The iPhone-doesn’t-require-an-SDK thing was pretty lame. We’ve all known that you could — and that people will — build web apps targeted at the iPhone for six months now. That’s neat, but it’d definitely not the same as writing apps for the iPhone. The lack of real third-party development on the iPhone isn’t a deal-breaker for me, but it’s certainly a bummer. And it just doesn’t make very much sense. Every other mobile phone on the market today has downloadable third-party apps. Every single one. Steve’s lines about it reducing stability or security are bullshit. It’s god dammed Mac OS X, right? If so, then it has memory protection. If allowing third-party development for the iPhone is unreliable and insecure, then so is allowing third-party development for Macs. And yet, Apple allows that.
Apple should just say what it means: It is going to ride out the iPhone as a closed platform for as long as it can. Eventually, they’ll probably let some choice companies in on development for it. This is exactly the plan Apple has used with the iPod, and it’s worked beautifully. I don’t blame them for wanting to repeat it with the iPhone. But why can’t they just say it?
Safari on Windows was a nice surprise. Doesn’t affect me a lot personally, but I’m glad to see it happen.
And finally: does anyone else think that Steve Jobs is personally obsessed with Cover Flow? In reading the MacRumorsLive coverage of the Keynote today, almost every line ended with “Cover Flow.” Pretty much every app on Leopard and the iPhone now include some for of Cover Flow. Hell, even the Apple website now includes Cover Flow as a means of navigation. It’s just starting to feel like Steve’s pet gadget and I just have this impression of the designers at Apple rolling their eyes every time Steve asks for it again. “Well, guys, Steve pretty much liked the new version of iCal. However, he wants you to be able to browser your to-dos using Cover Flow. Yeah, I know. But, Steve said. Sorry, guys.”
Visit -
Panic Coda: One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X
Okay, okay — let’s everyone just chill out a minute. I love Panic, and I’ve bought every app they’ve ever released. I think they’re probably the single best Mac development company in the world. But hot damn, this app has been out for all of five minutes and my feed reader is already overflowing with jizz coming out of every web developer’s pants. Yes, it look very cool, but let’s wait a few more than five minutes before we proclaim it the next coming of the Lord himself, okay? Has anyone actually built anything with it yet?
I live in TextMate. It’s my everything. It’s going to be really hard to get me to switch away from it. But if anyone can do it, Panic can. Initially, I feel like Coda has some really kick ass tools built in, and I’m definitely going to give it a shot. But it’s missing two very big TextMate features (for me personally): Subversion integration and a Django bundle. I rely pretty heavily on my Subversion repository, and not having tab completion and syntax coloring for Django would be pretty hard to get used to at this point.
We’ll see. This does look like an awesome app, especially if you just do HTML/CSS and not so much programming. But TextMate it is not — at least not yet, and not rom my initial five-minute glance at Coda. I’ll be keeping my eye on it, though.
Visit
Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
Filter content
FeedItems tagged mac
By content type
FeedOther tags in these items
- webdesign 1070 (100%)
- jeffcroft 1048 (98%)
- design 858 (80%)
- conference 567 (53%)
- webprogramming 531 (50%)
- apple 444 (41%)
- django 437 (41%)
- humor 405 (38%)
- blueflavor 374 (35%)
- music 363 (34%)
- worldonline 337 (31%)
- python 321 (30%)
- css 309 (29%)
- haleycroft 305 (29%)
- dkeithrobinson 289 (27%)
- technology 278 (26%)
- sports 238 (22%)
- business 225 (21%)
- journalism 203 (19%)
- video 197 (18%)
- osx 196 (18%)
- typography 192 (18%)
- software 183 (17%)
- iphone 180 (17%)
- webstandards 176 (16%)