A long long way from home

I am currently on my first test run of MacOSX, and has been the last 7 months now.  During that period I have installed and tested almost every program that seemed the least bit interesting – and there’s a huge heap of interesting applications out there, I promise you.  The result is that I have achieved a pretty unstable OSX installation.

Applications are segfaulting at random, and stuff generally does not work any more. The machine is slow and even crashes or freezes at random, some days twice a day.

If this was Windows I would switch back to Linux again, cursing the day I first installed Windows on the poor computer. But I kind of like OSX (understatement of the day) and I want to keep using it. In the last 7 months I have seen what works, how to do things, and what takes so much work cleaning up after that there is no point in fixing it. I have also found a lot of great programs, and those are the reasons for this post. Keep reading for finding out what I use!

I’ll list stuff up in random order here.

• Ecto – the blog tool I am using right now. A must-have for editiing blogs. The editor is kind of.. elementary, though.
• Growl – the notifier of Everything. Gives little bezels when applications reports events.
• iScrobbler – reports what you play to last.fm. Completely and utterly not useful, but if you like to keep track..
• VirtueDesktops – the free desktop manager for OSX. Pretty great with Parallels, and a must-have until OSX 10.5 Leopard with Spaces is unleashed from it’s cave.
• Parallels beta – virtualization software. I use this to run Windows and Linux, works pretty much like a charm.
• SSHKeychain – administers my ssh keys and ssh-agent, and connects the whole shebang against the OSX Keychain. I almost never type passwords anymore.
• Quicksilver – the handy launch utility. I use this to effectively launch all my apps, as well as changing songs in iTunes with a keyboard shortcut. It even looks fancy.
• iTerm – I normally do a lot of work on remote servers, and Terminal.app kind of sucks. Love that iTerm has tabs. Kind of heavy on the CPU at times and needs to be restarted every other day, but who cares.
• Emacs – The one and only text editor. May be used for everything, a total must have. The distribution I use also has all the extra stuff I need – and is 200MB in size because of it.
• Zend Studio – the best and most expensive tool for debugging PHP – yet. But it still is an enormous Java monster that eats my memory and does a lot of random crashing when running natively on OSX. So I have to boot Windows XP in Parallels to actually use it.
• AntiRSI – for those short brakes that your hands need
• Books – GPL book library. Lots of plugins for getting book info from various sources, and it it is easy to develop your own as well.
• Booxter – Payware that does the same as Books, but also has iSight bar code scanning just like Delicious Library
• Camino – Mozilla browser with OSX look and feel. Not really much used, but handy to have around
• coconutBattery – keep track of your battery health.
• coconutWifi – small app to see what wireless networks has WEP or not.
• CoreDuoTemp – monitors CPU speed and temperature.
• Disk Inventory X – Find those huge files that steal all the disk space
• Firefox – handy to have for web development
• Flip4Mac – Playing VMW media often comes in handy
• iAlertU – Car alarm for Macs. Hue show-off factor.
• MacTheRipper – super for backing up DVD movies
• Mozilla – I use mozilla as my USENET news reader
• OmniWeb – The coolest web browser for Mac. I normally use Safari because it is more usable, but Omniweb definitively is the coolest.
• Simplyburns – No point in getting Toast. Simplyburns simply burns everything.
• Thunderbird – the email client. I only keep it around for testig stuff. I of course use Mail.app.
• Transmit – FTP, SFTP – this client is the best.
• Thinkfree – an Office package made in Java. Works much better than Neooffice and MS Office on the Mac. Easy and functional Writer, Calc and Show (presenter)

I also use most of the apps that come with OSX like Mail.app, Safari and the iLife package.