product-15in.jpgThese days everybody is speaking about the new MacBook air. The last months I was showing my macbook pro to colleagues and these same persons were kind of laughing and telling me about this new laptop. Yes it looks great, but it is to small for me. I like the one I have now a lot. Why this long intro? I do not know, just wanted to mention this great new product of apple. This post is about the tools I started using since I have my macbook. Some of these tools will cost money, others are free. I’ll try to give as much details as possible. If you think I am using the wrong tool (I and did not pay for it :-)) please let me know.

So lets start with the office tools. When I was in the store I decided to completely loose microsoft. I bought iWorks, oke and I admit I also bought vmware fusion, for those times I really need windows. I just love the Unity support in vmware. This way you can run your windows applications but are not limited to the virtual machine window. It looks just like your average program. But I started talking about iWorks. I did not use Numbers a lot. I did use pages and keynote. I just love pages, never did I have so much fun creating documents. I wrote our corporate newsletter with it, export to pdf, no extra tools, all the links were really working. I got lots of very nice responses to the new newsletter format. So a job well done.

adium – A replacement for msn and all other chat clients like yahoo and jabber. In the netherlands a lot of people are on hyves. Hyves uses a jabber server as well to see who is online. This integrates very nicely with adium. Check the following page if you want to try adium with hyves. This software is free to use.

cyberduck.icon.pngcyberduck – A very nice ftp client. Exacty what you need when doing ftp or sftp, nothing more, nothing less. This is is very cheap, it does not need to cost you anything.

marsedit – Up till now I was writing my blog items using my blogging software. Not really a problem, but also not a real good experience. One thing I did like was the integration of special tools to write blog items. Acutually that is why I moved from serendipity to wordpress for blogging. This marsedit is a nice tool, not to complicates, and not very expensive (30 $).

plaxo – Software to manage your contacts, integrates with hyves, linkedin, etc. Most of all it integrates with you mac address book and calendar. So even without your mac you can still check your agenda.

AppFresh – The mac includes an update utility, but it does not work for all software packages you use. This application tries to fill that gap. It enables software updates for (all) your applications, it is kinda new, but it works reasonably well.AppFreshIcon128.png

MacFusion – using linux, windows, etc on your mac? Then MacFusion is what you want. I especilly like the unity approach. This way you can run windows applications like they are running native on the mac. So using alt-tab and showing microsoft vision, or windows explorer, or even the command prompt.

Remote Desktop Connection – Sometimes you just need to connect to a remote windows machine or server. Then this is a very nice utility. You do not need vmware for it to run 🙂

Tunnelblick – Very nice utility when you are using openvpn to connect to a remote server. Seems to be running very well.

Drawit – Looking for an easy drawing program to create these nice log’s or other drawings with very nice lightning effects. This is you tool. Nice usage of layers. Easy way of selecting filters to introduce effects. It is not free, but 30 euro is not very expensive for a tools like this.

I know this is not a very extensive list, but for now these are the tools that do not come standard with mac osx 10.5. If I learn about another nice tool, i will share it here as well.

greetz Jettro

Mac OS-X tools
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2 thoughts on “Mac OS-X tools

  • February 15, 2008 at 4:44 pm
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    actually, that is not such a bad idea 🙂

  • February 15, 2008 at 4:25 pm
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    So, shall we get a MacBook Air for home-fun (Java dev)? 😉

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