The first tool I want to talk about is a nice utility that can create applications out of website. With Fluid you take a url, give it an icon and create an application. This application can have it’s own links and preferences. Looks nice and it comes with some advantages. You can place it on your dashboard. It has it’s own icon when going through you apps with command-tab. Very easy interface and free to use.

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Another tool I want to talk about is not free. Omnigraffle costs a lot of money. Still I want to mention it here because it has so many nice things. This is the best tool I ever used for drawing diagrams. It just works like expected. Has a lot of alignment, sizing, grouping, colouring options to you available.

I was not sure if I really had to mention this one. But I decided that the current release of open office is so good, it would be an error to leave it out. I use it on a daily basis and it does what it should do. Writing documents in a lot of formats including the microsoft 2007 editions of word, excel, etc. Very nice if you do not want to pay any money for the microsoft office suite. Nine out of ten users will find what they need in the suite.

The next application is nice when dealing with zip files. BetterZip feels very comfortable to create new zips. I would like a command line interface but have not found it yet. It would be nice to be able to open a new archive from the the command line. Or just create a new zip based on a folder from within finder. These options seem to be missing. Still a nice utility for less than 20 dollars

Mac OSX comes with out of the box support for subversion. Using the command line is not very difficult for the basic tasks. But for more advanced tasks a graphical interface would be nice. It would be even better if this interface gives the feeling of a mac application. Well search no longer (if you want to pay for at least). Versions is here. This is a very nice application and it seems to work very well. The biggest disadvantage is the price. It costs 46.41 euro’s, which is not cheap for an application that only makes your life easier. Than again, if you work a lot with subversion it could be worth the money.

The last two applications are actually plugins for your system preferences. The first is for setting default applications. This is not easy out of the box, with this application you make it available from the System Preferences panel. The application is called : RCDefaultApp. The second I want to mention is about the temperature of your mac book pro. It can become pretty hot since the fans jump in late. The Mac should be perfectly capable of handling this, however you can have more options available. The speed is better at lower temperature and the machine just feels nicer when the temperature is lower. If you want this as well, go to the website of the utility Fan Control

That is it for now, do not forget to checkout the page with tools, feel free to come with better alternatives or good ideas.

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 – 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.

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