The mac software I need to get by

I got a new laptop when I joined Made Media and spent a happy evening going through all the applications I’d downloaded to my old laptop, only installing  the ones that would actually be of use to me.

This is really another of those posts intended to serve as a checklist for my future self. So next time I get a new laptop and want to start from scratch rather than just transferring everything straight across, this might be handy. In the meantime, you never know, it might be useful to someone else.

Here are the applications that made the cut:

First of all, I have iWork and Office for Word/Pages, Excel and Keynote (good grief, I love Keynote).

Audacity (with LAME for mp3 export and Soundflower) – for recording audio and doing very light bits of editing (with extras for mp3 export and recording streamed audio, respectively).

Camouflage – sometimes my desktop gets a bit untidy, so if I’m doing any training or presenting then this is the virtual rug I sweep everything under.

Chrome – a nice, quick browser and my day-today preference.

Dropbox – for sharing files between our teams but also allowing me to work between computers when I need to.

Evernote – I’ll work out how I want to use this one day. At that point I’m pretty I’ll kick myself for not getting into it sooner.

FileZilla – a simple enough FTP client.

JustNotes – a desktop wotsit for accessing Simplenote. This is the reason I don’t use Evernote (yet) and it was a revelation when I discovered it. Up until then I was cluttering the place up with a proliferation of TextEdit files.

Kod – I don’t often have to mess about with code but, for when I do, Kod will do the job.

Last.fm – for keeping track of what I’m listening to

MarsEdit – my offline blogging tool of choice. Good for writing on the go and a better place to work on drafts than WordPress. If only it synced between laptops.

Paparazzi – a nice little screenshot app with different enough functionality to Skitch to make it useful in certain scenarios.

Propane – a desktop client for Campfire, for internal office chatting.

Pukka – a lovely little social bookmarking client that replaces the functionality Delicious removed from their bookmarklet and adds some more handy little touches.

RadioAunty – a nice little player for listening to BBC radio.

RAR Expander – for opening compressed files.

Screenflow – a very good, simple piece of screencasting software.

Skitch – just a lovely tool for capturing screenshots, quickly cropping/resizing images and all sorts of other little things. I’m not sure what I’d do without it.

Skype – for chatting on the cheap.

Soundcloud – I seem to be listening to a lot of mixes on Soundcloud these days. Rather than use a browser tab I like to use the desktop app for that.

Spotify – another one I don’t use as much as I suspect I will do one day (soon). Need to get myself one of those Unlimited accounts.

The Unarchiver – again, for opening compressed files.

Transmission – because sometimes there are legit things you need to torrent. Srsly.

Twitter – the standard desktop client suits me fine for day-to-day use.

VLC – it’ll play any video file, apparently. It hasn’t let me down yet.

There are other bits and bobs that I use too but, for me, these are the must-haves.

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Links for 8 July 2009

• VideoLAN – Open Source multimedia and streaming solutions – The only media player you’ll ever need (although you may want others). It loads quickly and plays everything and has just been released in it’s first proper full version
• FREE (full book) by Chris Anderson – The manifesto for making money by giving stuff away. True to form Anderson’s put the book online for free via Scribd
• Thomas Moronic – There’s just something very cohesive and unfussy about the layout of this blog, especially the ordering of the sidebar. When you spend your time reading RSS feeds you miss seeing the content in the context it was (most likely) intended. I’ve followed Thomas’s writings for a while, inherited when I nabbed Pete Ashton’s OPML file for CiB but rediscovered the blog itself when looking for examples of good writers’ blogs to point to
• Socialreporter – Crowds, tribes, teams: Tuttle turns to consulting – Interesting business model this. Tuttle is the name of a weekly social media get-together in London (from which the format for the Birmingham Social Media Cafe was lifted pretty directly) – “Tuttle has been going very well, and has now spawned The Tuttle Team. This is an innovative consulting approach to discover and understand client needs using a process of refinement through three forms”

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