Macification

Feb 8 ‘07

My Macbook Pro is almost all set up, thanks in mostly to the large Cult of Mac contingent in the office. After asking for many suggestions and doing a bit of digging myself, here's what I'm running:

  • Quicksilver: My God, it's full of stars. QS actually reminds me of developing with a powerful IDE: who cares where stuff is when you can search? Just find it. For me, it's Command+Space and start typing. Wonderful app. Much faster than the build-in Searchlight.

  • MenuMeters: Displays CPU, memory, and other system status information discretely in the menu bar. I display memory and CPU, but skip the disk and network info.

  • Witch: Allows you to ALT/OPTION+Tab through all of your application windows, not just the main application itself. For example, I have 3 Mail windows open and I can ALT+Tab to all of them.

  • XTorrent: Free (for now) bittorrent client that also includes searching for torrents. Great for finding all of the that wonderful Creative Commons content.

  • Cog: ... and now that you have torrented all of that CC'ed .flac and .shn audio, play it with Cog. Actually I don't like it much, since I can't seem to sort by file name, which is annoying. I'm looking for an alternative.

  • NeoOffice Pretty free office applications. Gotta have at least one.

  • VirtuDesktops: Multi-desktops. I feel like I'm supposed to like this, and I sorta do, but I don't use them much yet.

  • Eclipse: Yeah yeah, I know there are many Eclipse haters out there, but it's a free IDE with lots of handy plugins. Maybe I'll buy TextMate, but free is free is free.

Other Handy Stuff I've Done

  • Windows/Mac hard drive sharing: I followed one of many many many instructions on the net to share my Windows hard drive with my Mac, and visa-versa. Rather handy for harvesting all of that stuff I've been collecting for the last forever.

  • NAS Enclusure: Fry's has a great selection of NAS (network-attached storage) hard drive enclusures, so I picked up a NexStar LX which seems to be working fine. Same theme as above: now I can more easily share content between my Mac and Windows machine, plus this will be a good place to park backups.

Dashboard Widgets

Holy crap these suck a lot of memory. But, if they are worth the RAM, then install like mad. The only one I keep up is iStat Pro widget which shows lots and lots of system info in a pretty interface. I checked out the Wikipedia widget and Rdoc widget widgets but didn't find them so useful when you can just open Firefox and hit the sites themselves.

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