Being the homepage of Matt Gibson, a random geek, writer and photographer from Bristol.
Fave Mac Apps
Geeky/Utility
- AppFresh
- Keep your Applications up to date. Also ties in with i use this, so you can see what people like you are using on their Macs.
- Growl
- Highly configurable notification system. Tons of apps plug into Growl to give you a nice consistent way of being told about stuff.
- Transmit
- FTP client with a nice interface and lots of features, including support for Amazon S3.
- Disk Inventory X
- Disk usage viewer. Similar to KDE’s KDirStat.
- Parallels
- Very funky virtualisation software. Run Windows in a virtual machine on your OS X desktop.
- Chicken of the VNC
- Friendly VNC client.
- Super Duper
- Disk cloner.
- Mac Pilot
- OS X preferences adjuster. Fiddle with OS X settings in (relative) safety.
- SoundSource
- Menubar utility to change your sound input and output devices without diving for the System Preferences.
- MenuMeters
- Put CPU, disk, network and other meters right in your menubar.
- Hazel
- Keep your Mac tidy and organised, without doing it all yourself. Hazel will organise your desktop, file downloads into the right places, even zip things up and set their Spotlight info.
Dashboard Widgets
- Wikipedia
- Quick access to Wikipedia articles from your dashboard.
Audio
- Airfoil
- If you have an Airport Express with iTunes, or more than one Mac, try Airfoil. Send any audio to your remote speakers, use another Mac as a remote speaker, play video with the soundtrack synced perfectly on your remote speakers.
Weird and Wonderful
- Pzizz
- Helps you get to sleep, or take power naps (really!) Odd, but definitely worth trying if you feel a little run-down during the day or have problems getting off to sleep at night.
Graphics
- Freeverse Lineform
- Vector drawing package that I use to draw things like this. Great value for money!
Photography
- FlickrExport
- Export directly from iPhoto to Flickr.
Web Design
- RapidWeaver
- Theme-based web development. If you want a good-looking, full-featured website in a hurry, and you don’t want to break the bank, go get it.
- RapidFlickr
- RapidWeaver plugin that creates a gallery based on Flickr photos.
- Coda
- If you hand-craft your websites, you can’t do better than Coda. Truly beautiful code and CSS editor, with ftp, shell and reference books built in.
- CSSEdit
- Awesome CSS editor. Point it at a web page and see exactly what your styles are doing. Has saved me from going mad on more than one occasion.
- TotalValidator
- Standalone application or web-based service that validates and spellchecks web pages in one fell swoop.
- Color Schemer Studio
- Colour scheme designer. Can do funky things like create a colour scheme from a photo you provide.
- Taco HTML Edit
- Nice little HTML editor with live previewing.
- Symbol Caddy Dashboard Widget
- Keep all those awkward HTML entity codes at your fingertips.
- Corporate Ipsum Dashboard Widget
- Don’t have your web copy written yet? Generate as much lorem ipsum text as you want, right from your Dashboard.
- PHP Function Reference Dashboard Widget
- All the PHP documentation in a nice widget on your dashboard.
Writing
- Scrivener
- Outlining, research and writing tool. I use this for drafing web content, articles and fiction. If you write, give it a try.
- NeoOffice
- Port of OpenOffice to the OS X, with a more Mac-like look and feel.
- Reference Tracker
- Keeps track of citations/references for writers; easily add references from web pages or using an ISBN lookup. Handy, nice interface, still in beta but definitely usable.
Books
- Delicious Library
- Scrumptious book cataloguing software. Can read barcodes using your Mac’s builtin camera and find the book’s details without you pushing a button!
Games
- Oolite
- Open source Elite clone, with spookily identical playability to the original.
Blogging and Social Networking
- XJournal
- LiveJournal blogging client.
- MarsEdit
- Blogging client for multiple platforms, including WordPress and Movable Type.
- Twitterrific
-
Twitter client.
- Pukka
- Fast, light, multi-account del.icio.us client.
Chat
- Adium
- Multi-protocol instant messaging client.
- Skype
- If I have to tell you what
Skype
is, you probably don’t need it.
RSS
- NetNewsWire
- RSS newsreader that can sync with other Macs and the web-based NewsGator service. There’s also a Windows client, FeedDemon. Both clients are available free; the web service needs a subscription.
Productivity
- Evernote
- The slickest note-taking system on the internet. Capture notes easily, from text, from websites, from photos. Save, read and sync them on the web, and from Mac and Windows clients. It’ll even recognise words in photos you take and make them searchable.
- Spanning Sync
- Synchronises iCal and Google Calendar.
Financial
- iBank
- Financial management software with a pleasant interface.