Being the homepage of Matt Gibson, a random geek, writer and photographer from Bristol.
Fave Mac Apps
Geeky/Utility
- Alfred
- Application launcher, and much else besides. If you like doing things quickly from the keyboard, rather than clicking around with a mouse, Alfred is your friend.
- Transmit
- FTP client with a nice interface and lots of features, including support for Amazon S3.
- Cyberduck
- If Transmit doesn’t float your boat, then try floating a Cyberduck. Cyberduck is an alternative, open source FTP client with some interesting little differences from Transmit. If you FTP a lot, it’s worth checking out both.
- GrandPerspective
- Disk usage viewer. Treemap-based; similar to KDirStat and WinDirStat.
- Virtual Box
- Free, open source virtual machine software. Run Windows or Linux in a virtual machine on your OS X desktop.
- Chicken of the VNC
- Friendly VNC client.
- Pukka
- Fast, light, multi-account del.icio.us client.
- Growl
- Highly configurable notification system. Tons of apps plug into Growl to give you a nice consistent way of being told about stuff.
- Super Duper
- Disk cloner.
- Mac Pilot
- OS X preferences adjuster. Fiddle with OS X settings in (relative) safety.
- iStat Menus
- 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. Excellent for automating stuff.
- TextExpander
- Type pre-prepared chunks of text using keywords. I use this for email, so I can just type “myplace” and TextExpander inserts my address and a link to Google Maps. Save your fingers!
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
- Pixelmator
- Lovely little image editor for you day-to-day raster graphic editing needs. Prettier and less annoying than any Adobe product. Not that that’s hard.
Web Design
- 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.
- Color Schemer Studio
- Colour scheme designer. Can do funky things like create a colour scheme from a photo you provide. Excellent way of making lovely colour schemes for your websites.
- 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.
Writing
- Scrivener
- Outlining, research and writing tool. I use this for drafing web content, articles and fiction. If you write, give it a try.
- Reference Tracker
- Keeps track of citations/references for writers; easily add references from web pages or using an ISBN lookup.
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
- MarsEdit
- I’m typing these very words in MarsEdit It’s a Blogging client for multiple platforms, including WordPress and Movable Type.
- XJournal
- LiveJournal blogging client.
Blogging and Social Networking
- 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, Windows and iPhone apps. It’ll even recognise words in photos you take and make them searchable.
- Spanning Sync
- Synchronises iCal and Google Calendar.