Software I Use

Updated: February, 2010

I try to keep an updated list of software I run. This is because I often get the question what software I use, and it’s easier to just point at a web page rather than trying to remember everything. I have used Mac computers since 2002, so I have stumbled across quite many different software packages over the years. Here’s a list of the software I currently use on my MacBook Pro 15″ laptop.

Top-10

These are the first 10 applications I install on my Mac which I use on a daily basis.

• Adium. A versatile instant messaging client for OSX that supports most protocols you could think of. *FREE*
• Adobe CS4 Design Premium. I use Acrobat, Illustrator and Photoshop daily for documents and presentations, and regularly use Indesign and Dreamweaver in various projects. I think I have tried most free or low-cost alternatives to CS4 but haven’t yet found anything that comes close to the full CS4 suite.
• Apple iWork 09. I feel much more creative working in Keynote than Powerpoint, and this is my main reason for using iWork for all my presentations. I have lately begun to use Pages as well, and I really enjoy the full screen toggle that was added in the latest version.
• Default Folder X. Once you have tried it you cannot use a computer without it! Default Folder X gives you a list of “recent folders” in the file selection dialog. You can also use it to “click” on a Finder window from an Open/Save dialog to point the dialog to that folder location. If you like me work with Word, Photoshop, Illustrator and a text editor in parallel, this application is a huge time saver! Default Folder X also does lots of other things such as keeping a list of favorites, adding previews etc to the file folder dialogs. It’s the #1 tool I install on all my Macs, I just can’t recommend it enough. *SHAREWARE*
• DropBox. DropBox is a tool for real-time online backups and document sharing. If you like me have more than one computer you can use DropBox to keep applications on all your computers in sync, like 1Password or Viscosity. The latest version also works fine with FileVault accounts. Highly recommended! *SHAREWARE*
• LastPass. The best application I have found for keeping my web site passwords and secure notes. And it’s free too! *FREE*
• Microsoft Office 2008 (Mac). I only use Word and Excel from the Office 2008 suite, but I use those a lot. For mail I use the built-in OSX mail which now has good Exchange support, and for presentations I use Keynote included in iWork.
• Skype. The Skype client for Mac is almost as full featured as the PC client and has better support for sorting contacts in groups. *FREE*
• TweetDeck. My favorite Twitter client. *SHAREWARE*
• Yojimbo. Having tried everything from OneNote to Evernote, I finally found my favorite note taking application in Yojimbo. Top 3 features: Great tagging system, excellent word-editor and superb export functionality. *SHAREWARE*

Software Packages

The rest is just a pile of software I use a couple of times per week.

• AppZapper 2. Sometimes you need to uninstall OSX software, and this program automates the process of removing left-over preferences and other files used by the application. I previously used AppDelete for this like AppZapper 2 better. *SHAREWARE*
• BBEdit. If I need to open text files created in Windows, or if I need to create text files that should be sent to Windows systems, I use BBEdit. The best app I know of that can work natively with UTF-8 text files with CRLF endings. *SHAREWARE*
• BetterZip. Zip file management in OSX. If you need anything more than “double click to unzip archive” this is one of the best OSX applications for this. Zip file management, automatically removes Mac specific items from archives, WinZip compatible 256-bit encryption, and much more. *SHAREWARE*
• FontCase. I have a few thousand typefaces installed, and FontCase is the best tool I have found to give me a good overview of all of them. *SHAREWARE*
• Growl. Growl is a notification system for OSX. You can customize how notifications from various applications should appear and how they should look, and after that “it just works”. Growl is widely supported by most Mac applications that doesn’t have the “Microsoft” name tag. I use it with the free Mono theme. *FREE*
• NetNewsWire. My favorite RSS reader application. *SHAREWARE*
• Picturesque. Makes pictures look nicer for blogs etc. I use it to add reflections, edges, curved borders, shadows etc to pictures before posting to the blog. Very nice tool if used subtle. *SHAREWARE*
• Safari. I run Safari with the following extensions: Safari AdBlocker and Glims. *FREE*
• Spotify. I use a Spotify Premium account for all my music needs. *SUBSCRIPTION*
• Transmission. One of the better Bittorrent applications for OSX, regularly updated. *FREE*
• Transmit. My favorite FTP client. *SHAREWARE*
• Viscosity. My favorite OpenVPN client for OSX. *SHAREWARE*
• VLC. Can playback almost every media file you throw at it. *FREE*
• VMware Fusion 3 (with Windows 7, Office 2007 and Visio 2007). I use VMware Fusion so I can run Office 2007 and Visio 2007. I sometimes still need to run Excel macros and edit Visio documents from time to time. I run Windows 7 in VMware Fusion since I like the new task bar and have come to depend on having favorite folder links in the Windows Explorer.
• xScope. A must if you do UI design or web layout. *SHAREWARE*

Software Packages I no longer use

I just did a re-install of my system and couldn’t really be bothered installing the software applications below. They are still good applications so I still list them here for you to explore.

• 1Password. After switching to LastPass I don’t use 1Password anymore. The LastPass Safari integration is really miles ahead of 1Password.  *SHAREWARE*
• Firefox 3. With addons such as Safari Adblocker and Glims for Safari I won’t switch to Firefox anytime soon. *FREE*
• Flip4Mac. I use VLC for all Windows Media (WMV) playback, which means that I don’t really need Flip4Mac anymore. Might still be good however if I need to convert older WMV movies into Quicktime format so I can use them in Keynote. *SHAREWARE*
• Geektool. Quite cool but also quite buggy, so I can’t really be bothered using it anymore. Previously I used it to display CAL, TOP and UPTIME on my desktop that refreshed every 10 seconds. You can download my GeekTool settings updated for OSX Snow Leopard here:
  http://www.sanneblad.com/files/GeekTool20091109.zip
  Included in the zip file:
  (1) Process list sorted by CPU usage
  (2) Uptime and RAM/CPU usage
  (3) European Calendar of the current month (calendar starts on Monday).
  Here are some tips to customize it, here are some more, and even more here. *FREE*
• iDeskCal. Shows your upcoming appointments on your desktop – highly recommended! My motivation for NOT using it however is that I don’t really want to show my entire upcoming agenda on my screen all the time. *SHAREWARE*
• JungleDisk. Now when DropBox works with FileVault accounts I really have no need for JungleDisk as a backup solution anymore.
• Luxology Modo. I previously used this for basic 3D renders and projections, such as the 3D banners on gapidraw.com. Unfortunately I don’t have much time these days for 3D graphics and renders.
• Menu calendar clock for iCal. A nice menu bar calendar with full support for week numbers. Not really using it anymore since I have my script to add week numbers into iCal. *FREE*
• SmartSVN. The most reliable and robust Subversion client I have found for OSX, written in Java. Can be used for free with slightly limited functionality. I will probably install it again if I need to work with subversion servers, which right now doesn’t look too likely in the near future. *SHAREWARE*
• UnrarX. Used to decompress RAR packages. Might be useful if I one day stumble upon a RAR package again, which seems to be quite rare these days. *FREE*