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I concur, only would add Graphic Converter. Enjoy that Dualie...

I was going to add Graphic Converter but their web site was not working yesterday. I am not sure what's up with them or if that was just my connection. I used to use GC a lot, but since MacGimp had that free version to download, it does most of the screenshot web editing I need fine so I don't use GC as much anymore.

Just tried it, guess they're back up:

http://www.lemkesoft.com/en/index.htm

Agreed, I'm still learning the Gimp but can see it's power...

http://www.redstonesoftware.com/vnc.html

Yea baby.

I find VNC terrible. It is unusable. As slow as it can go.
I prefer to shed down $300 and buy the 'Apple Remote Desktop' which will give me native support if I need remote OSX desktop than use VNC. I won't use VNC again on any of my OSes even if I was to be paid $300 to use it.
X11 and Windows terminal server are unparallel and I guess Apple's Remote Desktop is also good. But VNC, no thank you.

I'll go with your media pack and your web pack and Fire. Taco HTML, CSSEdit are a must, as PTHPasteboard. Not having much use of Graphic Converter, maybe I would replace it with Curator and Goldberg. Mellel as a word processor, Ragtime for heavier work, Kunvert to convert PDF to JPEG, Euro Converter. Pathfinder would be there too.

Vuescan for scanning. http://www.hamrick.com/index.html

Pepper for editing.

* MacJournal - free journal with amazing feature set including basic blogging:
http://homepage.mac.com/dschimpf/

* TeXShop - LaTeX/TeX editor. Best on any platform and free:
http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html

* Carbonized emacs

http://members.shaw.ca/akochoi-emacs/index.html

* Chartsmith - cmmercial but reasonably priced graphing software:
http://blacksmith.com/

* Iconverter, pic2icon, CanCombineIcons - utils for making pretty icons (search on versiontracker.com)

* DMGTool - user-friendly interface for creating .dmg archives
http://www.them.ws/themsw/dmgtool/index.php

* Onyx - enable hidden features and perform basic system maintainence
http://www.titanium.free.fr/us/onyx/index.html

* Meteorologist - Weather in the menubar:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/heat-meteo

* JoinPDF, PDFJoiner - combine multiple pdf files into one:
(search versiontracker.com)

* pdf plugin - view pdf's (and postscript) directly in safari (or what have you):
http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/

* iLyric - Find the lyrics to any and every song in iTunes (slow! Disable all of the search sites save one):
http://versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19783

* FetchArt - Applescript to grab album art from amazon and place in itunes

That's it! Cheers.

Delocalizer: you can recover tons of MB with that little app.

Sorry to hear about your problems with VNC. It works great for me when I need to connect cross platform operating systems.

Example:
I can connect to my Mac from Linux and vice versa. Can Apple's remote desktop do that?

Maybe you could contribute from code or $ to the VNC project if you believe in opensource and want to support it

Nice links, Eugenia - thanks.

For FTP, I still go with NCFTP. To me, it's faster than any graphical client, and sometimes even works when the others don't. For repeat connections, all you have to do is bookmark it, saving login/pw and current directory - then, it's just:
#> ncftp mysite
and boom, you're in. Beats the hell out of standard FTP.

another little must-have app, if you make your own labels - iLabel. I use this to make return-addy labels all the time, for paying my snail-mail bills.

I have no reason to give my money to any project that they may or may not fix my gripes with it. As a consumer, what I do, is to give my money to the application that does what I need *today* and not in a year from now. I don't believe in opensource or in closed source, I just believe to whatever works better each time. As you saw in my list some of the apps are OSS, simply because their price+feature ratio is better than others. Whatever works for any given problem at any given time is what I after. The best tool for the job.

Besides, even if we put all the money of the world on VNC, it can never be as fast as the native solutions. VNC is bitmap-based, it is an architecture problem, not an optimization problem. VNC took the route of "be as multiplatform as possible" and this is easier to implement when using bitmaps. And bitmaps are slower to download over the network than vectors, it is simple... physics. And so, there is not much to be done about it with my $300 bucks or not.

I have to agree 100% on launchbar, can't live without it! Does anyone know if there is something similiar on linux ? Right now I launch most of my apps by pressing <Alt>F2 and typing the first few letters and having the rest autocompleted, but launchbar is much mor flexible, for example you can press <Command><Space> to activate launchbar and then type TX<Enter> to start TextEdit, plus it will learn what shortcuts you use and adapt accordingly... awesome app!

.. Because as they say in Greece, "Love goes through the stomach first"

Not only in Greece Eugenia ;-)
Here, in Belgium we even more say this (specifically) about the Love of a man for his woman :-)

Nothing in the world beats Live Channel Pro.

http://www.channelstorm.com/Product.html

Why not just use Transmit for SFTP? You have it installed anyway for FTP :-)

pdf plugin - view pdf's (and postscript) directly in safari (or what have you):
http://www.schubert-it.com/pluginpdf/


Anyone know a pdf-plugin that support the scroll-wheel in Safari? (and uses Apples incredibly fast pdf viewer, instead of, well, acrobat reader..)

MP3 Rage - for the times when iTunes doesn't cut it for editing ID3 tage and other various attributes.

http://wsmanager.sf.net

Yeah, only problem is that it's alpha quality still...

Next time you reinstall, get to a base system then use CarbonCopyCloner to clone your setup. Restore from it.

@VNC/Eugenia/etc
Vnc is indeed slow. TightVNC is a bit better, better algorithms, but no match for Citrix/WinXP's TerminalServer (RemoteDesktop).
Apple Remote Desktop does no better than VNC. It's terribly slow. Terribly, really. Just like VNC.

A better alternative for Linux is called NX. It's as fast as microsoft stuff. I would *love* to see it ported to macosx. The core is open source. www.nomachine.com

Finally, I see poisonned and aquisition as P2P apps, but not mlMac ? Honestly, mlMac offer a *far* wider choice of results, it sports the eDonkey network, as well as Kazaa, gnutella, SoulSeek, bittorrent, and direct connect.

The upcomming version will have the long awaiting Gnutella2 support. The ui is slick and simple, but it still has very advanced settings (unlike poisonned)
www.mlmac.org

@VNC/Eugenia/etc
Vnc is indeed slow. TightVNC is a bit better, better algorithms, but no match for Citrix/WinXP's TerminalServer (RemoteDesktop).
Apple Remote Desktop does no better than VNC. It's terribly slow. Terribly, really. Just like VNC.

A better alternative for Linux is called NX. It's as fast as microsoft stuff. I would *love* to see it ported to macosx. The core is open source. www.nomachine.com

Finally, I see poisonned and aquisition as P2P apps, but not mlMac ? Honestly, mlMac offer a *far* wider choice of results, it sports the eDonkey network, as well as Kazaa, gnutella, SoulSeek, bittorrent, and direct connect.

The upcomming version will have the long awaiting Gnutella2 support. The ui is slick and simple, but it still has very advanced settings (unlike poisonned)
www.mlmac.org

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/12/02/photo_ipod.html


Very cool how it all fits together.

Just got my first Mac *ever* delivered to me less than 2 hours ago (PB 12") - already love it

Az Jim

In gnome, you can add a utility called command line, this lets you type things in to run from your taskbar rather then doing the alt-F2 bit.

Congratulations! Welcome to the Mac world. I think you will be very, very happy with your decision. Enjoy!

In gnome, you can add a utility called command line, this lets you type things in to run from your taskbar rather then doing the alt-F2 bit.

Wow!!! Thanks for that. I would have never noticed that. No need for Alt + F2 anymore. :-)

does anybody know how to listen mpc files(audio) on a Mac, besides Xmms?

Thanks ! Bye !

One of my new "can't live without" apps, Clutter creates windows from all your album covers on the desktop so you can visually browse your music collection by CD art. I rarely even look at iTunes anymore with this.

http://www.sprote.com/clutter/

But does somebody heard of something like that for win perhaps?


Oh, and here too Eugenia, but more like "through stomach to heart" :>

Thanks pal....found some good ones.

You lucky bastardo ;p

'Since we bought that dual PowerMac G4 last month, Mac OS X has been used a lot more than before in our home.'


We have you now, and soon you'll be a OS X Missing Manual thumping MacZelot like the rest of us ;p

Not really. I use a variety of OSes and I like all for different reasons. My opinion on Mac OS X hasn't changed. Panther is much better than Jaguar and Jaguar is much better than Puma, but that doesn't mean that Panther is the best OS in the world. It has its plus and minuses, as any other OS I have used through the years.

http://www.idevgames.com/content/contest.php?id=10&show_entries=1


I suggest Chopper, TankWorld, Primate Plunge ....its a must. Very addicting game play. To think that everyday users could create such cool games....very admirable.

My management wants a graphical SSH client for Mac similar to PuTTY or those commercial ones for Windows. Is there such a thing? We don't want to give users access to the system terminal so the text-mode ssh command is out.

Did you not read the article? I had two of them linked. RBrowser and Fugu. Both do GUI SSH.

Fink is a must have for me.

http://fink.sf.net

@ By Bob (IP: 128.172.134.---) - Posted on 2003-12-03 21:50:53

He means client for ssh
not scp
actually you don't need such a thing, due to our "unix" core
just open terminal.app and type ssh ip
it's like putty, just better (k, options are command line, but if you use ssh, it means that you use command line programs, and if your management doesn't get that, they're f***king stupid lol

Well I can use ssh on my computer but the boss doesn't want Terminal.app installed on the managed systems. But some of our users still need SSH. There are some good reasons, too, for disabling Terminal.app access so I can't really complain about that.

While I agree that "Limewire sucks" on the Mac platform, that is just because there are better options. In the Linux world, I would be lost if I didn't have LimeWire 3.6 Pro. Nothing else comes close. If you haven't tried LimeWire in the last year, try 3.6 Pro. It really is worlds better than all the previous versions.

That's because there is nothing better on Linux. On Linux I also use Limewire too. Because all these mule, gnutella and donkey X11 clones are just terrible to look at.

* MacJournal - free journal with amazing feature set including basic blogging:
http://homepage.mac.com/dschimpf/

Nah, they use LiveJournal where her husband posts about what a PoS the mac is. Kind of ironic. Livejournal.com/users/jbq

Me too!!

My 'precious' arrived yesterday and I was up til 3am this morning playing and learning about OS X :-)

Its a G5 1.8. I got one of the EOL single processor models for a good price and just couldnt really justify the $$$ to go the 1.8 Dual.

Its got 10.2.8 at the moment, Im waiting on my copy of Panther "Up-To-Date" before I use it as my main machine as 'User Switching' is probably the most used app in XP on my home PC.

One of the reasons that I decided to switch was because I was sick of dual-booting between Gentoo (for me) and XP (for everyone else) all the time.

Congratulations HAL, your post is the first idiot post for this Mac article. Keep up the good work.

Believe it or not MacOSX is not perfect and neither are users. Your OS assesment based on a single blog is ingenious.

Two programs that I couldn't live without now are tiger launch and ASM.

TigerLaunch is freeware. I puts an icon on the menubar with a dropdown menu of programs. very handy.

http://ranchero.com/tigerlaunch/

ASM is an implementation of the classic os application switcher. It used to be free but is now shareware. maybe you can find the older version somewhere.

http://www.vercruesse.de/software

Eugenia,

Is this app that much better than the built-in color calibration in Apple menu -> System Preferences -> Display -> Color tab? It will adjust the gamma settings and all that. I've used that tool to create a custom color calibration for my 17" iMac and it made a huge improvement on the display.

Yes, SuperCal is more flexible.

Eugenia!

Even though it is technically not a true Mac os X Application you shock me by not mentioning Fink *winks*

At least FinkCommander should have made it. And now I will stop with the shameless advertisement.

I must admit that I do have Fink on one of the three Macs here. But since Apple included X11 as standard on Panther, I just use my Slackware PC desktop over the local network instead of trying to compile Gnome or KDE apps on OSX. X11 remotely on OSX works great so I lately find myself not using Fink as much as I used to...

OpenOffice now has the 1.1 release for OSX X11 on the ftp site. I have it on everything at home. Slow to load but fine once it gets going.

BBedit Lite 6.1 is still available for free.

Aqua Mines is a brilliant free Minesweeper game

http://www.roastedsoftware.com/sw/Aqua-Mines/

Set it to Hard skill and it can be fiendishly difficult compared to the lame version in Windows

Nice article. As a proud owner of a brand new 15.2 Powerbook, your timing couldn't be better.
Do you have a recommendation on something for browsing SMB networks? Fugu didn't seem to have the functionality that Konqueror does and Finder doesn't work half the time for me.

OOo is really not a real alternative player on OSX until they get rid of the X11 dependancy or until X11 itself becomes more integrated to Aqua.

>BBedit Lite 6.1 is still available for free.

Not really my cup of thing though. Plus they haven't updated their free version for a long time, it has issues on Panther.

TheDude about SMB: try smbmount from the command line. If Finder doesn't work others possibly won't work either as they all use the backend Samba 3.x engine of OSX. The only product that uses its own SMB implementation and it might work for you is Dave: http://www.thursby.com/products/dave.html Give it a try.

Wow. I see some downloading tonight.

Never tried Transport, I use Fugu.

And I heartily agree that Taco is a *great* lite html editor.

Hey Eugenia,

As a medical student, I justed want to clear up that old wives tale about vision. There has been no data to show that watching TV to closely, sitting within 1 foot of a monitor/microwave/lcd etc, looking at the sun, and reading in low light damage the eye. Structurally, insense light (and conversely low light), do not physically damage the eye - what does happen is that a large enough amount of rhodopsin changes conformational state that it takes a bit longer for the enzymes within each retinal cell to restore enough rhodopsin for the eye to resume normal communication with the optic cortex.

What has been shown however is that myopia and hyperopia are generally due to developmental defects within the wall of the eye. Rather than having the correct lens to retina lenght vs. the natural focal point of the lens, the connective tissue for some reason in more relaxed in the sclera causeing a natural misfocusing of the eye. This is compensated early on by the intrinsic muscles of the anterior chamber of the eye that attach to the muscle and ciliary body. However, as the connective tissue further relaxes and the intrisic muslces hypertrophy the eye decompensates and thus beings myopia or hyperopia.

Vincent

> There has been no data to show that watching TV to closely, sitting within 1 foot of a monitor/microwave/lcd etc, looking at the sun, and reading in low light damage the eye.

I do not have myopia. I have astigmatism. And it DID come because of the computers. I could see better than anyone in my family but when I started using computers heavily my ability to focus degraded year by year.

I am almost perfect even without glasses, in fact I can drive and do everything I want without any glasses, but I now prefer to use them more and more. I started wearing glasses for astigmatism just 1.5 years ago at the age of 29.

Now, let's go back on topic.

I often use JView - http://home.nc.rr.com/jview/jview.html - a nice, fast, and simple image viewer.

I used to use GraphicConverter for simple image manipulation, but I find that I am using Panther's sips utility when resizing or converting file formats.

out in the open. Oh yeah, I use'em, but still funny to see references to Poisoned and BitTorrent and such.

I use BitTorrent to download distros, not pirating.
When I use Poisoned I mostly use it to download trailers as the original files are not available for saving when viewing a trailer on a web page. I have a collection with movie trailers that I like.

File sharing is not just about pirating you know.

I can't believe you didn't mention fink!

http://fink.sourceforge.net/

It gives you all the Open Source goodies for OSX in an apt-get package manager!

apt-get gimp

bang you have gimp!

apt-get kde

bang you get kde on OS X

Thank you for these links Eugenia (and everybody else). I'm a reasonable competitent Mac user but have never switched from Windows completely so knowing where to look for apps helps me save time. I used Gimp before in Linux but didn't like it that much. Are there any other graphics editors similar to Windows' PaintShopPro (version 4 or 5, not newer Photoshop-esque ones)?

Again, thank you!

The only true love is the love of food.
-- Unknown --

Kudos for David for adding Launchbar. The first thing i did when seeing this article was search through it for Launchbar, and ready myself to launch a scathing attack on OSNews if it wasn't there.

Launchbar is, quite simply, the BEST utility app on any platform. The only one that is truly indispensable for me.

I certainly agree with Transmit. It's the perfect Mac app. When you connect to a server, on one side of the screen is "Your Stuff" and on the other "Their Stuff" Wonderful simplicity :-)

I've always used Graphic Converter and still do but, ever since Photoshop Elements came out (for both Mac and Windows), to me, that's about the most worthwhile $99 one can spend.

I also give the nod to VueScan. Hamrick almost single handedly saved OS X from scanner oblivion. What a great app.

Another great utility to get around having to click your way to everything is Max Menus: http://www.proteron.com

To extend the Apple Menu and contextual menus, try out Fruit Menu:
http://www.unsanity.com

Shareware applications that I use:

GraphicConverter
Watson

Freeware applications that I use:

JView
ExifRenamer
MacMame
PostgreSQL
Qtplay (command line mpg123-like audio player)
VLC

Since I am the only user on my system, I install all third party apps in ~/Applications, since Mac OS X services will work with applications found there. Plus, it reduces clutter in the system application directory.

All those FTP clients are too expensive.

Does anyone know of a good free one? It's not like its a really exotic undocumented protocol or anything.

You can use the Finder for FTP, a good app is RBrowser Lite which is free.

First, I must say there were some really nice apps in your article that I will be using for some time to come.

I was, however, perplexed by the need for USB Overdrive X to control how your mouse functions. Too slow? Just use the system preference for keyboards and mice to adjust this. Want a faster mouse? Just move the slider over to the right. The faster you move your mouse the more pixels it will move per measurement.

Or maybe you just wanted it faster when moving our mouse slowly...

Anyway, those sound apps are great.

I thought the Finder FTP didn't support uploads?

Anyway, thanks for the tip.

The venerable Fetch 4.03 is $25.00.

Actually, Transmit is $25.00 too.

What about FUGU?

http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/

>What about FUGU?

Read the article before posting here. Fugu was mentioned!

>Want a faster mouse? Just move the slider over to the right.

No, it is not as simple as that. That panel does not give the control we needed.

>Or maybe you just wanted it faster when moving our mouse slowly...

Read my husband's blog for more info.

http://wsmanager.sourceforge.net/

> THIS SOFTWARE IS ALPHA QUALITY. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

I hope that this answers your suggestion.

Oh sorry. Didn't mean to offend. I did read the article. I just happened to gloss over the Networking section for some reason. Just (re)posting FUGU for the guys here complaining that Fetch and Transmit cost too much.

Read some more of your husbands blog and he does have a very valid point (got to the details part this time). Fair enough. Maybe a tablet would work for all the photo editing.

There are tons and tons of graphical apps for OS X (browse the graphics section of versiontracker), but I'm not aware of anything that would compare to PaintShopPro.

As for non-Photoshopesque editors, I'm not sure what you mean. The following are more or less different from Photoshop, pricey (less than Photoshop, and worth the price): Painter, Canvas, Tiffany, Asiva Photo, Studio Artist (would be my personal choice).

Fugu's great because it connects via Secure Copy(SCP) automatically to FTP servers that support it. Has file permission setting too. Oh...it's free!

Michael