Published Dec 7, 2007

OK, I’ve been fooling around on my new PowerBook — I mean, MacBook — now for a couple weeks, and I’ve achieved a moderate level of productivity. But what are the great apps out there that I’m missing? What small developer should get my $30 for the magic they’ll put in my Applications folder? Tell me your favorites so that I can try them out!

So far I’m using Mail.app, iCal, Address Book, OmniFocus, Office, SCPlugin, and CS3 regularly for work. Adium and iPhoto and iTunes have kept me pretty well amused. Mark/Space Notebook, part of The Missing Sync, is keeping my notes, but it’s a minimally-featured program and I’d seriously consider a change. I used to love me some OmniOutliner but I’m not sure I need it what with OmniFocus, since mostly I plan in outlines. Quicksilver doesn’t seem to quite be up to speed with Leopard yet so I’ll admit I don’t quite love it; I’ll probably give LaunchBar a whirl and see if it’s more my style. And do I need to shell out for SpamSieve, or will Mail learn soon enough?

But, more specifically, what am I missing? Tell me stuff I should try. In particular, I need to eventually pick a text editor. I was a big BBEdit fan back in the days of System 7 and OS 8 and 9, but I’m open to anything. SCPlugin doesn’t do SVN Imports so maybe I could use another Subversion client… or maybe I should just use Terminal.

Also, if someone could tell me what setting lets me tab through all the controls on a Web form, that would be super. But that’s not to be negative; I love it so far. I just want to make the most!

3 Comments

what setting lets me tab through all the controls on a Web form

I take it you’ve discovered that on Mac, tabbing takes you right past menu-style inputs? That’s one of the few things that’s always irritated me, and I’ve never figured out how to fix it…

Yes! Also, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc. Frustration!

It seems like this must be at least partly the fault of the implementors of the web browser. It’s possible that the GUI for OSX makes it harder to do the right thing, there, but even if so it shouldn’t be all that tough to put together an effective solution at the application layer — make the app-level’s “menu control” or “radio-button control” into something that is, from OSX’s point of view, a text box containing the various values possible for the input, then capture keypresses appropriately and display in the page as the appropriate type of input.