My Favorite Apps or What's in My Dock?
Macromedia Studio MX [MacOS X]
THE apps for web development. These are my world. Dreamweaver is the editor for over 80% of web developers. Fireworks is an increasingly excellent graphical editor specifically geared towards building images for web pages. Flash creates cheesy web animations, but much more importantly is the development environment for vector based graphics and applications on the web. Finally, Freehand is a long time powerhouse application for the creation of vector graphics destined for print or the screen. These applications are all equally comfortable on Windows and Macintosh OS X and are a great value when purchased as the studio at education price. If you are not a Macromedia user, you need to check them out.
Transmit [MacOS X]
If you are looking for a great FTP client for the Macintosh, I don't think you can find a better one than Panic's Transmit. It has a great interface, allows you to store bookmarks to servers and directories and is updated often. My favorite new feature is one that enables you to double click on remote HTML files and have them automatically opened in BBEdit for editing. When you save the file in BBEdit the changes are automatically uploaded to the server. This is what I use Transmit for %80 of the time anyway. It also has a nice new ability to show you previews and image dimensions of graphics that are on the remote server.
MacSQL [MacOS X]
I'm comfortable working with MySQL in its command-line interface, but there are many times that you just wish you could work with your data in a graphical interface. After a lot of looking at graphical SQL tools for the Macintosh a while back, MacSQL is the best and most full-featured that I found. It wasn't the cheapest and it certainly isn't perfect, but I find it very easy to use and it does nearly everything that I need it to do. Once I get the database created in the command-line and set up the permissions, I do nearly everything else in MacSQL.
LaunchBar [MacOS X]
LaunchBar is an ingenious application launcher that is completely hidden when not in use. With a simple key command it pops up and allows you to start typing the name of what ever application you want to launch. Based on your keystrokes, it guesses the possibilites and presents them to you. This may sound complicated, but it's a breeze. For example: when I want to launch BBEdit, I simply hit cmd-space to get LaunchBar, 'bb' to have it find BBEdit, then 'return' to launch it. You don't have to know exactly what something is called. Typing either 'Internet' or 'Explorer' would cause it to find Internet Explorer and its even smart enough to look past your misspellings. It can learn what applications you usually want when you type a particular string and it can be configured to work with documents, email addrsses, browser urls, and nearly anything else that you might want such handy access to. The only real downside is that it takes a while to scan your computer each time it is fired up.
Lite Switch [MacOS X]
This program is made by Proteron Software in Omaha. It's a fun program that allows you to use the option-tab key combination to easily flip through your currently running applications. You can also queue up applications to be quit, or easily force quit applications. This software is free.
Image Rodeo [MacOS X]
This is a very powerful program for creating online photo albums. Image Rodeo has it's own scripting language that you can use in conjuction with standard HTML to create themes for albums. It also has a very easy to use album manager which allows you to organize, title and describe photos as you wish. You can then set both the thumbnail size and actual size of the photos that will be posted and let Image Rodeo go to work creating the album. IF you choose to create your own theme, that is by far the most difficult part, otherwise, you may use one of the built in themes for a very simply photo album solution.
HBImage Processor [MacOS X]
HBImageProcessor is designed for quick and easy image processing. It lets you rotate, crop, and resize images with a simple drag and drop interface. It's perfect for quickly shrinking down a few images to send in email or post to your website. Just drag your source image onto HBImageProcessor, process it as you like, and then drag the resulting image directly into email or place on your Manila site.
Carbon Copy Cloner [MacOS X]
Got a new computer and you need to move your life from your old computer to the new one? Need to set up several computers in exactly the same way? Carbon Copy Cloner is a applescript/cocoa application that allows you to hook two computers together and clone one to the other. It is a major time saver. Just ask Rob Smith, our support specialist, who has setup many computers using CCC.
BBEdit [MacOS X]
THE text editor for the macintosh platform, this application seems to find it's way into everything I do. Very simple, yet powerful beyond my ability to understand, this application is able to just about anything with text that you could want done. It comes in both a free lite version and a more powerful commercial version.
iView MediaPro [MacOS X]
Similar to Extensis' Portfolio product, iView creates a catalog of images from folders that are dragged on to it. You can drag a website on to it and quickly get a catalog of all images and movies contained in that site. You can drag a folder from a clip art CD / DVD on to it and browse the images, then drag the images from the catalog into your image editor of choice. I began using this when I moved to OS X and needed something to browse images in the absence of a version of Porfolio that runs on X. Since then I have come to really enjoy it's ease of use and rely on it frequently.
iComic [MacOS X]
A fun application that simply queries the web for comic strips and delivers them to you. iComic uses a plug-in model that allows you to visit the iComic site and look for comics that you would like to add, then simply drop the plug-ins into iComic to view them. It's a great way for me to see my favorites each day: Foxtrot, Dilbert and Calvin and Hobbes.
Watson [MacOS X]
An application that shows the power and bright future of Web Services, Watson offers a number of channels that are able to pull data from the web. Get baseball scores, TV programming, Movie Listings, Phone Numbers and much more. It has a semi active mailing list and it seems that there are a few people out there beginning to write third-party plug-ins for it. If you have upgraded to OS X.2, you may wonder why you would want Watson when Sherlock 3 appears to offer much of the same functionality. I think that if you give it a try you will find that it has a better interface, has more tools, and has a much larger development community and thus a brighter future. Give it a shot.
Not necessarily my favorites, but my picks:
Clip2GIF [MacOS 8 & 9]
This is a simple piece of software for MacOS Classic that resizes graphics and converts them to a number of different formats, including JPEG and GIF. Works well for optimizing graphics for use on Manila sites. (Has not been updated since 1995)
IrfanView [Windows]
Fast image viewer and converter that supports animated GIFs and many other image formats.IrfanView supports the following formats: AIF, ANI, BMP, CAM, CLP, CPT, CUR, DCX, DIB, DJVU, EPS, FlashPix, RLE, JPG, GIF (including animated GIF), PCD, PCX, PNG, TIF, IFF/LBM, LWF, PSD, TGA, RAS, ICO, AVI, WMF, EMF, PBJ, PBM, PGM, PPM, PCD, PSP, and XBM/XPM. IrfanView can convert images between most of the supported formats, either individually or in batch mode.IrfanView can also perform some basic image editing and processing functions, including cut, crop, resize, resample, change the color depth, adjust brightness, and adjust contrast. It has command line options and it can display images in a slideshow and extract frames from ANI files, AVI movies and animated GIFs. (Still Updated)