it’s now been a few days over the 1 year mark since i’ve had my mac book pro.

the learning curve wasn’t as bad as i thought it might be. learning new key combos for regular tasks has taken me longer because i’ve mostly used the mouse. both here and at work (i’m one of those lucky people that gets to use a mac at home and and work). i’ve just started using the mac wireless bluetooth keyboard at work so the key combos are taking some time.

the programs i found early on and still use:

menumeters. because i like to know what’s going on with my mac.

little snitch. for a little finer control over the firewall.

dragthing. i have the the dock moved over to the left side of the desktop and i use dragthing exclusively. well, now that i have bluetooth keyboard i’m using quicksilver a fair bit.

forklift it’s very tempting to try and sustain a “windows look and feel” while using a mac. but you’re not doing yourself any favours. you’ve made the switch to a mac use it like a mac. having said that, finder windows are only marginally better than explorer windows. i like a two paned file manager. i went through a few different ones when i used DOS. i never really liked norton commander, i used a program called dosamatic, which use can still find on various simtel sites. when i got into the whole bbs thing i needed my file manager to handle various archive types, so i started using a program called arcmaster. it was one of the first programs i registered and disappeared around v9.3. i even used it under os/2 and later windows until the eventual shift to longer filenames.

under windows i jumped around a lot and settled on one i liked. had i found mucommander i would have used that. i found mucommander shortly after i started using forklift. mainly because i like the “delete permanently” option when deleting files.

forklift is faster than mucommander (the latter is written in java), but closer to mac’s finder. i think i registered forklift the first day i got my mac. i didn’t discover that it did tabs till a few weeks ago (no, really

programs that i use but not on a daily basis:

marsedit. what i’m using to type this in now. for ten years i did all my web page work manually and blogged with my own tkblog and as you can see from the freshmeat page it hasn’t been updated in almost six years. to be honest it did everything i wanted it to, but not everyone else. i think i can still claim that it was the first cross-platform standalone blogging application. a few people used it, i helped several with their configuration. for the DIY blogger it would still work but it’s definitly a little dated now. i used it until i got my own domain on godaddy. btw, it works on OS X using etcl.

evernote. mac stickies are ok. if you need a little more note taking power than evernote works. i use it heavily at work, and at home when i need to.

notebook. when i want to make notes for larger projects there isn’t anything better on any platform than circus ponies’ notebook. it’s just like having a software version of a ringed notebook. complete with yellow stickies and sticky index tabs. you can embed media, export to a web page, etc. great program probably one of my favorite on the mac.

on a side note. i still haven’t found anything that will give me the functionality of notezilla for windows. yes it’s a sticky note manager and well worth the registration fee, but it does one thing that isn’t available on the mac. you can attach a sticky note to any window on your desktop (or email, document, etc.) so that next time you’re viewing that window (or email, document) the siicky note is there. [later] ok just did a quick search and found sticky notes. it will allow you to attach a note to an application. apparently not to a specific window because the mac api has nothing for the programmer to work with. so there you go, you can do something in windows and not a mac. who knew [snrk]. i’m probably going to register it anyway as i can use even the stick to application feature. so i guess i’m still going to miss notezilla.

i’m also going to miss vcom’s autosave. as you can see they’ve been bought out or changed names. but it was a great way to automatically save files. saved my butt a few times.

the only programs i can think of that i no longer use are parallels. and keyboard maestro. i still have the latter installed but i don’t find it as convenient to use as macro express for windows. could be i haven’t spent enough time with it but i tried to do a few things that would have been a breeze with macro express and were dismal failures under keyboard maestro. might be my fault, powerful programs deserve some time with them to get familiar with the cabilities.

as for parallels, i now use vmware fusion. sure they’re leapfrogging each other, and parallels is now slightly ahead of fusion for speed, but for features fusion was there first, and i found parallels v3.x a bit buggy. i use fusion at work also. it’s rock solid and there are a ton of appliances for it.

textmate. i know bbedit has been the defacto standard for powerful text editors on the mac. i found the interface a little busy but i’d probably get used to it. instead i use textmate. i use it exclusively at work. it was recommended to me tried it out, found it was closer to the way i work. at home i jump between textmate and boxer. that’s right it’s a windows editor. runs great under crossover. i’ve been a boxer user since i first registred v3.xx on dos back in the early ’90’s.