loonyblog.

The idea for this post was shamelessly ripped off from Karelia, makers of Watson (which is of course on the list below). But anyway, one of the great things about Macs is the huge number of genuinely useful shareware programs that are available. My system is super-customized, thanks to a handful of various apps, many of which are listed below.

And so, here are my favorite apps, in no particular order:

NetNewsWire There’s a reason I link to this program on my sidebar…it’s just indispensable. I use it to read blogs, comics and news sources and update my own blog. Quite simply, it rules.
Default Folder X Default Folder X is another one of those programs I can’t live without. Using DFX, I can assign keyboard shortcuts to all of my favorite folders. So when I’m doing images for Shacknews, it’s super-easy to navigate to the right folders on my hard drive. DFX also has a great menu bar app that lets you browse your entire hard drive from there, and it even brings back the ability to get a filename by clicking on an existing item in a save dialog box. It’s a huge productivity booster. And when you’ve got 50 images to thumbnail for ten different games on a Sunday morning, every little bit helps.
Watson If you’ve never seen it, Watson is an internet services gateway. It lets you browse Amazon.com, search Google, monitor eBay auctions, get weather reports, and my favorite feature, look for movie tickets. It’s one of those things that you don’t realize how useful it is until you download it and start using it daily.
BBEdit When I made the leap from Windows to OS X, one of the programs I missed most was NoteTab, a brilliant little text editor. But BBEdit is the world’s most celebrated text editor for good reason. The sheer amount of power within BBEdit is astounding. You can do pretty much everything imaginable within it, from contextual highlighting to saving via FTP to running shell scripts. And as a plus, it’s really easy to reassign keyboard shortcuts. It took me a while to get used to it, but now I’m a total convert, and I just can’t get enough of its simplistic method for arranging windows. I wish every program had that.
FruitMenu The first bit of OS X shareware I ever registered, FruitMenu brings back the ability to customize the apple menu. It’s so useful that when I’m using a Mac without it, I often find myself attempting to use it anyway. My FruitMenu is super-customized, and that allows me to keep my dock relatively clutter-free. Note that there is a beta for Panther available at Unsanity.org.
QuickTime Pro Since it’s made by Apple, I guess QuickTime isn’t really a shareware app, but I use it so much that I’m including it anyway. Because of all the movie trailers I watch, I’m a happily registered user of QuickTime. Actually, I’m such a power-QuickTime user, that I’ve also got registered versions of QT5 and 6 for Windows (left over from my pre-Mac days), and I even purchased Apple’s MPEG decoder for QT6. Unless you register it, you can’t play movies full-screen, and that alone makes it worthwhile. Add in the ability to save most movies and create new QT movies by copy-and-pasting between them, and you’ve got a worthwhile purchase right there.
Dock Detox This is another great Haxie by the hard-working people at Unsanity. One of those really, really annoying features of OS X is that to get your attention, apps will bounce up and down in the dock. A lot of applications let you turn off this bounciness, but most don’t. This tiny little hack stops it completely. If it weren’t freeware, I’d have registered it ages ago. Now all I need is a version that works with Panther.
Can Combine Icons This little app I only discovered fairly recently. It’s a super-simple way to create custom OS X icons by dragging and dropping them. Using this, I customized pretty much every folder I use on a regular basis, and because it contains a handful of really useful filters, they don’t look like they were just thrown together.
Emulation Enhancer Richard Bannister is the biggest producer of emulators for OS X, and while those are all freeware, his shareware app is more than worth registering. Emulation Enhancer adds the kind of OS X-specific functionality you want to see in a native emulator. Things like USB gamepad support, great screen filtering (for high-res full-screen gameplay even when emulating really old platforms) and lots more. The only thing it’s missing is support for MacMAME.

So there you have it, nine of my favorite programs. There are of course more, but those are the best of them. And as for the program I use more than anything else, that’d be Macromedia Dreamweaver MX (not 2004, as I saw no particular reason to upgrade), which I have super-customized with my own JavaScript-developed commands. I also love iPhoto (for its integration with .Mac), iTunes and naturally Photoshop (7, since there’s no good reason to move to CS). And because of the ingenuity of the Mac software community I keep discovering new things every day. I’m sure there are just as many (if not significantly more) Windows shareware developers, but I never used this much shareware in my Windows days. Call it another benefit of switching.