My essential Mac applications, part 5

I recently bought a new iMac computer, and I installed about 30 different applications on the first day. They are applications I consider essential (or at least mighty desirable for my purposes). I've covered programs 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, and 16-20. Below, applications 21-25.

21. Viewfinder (OS X, £15) This is a pretty specialized application that I use to search through Flickr for Creative Commons licensed images that I can run on Boing Boing. I enter keywords (the example shown here is a search for "cigar box guitar") and Viewfinder returns all the Flickr images it can find that have the keywords in the tags, titles, or descriptions, and can be used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. I've been using the demo version for many months and it has all the functionality I require.

22. ViewIt (OS X, $22) This is a super-fast image organizing and viewing utility. It's much faster than iPhoto or Preview, and offers thumbnail and full-screen viewing modes. I use it to go through my massive image folders that I've filled with the retro illustrations I've snorked off the Web over the last 15 years.

23. AppZapper (OS X, $12.95) I try out a lot of apps, and I delete most of them within minutes of opening them for the first time. But when an app is dragged to the trash, the extra files associated with the application stay on the hard drive. I don't know why OS X doesn't get rid of these orphaned files automatically. I use AppZapper to make sure all the preference and support files get zapped along with the application file.

24. Camouflage (OS X, free) This menu bar utility doesn't do anything but make all the icons on your desktop disappear. I use it when I give a Keynote presentation, so that when the audience sees my desktop, they are fooled into thinking I'm a tidy person.

25. Disk Inventory X (OS X, free) This gives me a visual indication of the amount of storage space the files on my hard drive are taking up. It's a great way to find hard-drive hogs (like big movie files I don't want any longer) and delete them.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Anonymous

Space Gremlin, over in the App Store beats Disk Inventory severely about the head and shoulders.
johnlancia

Part 5?! So basically you’re just going to list all the Mac software out there as essential?

LOL
- Cowicide
  
  What part don’t you understand about essential apps? None of these seem trivial to me. If you find the list trivial, then I have to wonder why you bothered to lift a finger to write your comment. You must surely have more essential things you should be doing?
TheMysteryCow

DaisyDisk is another really cool option for hard drive visualization.
Anonymous

One application (almost) every mac user should get to know and use (but don’t already): Automator!

It’s the non-scripter’s scripting tool. Things like automagically renaming batches of files or cropping photos to a certain size or pulling metadata or a billion other wonderful things. It’s been a part of mac OS since at least 10.4 and likely earlier. I don’t know why more mac users don’t know about it or don’t use it if they do know about it. It’s in your Utilities folder in Applications. It looks intimidating at first, but it’s all just dragging and dropping to create a workflow. Also it pretty much renders useless a few of the paid apps in this list.
tozlink

So after spending $1,199-1,999 for an iMac, I only need to spend another $544.69 or so on software to get started! It just works!
- Cowicide
  
  Hi tozlink, welcome to a thread about apps you can’t afford because you’re too busy struggling with your Windows computer to make any money. I’m sorry you feel inferior, but it’s because you are.
  
  See, I can troll too. :)
chairface

I like this series. I’m also hoping you’re going to mention MenuMeters, which you should check out if you aren’t familiar with it.
Anonymous

Nice list — but but it’s missing some *essential* capabilities:

1. EyeTV (Elgato). I use a Mac Mini as an HTPC. Elgato HD records/transcodes HD cable tv (via component video, not HDMI) to h.264, then Apple’s FrontRow (bundled with all Macs) plays it back using a combination of EyeTV and PyeTV (google these). ETVComskip runs comskip to mark all commercials.

This is commercial-free HDTV recorded as h.264 on your mac, and it’s beautiful.

There are no DRM issues because the recordings are done using high quality component video. The h.264 files are just video files like any other. But wait … there’s more! EyeTV acts as a video server to your iPhone or iPad or both — you can watch all your shows anywhere you have 3G access. This is an essential app.

2. Macports plus Xcode. There is an enormous repository of open source code on unix boxes like the Mac — this is all available freely and easily with the Macports package (a “port” of this unix code to the Mac). To access this, all you need is a compile, which Apple supplies for free as Xcode, and Macports.

For example, want to run comskip — a windows executable — on your Mac? You need WINE (WIndoze Empulator). So get wine:

$ sudo port install wine

And so forth. An essential app that gives you access to thousands of essential apps.
Mike

Thanks for the tip on Camouflage. I run into the same problem with presentations, plus I really like a “clean” desktop when I’m trying to be focused.
MarkM

DiskInventory is a beautiful program.
SamSam

It really has been amazing to see, in each of these posts, so many applications that you are paying for that have great free, open source, or web alternatives.

“Viewfinder” just blew me away. As several people have said above, there are so many simple ways to find all CC-licensed stuff on Flickr (and elsewhere on the web), such as the site that Cory posted about or even lowly Google.

I hope this doesn’t come off as mean, but I had the same reaction when reading your book. In it, you (self-deprecatingly) describe how you wanted to transform your lawn, and so instantly sprung for the most expensive mulch you could find — hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth. It seems that you recognize this tendency of yours to assume that “if you’re paying a lot for something then it must be worth it,” but you don’t want to change it.

It really is true, though: just because someone wants you to spend money on something, doesn’t actually mean it’s worth it.
SamSam

Another simple CreativeCommons search engine, besides those already listed above:

http://search.creativecommons.org/
kmoser

I enter keywords (the example shown here is a search for “cigar box guitar”) and Viewfinder returns all the Flickr images it can find that have the keywords in the tags, titles, or descriptions, and can be used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Doesn’t GIS have the ability to filter by CC license type?
Anonymous

Disk Inventory is my hero.
tylerkaraszewski

I actually sort of agree with tozlink to some degree. My most essential mac software is actually:

Safari
Mail
Terminal
Adium
Xcode
MacVim

These are all free (at least if you bought a mac already they are) and do most of the things I need to do day-to-day. I could easily live with a mac with all free (in the purchase price sense, not the richard stallman sense) software. There are a couple of handy paid apps I like, most notably 1password and Adobe Lightroom, but that’s not the case for most of the software I use.

Still though, page after page after page of “essential” software, and none of it includes the obvious real essentials: web browser, mail client, text editor, etc.
- Grimnir
  
  Good point!
  
  My REAL essentials all came with my Mac. Sure, I use some other stuff, but the ones that get used EVERY day? (in order of use)
  
  Safari (always on, usually being used)
  Mail (always on)
  iChat (always on)
  iTunes (always on)
  iCal
  Preview
  TextEdit
  Weather, Calendar and Calculator widgets
  and one paid app, OmniFocus (GTD To-Do Software, $80)
  All of these but the last one came with my machine.
  
  Slightly less often I use Klok2 (time-keeping software, free version), OpenOffice (free), Scrivener ($45), GarageBand, iPhoto, and World of Warcraft.
- Chris Tucker
  
  “I actually sort of agree with tozlink to some degree. My most essential mac software is actually:
  
  Safari
  Mail
  Terminal
  Adium
  Xcode
  MacVim”
  
  Since a decent web browser, a usable email app, a decent TextEdit(or), ect are included with OS X, tell me again why they should have been mentioned?
  
  When you become a professional writer/editor/substantial contributor to Boing Boing, maybe you’ll find that YOUR essentials don’t do what you need to do to get your job done.
  
  Thanks for playing. Vanna has some lovely parting gifts for you!
  - tylerkaraszewski
    
    “Since a decent web browser, a usable email app, a decent TextEdit(or), ect are included with OS X, tell me again why they should have been mentioned?”
    
    Because they’re “essential”? He could easily use Firefox or Chrome instead of Safari, but he hasn’t mentioned a web browser *at all* in the first five installments of this series.
    
    Where an item came from has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not you need it.
    - Gnatcatcher
      
      Not really getting why people are so mad that Mark’s premise for this series (software I installed day one with my fresh machine because I need or really like it) is not EXACTLY THE SAME as the series of articles that they would have preferred to read or would have written themselves.
      
      If you want to know what browser he uses, perhaps you could post a comment that asks him what browser he uses, instead of saying that his list is silly because it doesn’t include a piece of information that you would have preferred to read, or would have included yourself in a post on your personal blog.
      
      Weird that the haters had the stamina to stick through a five part series to post about what a waste the series is.
      - gravytop
        
        From my reading the comments, it seems like most of the really angry comments are coming not from people who disagree with the choices — but from people who disagree with the act of disagreeing.
    - valiant66
      
      Perhaps you missed the topic of this thread. He’s talking about apps he considers essential that he installed, not apps that came pre-installed. Obviously if he hasn’t mentioned browsers etc., he’s fine with the apps provided by Apple.
- Cowicide
  
  My girlfriend’s dog has got you beat, he doesn’t need any of that shit. He doesn’t even use a computer. Top that, top dog!
von Bobo

this list needs more hair styling products, or maybe a fedora?
mikex

Google advanced images search has the ability to specify “licensed for commercial reuse” which does search flickr. Does Viewfinder do something more?
Anonymous

COCONUT BATTERY!!!
Caroline

Guys. For the millionth time. “Essential,” here, does not mean “necessary to make the computer minimally functional.” It means “particularly useful for me.”

I’ve owned a Mac for 4 years. My list of “essential” Mac software is quite different from Mark’s, because I do very different work than he does. I’m a Ph.D student in engineering.

Mac-only stuff that is significantly more useful for me than what comes already installed: Papers (number one with a bullet for me), 1Password, OmniFocus, SuperDuper, Freedom, Aperture.

Mind you, I didn’t believe 1Password could be significantly better than the built-in Keychain until I finally installed it a couple months ago. Keychain is pretty awesome already, but 1Password has small but useful improvements on it.

Non-Mac-only software that’s essential to me: Matlab, Mathematica, Python, R, Adobe Illustrator.

Anyone know of a really awesome application for scientific data visualization/graphing? At the moment when I have to put together graphs and charts for papers or presentations, I do it in R — everything is much more customizable than in Matlab. But it is a giant pain in the ass.
- mo-seph
  
  Have you tried ggplot (within R) for graphing? It takes a little bit of getting used to, but it’s much less of a headache than the built in graphic stuff, and it makes *lovely* graphs (Tufte inspired)
  
  http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/
lrivers

I like Backdrop (similar to Camouflage) but more focused toward screenshots and such.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/15426/backdrop
TheMysteryCow

DaisyDisk is another really cool option for hard drive visualization.
Antinous / Moderator

Moderator note: The title of this post is not Tell Me Why You Don’t Like Macs.
valiant66

Hmm. With people providing command-line alternatives to GUI products, I’m surprised that no-one has mentioned iTerm, an excellent replacement for Terminal.app. With bookmarks and tabbed windows it’s one of my essential first-install apps on any new Mac. Free. http://iterm.sourceforge.net/
Anonymous

iTerm2 should be on that list. It is by far the best terminal emulator on OS X. Split panes, fullscreen, autocomplete, 256 color mode, and much more. http://sites.google.com/site/iterm2home
quercus

There are many free alternatives to the Viewfinder app mentioned above. One of the best is something Cory mentioned right here on boing boing a few years ago:

http://boingboing.net/2008/03/19/compfight-powerful-s.html
Anonymous

I have never used a computer in my entire life.
…oh bugger!
Rudy Coby

Awesome article! Camouflage is very cool.
- sworm
  
  App cleaner is a free alternative for app zapper. Works just as well.
JamesProvost

Thanks for sharing these appsâ€”but now you really have to share some of that sweet sweet retro illustration collection!
- Madmolf
  
  I second you on this, we have been titillated by the very mention of it.
Anonymous

DiskInventoryX has been quite useful to me.
Anonymous

I use AppCleaner (free) http://www.freemacsoft.net/AppCleaner/ instead of AppZapper and prefer OmniDiskSweeper (free) http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnidisksweeper/ to Disk Inventory X

Also, http://alternativeto.net is a useful site for finding apps with similar functionality (like a free alternative to a paid app).
Philipshade

Gotta get Camouflage just to make myself feel good for a few minutes. My desktop is COVERED right now.

PS thanks for sharing your switchover. Hoping to upgrade soon and it seems like a great idea.
Anonymous

Hazel from noodlesoft does what appzapper does, and a lot more in the robotic filing dept.
Ronald Pottol

For those of us of a more command line bent,

du -xk | sort -n | tail -40

will give you a list of the largest directories on your system (well, from the dir you run it in).
- Nadreck
  
  I use the following piece of script-fu to find the largest individual files below my current directory.
  
  find . -type f | xargs -IFRED ls -l FRED | cut -c28- | sort -rn | head -22
  
  Always useful for finding those huge core dump files that you didn’t even know were created.
  
  Hmm, in this font it’s hard to tell the difference between an “I” and a “|”. If it has a dash directly in front of it it’s an upper-case i
  - Ito Kagehisa
    
    find `pwd` -type f -exec ls -s {} \; |sort -n |awk ‘{system(“ls -lh ” $2)}’
    
    Ought to work on a mac… sort always blocks until EOF, so it will sit there looking like it’s doing nothing then suddenly dump all the output at once.
    
    I like highly information-dense output, but I like my file sizes in human-readable format… ^_^
  - Cowicide
    
    yawn
    - george57l
      
      You seem rather sensitive to any opinions on this other than “gee, these really ARE all essential”.
      
      But I’ll play with you…
      
      Nadreck’s post proves that the app in question is not “essential”. Useful, convenient, pleasant, intuitive, helpful, or any other number of adjectives. But not essential.
      
      :-P
      - Cowicide
        
        You seem rather sensitive to any opinions on this other than “gee, these really ARE all essential”.
        
        If I seem really bored with trite semantic arguments over the word “essential”… it’s because I am.
        
        Double-backflip Yawn…
Anonymous

This is all fine and dandy, but how about something like this for windows?
FourierOne

Please consider adding Photo to Movie to your list of essential applications for making slide shows. I’ve tried using Fotomagico, Animoto, PulpMotion Advanced, iMovie and others. But for serious slide shows with Ken Burns effect, nothing matches Photo to Movie output in quality!
Anonymous

It appears as if some folks jumped right in without reading Mark’s opening statement:

“I recently bought a new iMac computer, and I installed about 30 different applications on the first day. They are applications I consider essential (or at least mighty desirable for my purposes).”

I appreciate learning about what tools are used by people whose work I enjoy, whether or not they apply to my work, play, or platform of choice. It’s also interesting to learn about similar tools for the same tasks.

Thank you all for sharing.