Steve's Essential Mac OS X Software List

So I'm three months into (nearly) full-time Mac ownership. What applications have I found essential and worth downloading? For my own memory (should I ever need to re-grab everything after a re-install or on a new Mac, and to help others) here's a brief rundown:

• Nokia Multimedia Transfer - essential for integrating a Nokia smartphone into a Mac
• Seashore - somewhat basic but useful image cropper/manipulator
• KompoZer - not supported anymore and 1% buggy, but a terrific visual HTML/WYSIWYG editor
• Cyberduck - the best FTP client for the Mac
• Copernicus - small screen video grabber, useful for odd extractions from web animations
• Audacity - the famous audio editor
• Open Office - the equally famous full Office suite
• Burn - additional disc burning functions beyond the built-in bits of Mac OS - still not sure if I need this, but it's got a great reputation
• Audio Hijack Pro - ditto. Not found an actual use yet, but it seems like something I'll find just the job in hurry in the future
• Disk Inventory X - super for finding where all my hard disk space has gone
• OnyX - the Apple-recommended semi-official hard disk verification and clean-up utility - hasn't found a problem yet on my Mac, but you never know....
• Smultron - a text editor that copes well with the huge text files used in my Trivopaedia
• Syncplicity - a somewhat erratic but potentially life-saving 'back up everything as you go along' online utility
• Wimpy FLV Player - as it sounds.... there's no native FLV playback in Mac OS X

A somewhat shockingly long list, I'd thought that Mac OS X would do most everything I needed (what with the superb iLife 09 suite etc), but it turns out that, just as under Windows, there were a whole raft of little addons I needed in order to get everything done!

I do hope this list helps someonem anyway.

Credit Crunch Ideas

A.k.a. Things for you and your family to do that don't cost a lot of money! 

A new idea for a mini-site, over at my 3-Lib server. I was fed up with the way weekends and school holidays were just turning into huge money-drains - hence the suggestions. I estimate that it costs roughly £1000 to get one child through the summer holidays in the UK, living by the world's 'rules'. Add 50% for two kids, double that for 3 children.

I aim to halve those numbers (at least). What do you think of the ideas and do you have any other suggestions?

The joy of evenings

Maybe it's the nicer weather and longer days (light-wise). Or maybe it's the fact that I've cut down on my evening commitments recently (including leaving Shed Music - though I wish them well for the future). Or maybe it's that my daughter is now old enough not to need constant attention all the time.

Either way, I seem to have evenings back. You know, that time of day when your main work is done and you can genuinely potter around in the garden, watch a little TV and generally relax. 

As someone who is self-employed, it's sooo tempting to fill some of this time with trying to work (or looking for work) - memo to self: must try to stay away where possible. As a wise cousin once said "I work to live, not live to work". 

$500 for the Apple logo?

Microsoft's crazy-as-can-be CEO Steve Ballmer has been dissing Macs again, this time saying: "Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment—same piece of hardware—paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be"

As a recent Mac owner and long term (8 of them) PC veteran, I feel quite well qualified to be objective here. Having first borrowed a Macbook and then bought a Mac Mini, I've been staggered at the difference in build quality between the PCs I've owned (cheap plastic or badly finished metal) and the Apple hardware (rounded corners, terrific material choices, a feeling of real permanence). Take a £400 Windows laptop and a £800 Macbook and they're patently not the "same piece of hardware".

Of course, the question is: is the better hardware worth a virtual doubling in price? Possibly not, but then there's another factor to consider here, besides the logo(!) Obviously, one device runs Windows Vista and one runs Mac OS Leopard. If it was just down to the bare operating systems then there wouldn't be that much in it, but Leopard comes with iLife 09, including the best video editor in the world, plus the also-staggeringly-easy iWeb, iPhoto and Garage Band, a semi-pro audio studio. Look for similar apps for Windows and you're looking at a few hundred pounds extra, potentially. (And they still wouldn't be as good)

I reckon that add the extra build quality to the extra media software and you get the price difference. Factor in a more robust OS that's not (anywhere near as) prey to viruses and exploits and the buying decision isn't as clear cut as Steve Ballmer say it is.

Online backup might be the way forward, but it's not there yet

Whether, as part of my job, messing around with Files on Ovi, or using Syncplicity to backup parts of my Mac, or listening to TWiT and hearing of their new sponsor, Carbonite, I keep running into the notion that the best way to back up your computer is online. The concept's not that new and these are only three of over a dozen possibilities, but I'd like to sound a note of caution and sanity.

You see, most of us are on asynchronous broadband links. ASDL, to use the full acronym. What this means is that home broadband is great for downloading stuff and not brilliant and uploading it. Upload speeds from the average connected home are or the order of 128kbps. This is just about OK for uploading short video clips to YouTube and fine for syncing documents up a web server, but it's utterly inadequate for being the basis of an all-in online backup solution. 

The likes of Carbonite (and I'm not just picking on them, I've heard the same idea from others and from several should-know-better bloggers) say that you can just select folders of favourite pics, music and videos and they'll be spirited seamlessly up into the cloud, fully backed up.

Oh no, they won't. What'll happen is that you'll tag the aforementioned folders and they'll start uploading. And, three days later, they'll still be uploading. And in the meantime the saturation of all your upstream bandwidth has meant that everyone in your family has been just about locked out of doing anything at all online.

Don't be taken in by the hype unless you really do have a lightning fast non-ASDL connection - by all means back up your document folders and anything really important online, but stay clear of your media - that 80GB of JPGs, MP3s and MP4s is far, far, better backed up locally - to another (plug-in, removeable?) hard disk or similar.

Trust me.

Air Traffic wonder

Ever imagined what the human race looks like from space? This is in that vein, it's an animation based on real data, showing all the commercial air flights in the world over a 24 hour period. Wow. Had you ever realised how many people were up in the air at the same time?

Peering inside the mind of a million phone geeks like me

Gulp.