What I like most about the Mac is that there is this enormous subculture
of nifty productivity software. These programs tend to be more numerous, easier to use, and of better quality
than I have noticed for other platforms. Here is a list of
software that I recommend. None of these are very expensive; many are free. Except where noted, I use all of these
programs regularly.
- For taking research notes, I find Journler to be indispensable.
Journler has an email-like interface with explicit support for dated entries, categories, and free-form
tags. Keeping multimedia, Web, and email attachments is also easy.
- Another very nice organizational utility that I have used is VoodooPad.
VoodooPad is essentially a personal Wiki, i.e., you
can create new pages in your notebook to keep organized. But, unlike
regular Wikis, it's easy to change formatting, copy and paste pdfs of
graphs, etc. It's Mac-only. If you're using Windows, you might try
WikidPad instead,
but I've never used it myself.
Between Journler and VoodooPad, it's a tough call. The advantages of VoodooPad is that it's less structured, so it's easy to reorganize
and refactor your notes. In other words: Journler's advantage is that it's more structured.
Voodoopad's advantage is that it's less structured.
- I haven't tried it yet, but some people swear by Yojimbo for keeping lots of disparate snippets of information. It doesn't seem like a good fit for the kind of information that I want to keep, but I might be wrong.
Another essential is QuickSilver. Similar to
application managers such as LaunchBar and Butler, it
allows you to start applications anywhere on your machine using only a
few keystrokes. Unless you enjoy wasting your time, you need to use this application.
The idea: You realize that you want to run, say, Powerpoint. You start Quicksilver with a hotkey (say, Cmd-Space), it comes up instantly, and you type in PPT.
A menu comes up with all of your applications and documents that whose name (NOT contents, like Spotlight) contain "PPT" somewhere in them.
You could scroll through this list, but you don't need to, because it has been cunningly ordered so that PowerPoint is at the top.
You press Enter, and PowerPoint launches. That's it. It took you more time to read this paragraph than it would have to start any
application that you own.
But that's just the beginning. Under the surface, QS is a graphical command line, and "Open Application" is but one of the many
verbs it can support. For example, you can play any of your albums without having to switch to iTunes, you can add entries to
Google Calendar without starting your Web browser, and you can enter tasks into OmniFocus (see below) without leaving your current task.
(The latter two are important examples of ubiquitous capture,
which means what you think it does, and is an important aspect of being in control of your life.)
To build your Quicksilver-fu, you will want to look back at past entries of the 43 Folders blog.
- If you write code, like me, you will need a text editor. I am perhaps the
only person in the universe who uses three to four different editors daily. My favorite port of Emacs to OS X is Aquamacs Emacs. I have used several
Aqua Emacs ports over the years, and this is hands-down the most
Mac-like. TextMate is also very well-done; it has many powerful Emacs-like figures, but in a fully
Mac-like package. Its interface for multi-file projects is significantly better than Emacs.
- I have used TeXShop
for writing TeX documents. It's gotten some neat features recently,
like being able to localize between source and pdf documents; use any
Mac font in a TeX document; and powerful macros. Its main competitor,
which I have not tried, is iTeXMac.
- That said, for my dissertation, I actually switched to editing in Emacs, because I found it more convenient for large files. AuCTeX, a package that is included with Aquamacs, is very impressive, although a little bit difficult to set up. Getting pdfsync to work with AuCTeX is very useful. It lets you jump back and forth directly between your TeX document
and the corresponding place in the PDF. For that, you will need a different PDF viewer than Preview. So far I've had good luck with Skim.
- I keep all my bookmarks in del.icio.us, which is much better than
browser bookmarks because (a) bookmark folders are extremely cumbersome,
(b) you can access del.icio.us
bookmarks anywhere, and of course (c) you can find interesting
pages that others have bookmarked. (For example, as I recall I found out about GTD by bookmarking some page,
being informed that someone else had tagged it gtd, and looking for other pages with that tag.) Perhaps you are curious about
my bookmarks?
- For time management, you may want to check out
OmniFocus,
which is a simple but effective task list manager, generally following ideas from Getting Things Done.
Despite the offputting buzzwordy-ness, many basic ideas of Getting Things Done are useful. If you start using kGTD, or just plain GTD, you will want to read the articles at 43folders. The OmniFocus iPhone application is especially nice (it won an Apple Design Award),
and increases the usefulness of desktop OmniFocus by at least a factor of 10.
- I use SSH Agent to avoid typing in SSH passwords.
- Having written all of the code for my dissertation in Java, my main advice for Java development is: Don't.
It must be said, however, that the state of the art for Java development environments are better than perhaps
any other high-level programming language.
In this respect you can do no better than IntelliJ IDEA.
I have only
occasionally used its free competitor Eclipse,
but my impression is that Eclipse has most of the same features, but a
significantly worse interface—and this is a real problem,
because the whole point of an IDE is to
get things done quickly.
- Safari is a great browser, but the Firefox
Mac port also works great, and Firefox 3 is super fast.
The extensions add many useful features that aren't available in Safari.
Firefox is especially good for debugging Web application, through the awesome extension Firebug.
- I have occasionally used a neat egg-timer-ish utility called Chimoo Timer. Its niftiest feature is that it uses voice recognition (many Macs come with microphones), so that you can say "start" and "stop" to control the timer from across the room. I haven't used this for a while though. Recently, I have also been using Stop It!, a Dashboard widget by my friend Gary Warren King.
Recently, however, both of these have been supplanted by the timer on my iPhone.
- Of course, for statistical computing and graphs, there is R. The latest Mac versions are quite nice.
- Want a del.icio.us-like way to keep track of your library of
books? I've been playing around with LibraryThing. Its most
impressive feature is that its book entry interface is
very well done, so that it is possible to enter
hundreds of books quite quickly.
- You should know about MacPorts, a large repository of free Unix software that has been ported to OS X. An alternative to MacPorts that is also common is
fink. You may wish to use either, but probably not both.
- OmniGraffle is great for drawing graphical models and such.
- A common problem is how to get LaTeX equations into PowerPoint.
Probably the most convenient way to do this is TexPoint, which now comes in a
Mac version. Its main feature is that it associates the TeX source
with every equation that it generates, so you can select an equation
in PowerPoint and change the source. The Mac user interface is
slightly clunky, but it works very well.
If you are using Keynote, then LaTeX Equation
Editor is useful. It also associates LaTeX source with the
finished pdfs, but it is slightly more cumbersome to use than
TexPoint. It works well with PowerPoint, too, but PowerPoint insists
on blurring pdfs when you paste them in. The workaround I use is to
generate very large pdf equations, like with 32pt type, and shrink
them in PowerPoint.
You should also become familiar with the presenter tools in
Keynote or Powerpoint that show your time and next slide on the laptop
display while your slide is sent to the projector. These are to die
for.
- SubEthaEdit allows multiple people to simultaneously edit a document, viewing each others' changes in real time. It is unbelievably cool, so much so that it won an Apple Design Award a few years ago. Probably its function is now taken over by Wikis and Google Docs, although being a native application gives it a significant interface advantage.
- DefaultFolder X
is a nice utility that makes opening files significantly easier and faster.
I never reinstalled it after the last time I switched computers, because for me that function
was completely taken over by Quicksilver.
- I use TinkerTool solely to add a
"Quit" option to the Finder, which saves a lot of memory. OK, it's not that much, but when you have an IDE using 500MB+ of RAM, every little bit helps.
- Are you interested in discovering new music?
Try Pandora before the record labels
finally succeed in putting Internet radio out of business.
OK, that's enough. Get back to work. (Question: Am I talking to you, or to me?)