Geekygrad’s Blog

Geekygrad’s Mac software mix May 8, 2009

I thought I’d do a quick tour of some interesting programs I’ve found useful on the Mac. Some are geeky, some not so geeky:

Bibdesk - Excellent reference manager that natively uses the BibTeX format. Files PDF’s and lets you search databases such as PubMed and ISI Web of Science. Very extensive applescript support. BibDesk is free software, and has a great user community and plenty of contributed scripts.

OmniFocus - GTD task management application that has excellent integration with AppleScript, Mail.app and iCal. Also has a companion application for the iPhone that can be sync’ed via Bonjour/WiFi or over the air to a WebDAV share. OmniFocus is available from the OmniGroup, and is well worth the price. Student discounts are available and the support is excellent.

Audacity – finally we’ve got a professional-grade audio recording program that’s usable by an amateur yet has all tools a professional needs. I use it for everything, from recording narration to digitizing old records and cassette tapes. It exports the final product to all major audio formats and appears to have support for VST plugins as well as having its own plugin architecture. Audacity is free software and has an extensive Wiki on its web page.

Quicksilver - the swiss army knife of launch applications and documents. I’ve barely scraped 10% of the functionality of this application yet, but in the right hands it’s a great time saver. Quicksilver is available from Blacktree software free of charge.

Aquamacs - If you’re an emacs user you’ll love Aquamacs. It keeps all the functionality of emacs, including plugins, but has a beautiful cocoa-based interface that uses the native Mac OS X system services as much as possible. The interface is well thought out and the program appears to be under active development. Aquamacs is free software, available online.

Boxee - media center based on XBMC with some social networking features built in. Very nice interface and plays most file formats. Boxee is available on its website, and sign-up is required.

Calaboration – easily set up your Google Calendar using the CalDAV access protocol. Simple program that does the job well. Calaboration is free software, available from Google Code.

Delicious2safari - puts your delicious bookmarks into a bookmarks folder on Safari. Works from a GUI, and doesn’t seem to have a command-line interface but it does the job very well indeed. Delicious2safari is free software, available online.

Audio Hijack – lets you directly capture audio from any application you have running. Great for saving realplayer streams and radio streams from the web without getting annoying system sounds into the mix. Audio Hijack Pro is on sale from Rogue Amoeba software and well worth the money.