My essential OS X "general" applications, top 5

Last week my brother visited me at home and told that he bought a new Macbook Pro 15". He has used Windows for years so he is quite new to OS X. The question he asked me was; What do you consider are essential applications? Well, it depends what you use it for. I use the mac to do Video, Audio, Development, Gaming, Pictures and the usual browse, mail, twitter and write stuff.

In all the above usage scenarios i will post my top 5 apps! starting with this post for the general stuff. The general stuff is what i need to get around on my mac and makes me feel comfortable (and perhaps warm and fuzzy inside) and isn't part of the standard OS X Leopard installation.

So without further ado, i bring you;

1. Quicksilver by Blacktree

The idea of the OS X dock (the thing living on the bottom of your mac) is to launch regularly used applications. If you use mail a lot, you add it to the dock, with one click you can launch it. It also functions as a task switcher. Launched applications are also shown on the dock with a blueish-dot beneath them.

I use so many applications regularly that my dock became huge! It was a pain to find them. Thanks to a colleague and friend of mine Viktor, i discovered Quicksilver. This app lets you launch other apps by just typing in a few letters that can correspond with the name of the app.

For example; If i want to launch "Safari", i just type in the letters "sf". Quicksilver then matches the letters with the name of the app, in this case "Safari", shows the Safari icon, i press enter and it is launched.

So how do you launch Quicksilver? It is automatically started when i login to my mac. It shows itself as soon as i hit the key-combo "ALT-SPACE". Quicksilver has become my preferred way of launching applications and doing some more advanced things ;) But i'll let you watch Merlin Mann and Leo Laporte do a demo of Quicksilver.

2. Disk Inventory X by Tjark Derlien

Have you ever had the problem that your hard drive was full and you didn't know what was eating the disk space? Well then this application is for you! Disk Inventory X scans your hard drive and shows an image of all the files! The bigger the file, the bigger it shows on the image as a colored block. Click on the block, and it tells you which file it was! Instantly hunt down those big files and remove them from your hard drive.

3. Perian Components for Quicktime by the Perian guys

I'd like to play any video or audio file without having to think how to open them. Heck, i'd even love to use the quicklook feature of the Finder! Whenever you get an divx, xvid, mkv, dts, dolby digital file and you try to open them with Quicktime it will fail. I know a lot of my friends use VLC to play any digital media file but it's a bit buggy and does not enable quicklook.

Perian to the rescue! This isn't actually an application. It's a set of media decoders for Quicktime so you can play some of the more common non-Apple media formats out there. When you install it, the only thing you get is a preference pane in your system preferences. But the cool thing is that you can open that avi/divx file within Quicktime. You can even add and play the movie in iTunes.

4. Fuzzy Clock by Objectpark

It's a clock for your menu bar. But instead of saying "10.17", it will say "quarter past ten". This is the fuzzy part. This clock isn't precise and to me it is less distracting then a clock that changes every minute ;) It's hard to explain but if you keep checking that damned clock every time and you want something more easy and relaxing to the brain and eyes, give Fuzzy clock a try.

5. 1Password by Agile Web Solutions

This has been a life saver! How many times did i forget passwords and user accounts for websites, devices and so on. Now comes 1Password. This application holds all your password information and more. It can be protected by just one master password that you have to remember. It integrates with browsers, for example; whenever i go to the Utreg Massive forums, i click the login button, click on the 1Password icon in Safari, select "Login to Utreg Massive" and hey presto, i'm logged in. It's easy as pie.

It also generates passwords for you, currently on the web, all my passwords are different, all are generated by 1Password. The generated passwords are impossible to remember. So if someone (evil) would get my password from a website, it would be of no use to him because it is only used for that particular website.Generated passwords are thankfully impossible to remember

So what do you do when you don't have your computer with you and you want to login onto a website at a friends house? 1Password has an iPhone application that lets you synchronize passwords. Whenever i want to login to Utreg massive when i'm at my parents house, i launch 1Password on my iPhone, type in my master password, go to the Utreg massive password entry and voila, the password is displayed! i can then start logging in.

Well, that's it for these 5 apps! I look forward to sharing my top 5 audio apps next time.

Use iPhoto to rate wine (or any other drink)

This weekend i bought a nice bottle of red wine from a shop in Utrecht, Margaret Wines. The guy from the shop suggested a red Bordeaux made by a Dutch wine-maker living in the Bordeaux region. When i got home i swapped the last empty bottle of red wine with the new full one. When i put the empty bottle in the bag with other empty bottles i thought to myself, the now empty one tasted pretty good, i should remember it. But how can i remember it? If it's good, if it's bad, how much it was? and it also would be cool to have that information with me when I'm at the supermarket shopping for a new bottle.

Wine event in iPhoto

Well the solution for me was very simple. Take a picture of the wine bottle with my iPhone (or any other camera), import the picture into iPhoto, add it to a "Wine event", rate the picture and if needed add some description to it. What i have then is a list of wines, well pictures actually, with ratings (1 star is horrible-do-not-drink-again, 5 is wow!) and a short description of how it tasted, where i bought it and perhaps the price.

Now the only thing left is to have the list easily accessible when I'm shopping for new ones. Hmmmmmmm, well i found a pretty nifty solution , it's the all magical iPhoto->Smart Album->iTunes->iPhone combo! You start off by creating a Smart Album in iPhoto, then setup the conditions as seen in the picture.Open up iTunes, plug in your iPhone (or iPod), go to the pictures tab and click from the Selected albums the "Best wines" album. Now hit the Sync button and you have an album of best wines added to your mobile device (aka iPhone or iPod)! So what just happened? I have a fully automated way of adding pictures of great tasting wines to a picture album on my iPhone. Whenever i add a picture to the "Wine" event in iPhoto and give it a 3-star or more rating it gets synced to my iPhone. Of course this is just a taste of what is possible with rating pictures of bottles of wine and syncing them back with "Smart albums". I'm going to be adding "Smart albums" for "Best Whiskey" and "Worst wines" (so i don't accidentally buy them anymore).

Currently this wine is at the top of my list! (price is a bit steep but hey! the taste is great!)

Chateau D'Aurilhac 2005 Haut Medoc

Yep! Getting rid of paper...

My girlfriend and i are going to be moving soon (may-june) from the city of Utrecht to the very small city of Rhenen. That means that we have to get our current apartment in order to sell it. So we started cleaning and throwing stuff out. There was but one major problem lying on our desk and in the living room. Paper! bills, notices, contracts, warranties and so on! How could we clean up the mess and still be able to find all our paper if we ever needed it?

Piles of paper lying on our desk at homeLast year we tried to put everything into boxes, sorted and labeled but as i am a nerd i gave up on it. I couldn't be bothered, trying to look for the right box, finding the appropriate place to put the paper in.

But after listening to Andy Ihnatko on the Macbreak weekly podcast where he recommended software to scan in your receipts, business cards and so on, it got me thinking about our paper mess and perhaps scanning would solve a bit of our problem.

So i looked for some scanning and paper organization software for Mac OS X because we already had an Epson perfection 1260 scanner in the house. I found Yep! from Ironic Software which organizes PDF documents just like (what they say on the site) iPhoto. 

Yep! is an application that can scan documents using a TWAIN scanner driver and then create PDF documents. The biggest feature for me is the use of tags which you can assign to those PDF's. For example; if we have a receipt for some apple stuff we scan in the paper, and just assign some tags to it, like; receipt, apple, <store-name>. The application also allows you to quickly search for PDF's based on those tags. This is very powerful which i experienced when doing my taxes last month. Normally it would take me at least 2 hours of sifting through piles and boxes of paper to get the information needed to do my taxes, this year i measured it and it took me 15 seconds!!! I just typed in the appropriate tags, like taxes, overview, 2008 and it returned all 8 documents which i needed.

Wow! this is a nice life improvement for me and my girlfriend.

Now for some quick tips;

• Make sure the PDF's and the tags that go with it are backed up. Yep! PDF's and Library settings are on my Drobo, which in turn is backed up on a separate disk.
• The Epson scanner will sometimes stop responding! and the only way i could get it working again was to restart the Macbook Pro. But yesterday i found a solution! Launch Activity Monitor, kill Yep! and the Epson Scanner program, unplug the scanner USB cable and plug it back in. Then launch Yep! again and you are ready to go!
• Make sure everybody that does the scanning knows about the tags and what they mean ;)

Currently i've only scanned in 75% of the piles, in 4 hours smeared out over 4 weeks i'll be done with all of them!