Mac

Adium

Multi-protocol chat client.

http://www.adiumx.com

Bwana

Read man pages in your browser.

http://bruji.com/bwana/

Chicken of the VNC

Mac OS X VNC client.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/

Flip4Mac

WMV support for the Mac.

http://www.flip4mac.com/

Google Notifier

Quick access to your Google mail and calendars.

http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/notifier_mac.html

Growl

Nice notifications - integrates with lots of other apps.

http://growl.info/

iScrobbler

Mac iTunes support for last.fm.

http://iscrobbler.sourceforge.net/

LastFM

Mac player application for last.fm

http://last.fm

MySQL Tools

User interfaces for browsing and administering SQL databases.

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/gui-tools/5.0.html

NetNewsWire

RSS feed aggregator.

http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/NetNewsWire/

OmniGraffle

Great diagram drawing application.

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/

OmniOutliner

Hierarchical lists galore.

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/

Parallels

Run Windows on the Mac.

http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/

SharePoints

Nice little UI for configuring AppleShare and SMB file sharing.

http://hornware.com/sharepoints/

SubEthaEdit

Snappy collaborative text editing.

http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/

The Filter

Music recommendation service.

http://www.thefilter.com/

Twitterific

Desktop Twitter client.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/email_chat/twitterrific.html

xCHM

A Mac CHM reader.

http://xchm.sourceforge.net/ http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13750

Windows

ObjectDock

A little-known fact about Xcode is that is supports syntax colouring and function pop-ups for Dylan files.

Whilst this is nice, it inevitably leads to the desire to be able to build Dylan programs directly from within Xcode.

There are a few problems with this, but it turns out that with a bit of scripting it is possible. To save everyone else going through the same pain that I went through, I’ve made some template projects that you can install into Xcode.

Version

The current version is 1.1.

At the moment the file archive doesn’t include any obvious indication of the version number. I’ll try to fix that at some point. For now, if in doubt, check the output of the Build Results window - you should see a version scroll past at some point!

Downloading

You can download the templates from here.

Installation

Eventually I will make an installer, but for now you have to do the installation manually.

1. Extract the dylan-xcode-latest.tar.gz archive: tar xzcf dylan-xcode-latest.tar.gz

2. This should produce a single folder called “Dylan Tool”. Copy this into /Library/Application Support/Apple/Developer Tools/Project Templates/Command Line Utility/

3. Start Xcode, and choose New Project, you should now be able to choose “Dylan Tool” from the list of templates.

Usage

Once you’ve installed the template, you can create a new Dylan project by choosing File/New Project…, then selecting Dylan Tool from the Command Line Utilities section of the assistant.

You should see a new project with three source files:

• hello.lid
• hello.dylan
• hello.dylan-exports

If you know any Dylan, you should know what these are for! If not, you probably need to check out some of the tutorials first.

You should be able to build and run this project by choosing Build and Run from the Build menu.

Tom has been having painful experiences with Word. No surprises there then.

I actually quite like Word (oops, did I really admit that in public?), but these days I find myself more and more tempted to use html + css for writing documents - either as a blog entry, or on an internal project Wiki if it’s not a public document, or even if worst comes to worst as a standalone html page.

Admittedly writing web content can be painful, and most tools are either shit or totally over-engineered for writing simple documents, but generally it isn’t too bad if you’ve got some sort of simple mark up add-on installed (e.g. Markdown).

Sorting out the basics - headings, images, lists, text styles - is easy, and I often find that the constraints imposed on me have a positive effect, leading to a simple layout, or a well structured group of pages.

What I’d love to see is for someone to do a Wiki tool which had a good client-side authoring component that ran as a standalone application.

What it should do is:

• let you author offline, using basic word processor-like wysiwyg editing