Beezly's Blog

It’s been a few months since I bought my Mac now. It’s really become my main operating system at work and I use it fairly frequently at home, so I thought I’d list a few of the applications I’m using frequently:

• iTerm – iterm.sourceforge.net.

  An enhanced terminal application. I was used to gnome-terminal on Linux and the tabbed window feature was something I missed in the Apple supplied Terminal. One minor gripe was some broken keyboard mappings, but I fixed that.

• VMware Fusion – vmware.com/products/fusion.

  Basically this is VMware Workstation for Macs. The Unity feature is excellent, allowing me to embed Windows applications on to my OS X desktop without having to have an entire Windows desktop running in a window. My main requirement for this is to run Linux and also for Windows XP (my work use Microsoft Live Communication Server – Windows Messenger is the only client that I can use to talk to it and the Mac version doesn’t seem to work). I’ve always been really impressed with VMware’s products and Fusion also excels.

• MacFUSE – code.google.com/p/macfuse.

  FUSE for Macintosh. It allows me to mount filesystems on machines just using SSH. Another great piece of software which I was used to from Linux.

• Azureus – azureus.sourceforge.net.

  A cross-platform Java BitTorrent client. I’m not too keen on what they are doing with v3, but v2.5 is ok. I’ve also been using Transmission – tranmission.m0k.org, although sometimes it doesn’t have some features that I want to use.

• VirtueDesktops – virtuedesktops.org.

  Virtual Desktops for OSX. If you used Virtual Desktops before you’ll find this to be a really nice implementation with some clever features that allow you to use the tilt and light sensors to change desktops (although they’re more of a gimmick than anything else). Development of VirtueDesktops has stopped as it is about to be out-moded by the inclusion of a Virtual Desktop feature ( Spaces) in the next release of Mac OSX. Until then, VirtueDesktops is great.

• Firefox – getfirefox.com.

  The best web browser out there for my purposes.

• MissingSync for Palm OS – www.markspace.com/missingsync_palmos.php

  Decent synchronisation for my Treo 680 phone.

• SpanningSync – spanningsync.com.

  Synchronises my iCal Calendars with Google Calendar. I’m not usually that keen on “Subscription Software”, but this application seems to work reliably.