As I mentioned recently, I've been using virtual desktops for a while and consider them a great addition to the Mac OS X experience. I started with Desktop Manager and recently have been using Virtue. Apple plans to include their own implementation of virtual desktops in Leopard which they have dubbed Spaces and it looks good. My use of virtual desktops came about from a desire to have a bit more desktop space on my primary Mac, a 12" PowerBook. Virtual desktops allow for a sense of more space and the ability to quickly jump to a whole new screen. As someone with 9-12 applications open at all times I appreciate the ability to have a desktop devoted to specific purposes and applications. A side effect of doing things this way is that I've developed a habit of keeping each application maximized so that I can focus on that app when I'm in that desktop and get the most out of the 12" screen. Seems to make sense.

But maybe not. See, now that I'm keeping my windows maximized I can get the exact same effect of the desktop switch by using the OS X Command-Tab application switcher or the dock. If I just need quick access to the desktop I have Expose set to show the desktop via a keyboard shortcut using the "fn" key or the bottom left of my screen, either way requires a trip to the bottom left, keyboard or screen. I got to thinking about this and as an experiment I've quit Virtue for a few days. A side benefit is that the memory normally used by Virtue is now freed up for other apps and on a PowerBook with 768 MB of ram every little bit counts.

It's been nearly five days without Virtue and I think this change may stick. The only real difference in switching with Command-Tab or the dock is that I do not see the nifty transition that virtual desktop apps provide when switching. The end result is the same and it happens just as quickly. A key to making this work, as with virtual desktops, is to not use the dock for minimizing windows. Another key to making this work is the tabbed window interface in applications such as Safari, Vienna and Smultron. I do not use multiple windows for each application and that's been the case for a while. The only exception to this rule is iChat, a bit of an oddball which requires 2 windows, one for my buddy list and one for message window which is tabbed via Chax.

Still, I can think of situations in which the virtual desktop solution would make sense. Should I need to work more often from my iMac with it's larger 17" screen I would use Virtue because certain tasks such as web development would benefit by having a Safari screen alongside of Smultron window with open html files being edited. FileMaker related work also often benefits from having multiple windows of the same database open side by side.

For now though, as long as I'm working on my small screened PowerBook I'll work without virtual desktops and I'll be just as productive.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Mac Apps, Virtual Desktops

The full list is available here.

iLife
I'm adding the iLife suite to this list because I consider it to be essential. I have the latest version and will likely continue updating with each new release because I use these apps all the time and because each yearly upgrade seems to be worth it in terms of new features. I won't go into iTunes because it is free and included on every new Mac. It's great and I use it many hours every day. Enough said.

iPhoto is another essential. I take a lot of photos and I'm always scanning in old photographs from one of the many shoe boxes of family photos. I keyword all photos at the time of import and for that I consider Keyword Assistant essential. It makes keywording even easier than the methods included in iPhoto. Another reason to use iPhoto is the tie-in to other apps: iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, RapidWeaver, Pages, and Keynote to name a few. It seems ever new application, Apple or third party, is taking advantage of the photos stored in iPhoto. Last but not least, I've now made two iPhoto books and will be making more for various gifts.

iMovie and iDVD. I love these apps. I've made numerous movies which were first put to VHS (2001) and for the past couple years, DVD. With a combination of still photos and new or even digitized archive footage I have assemble DVD and iPhoto book combination gift packages for birthdays and anniversaries.

GarageBand has various uses. I have used it for podcasting and for creating soundtracks for video projects. I wouldn't consider this one essential but it has been very useful, easy and fun to use.

Last and probably least is iWeb. I don't use it and don't consider it to be as useful as RapidWeaver. It has great potential and I'm certain that future versions will greatly improve it. My main reason for not using it is that I do not use .Mac. Yes, I know I can ftp iWeb sites but from my brief experimentation it seemed to be far more of a hassle than it should. For those with a subscription to .Mac I would certainly recommend giving iWeb a shot.

1. iTunes
2. iPhoto
3. iMovie
4. iDVD
5. GarageBand
6. iWeb

Maintenance
Want to save some hard drive space? Monolingual is your friend! I've saved at least 1 gig on each drive that I've used Monolingual on. It removes the various localizations from the applications on your Mac. On a small 40 gig PowerBook drive 1 gig is nothing to sneeze at! The most recent versions of Monolingual also have the option of removing the parts of Universal Binaries that are not needed. I'm on a G4 and a G5 so for me this would be the Intel code that is removed. I've not tested it on Intel machines to verify that it does the opposite for them and removes the PPC code.

OnyX is a great application for those that like to sleep their Macs at night to save energy. The various unix maintenance scripts that remove caches and logs run at night and will not do so if the computer is asleep. OnyX allows me to run them manually or set new times for them. I've set them to run during the day when I know my machines are on. It can also be used to repair permissions and set a variety of other options which cannot be set in the standard system prefs.

SuperDuper! I've tried numerous back-up utilities but ultimately chose SuperDuper! Easy to use and in my opinion the best option until Leopard's Time Machine. You do back-up.... don't you?

1. Monolingual
2. OnyX
3. SuperDuper!

Preference Panes
Ah yes, preference panes. These are must haves. All of the Unsanity haxies are great though I currently only use Shapeshifter. As much as I love Mac OS X sometimes I like to mix it up and Shapeshifter seems the best way to do it. I've never had any problems with it. It eats up a bit of memory and may add just a fraction of start-up time for each application but I don't notice it. Lots of beautiful themes to choose from. The other Unsanity apps are also good though I don't always use them due to limited memory: FruitMenu and Xounds. I'm fairly certain than when I finally upgrade to a MacBook with 2 gigs of ram I'll use them all.

MenuMeters is essential. I want to see my current processor and network activity at a glance. Though I'm not using them MenuMeters also offers disk usage and memory usage. That's a total of 4 monitors that can reside in my menu, each one customizable in various ways.

Textpander was free is now shareware called TextExpander. It's a great way to create shortcuts that will expand out into all kinds of text. I use it to expand out into html tags, phone numbers, signatures, email addresses, urls, addresses, names, etc. A great timesaver and absolutely essential once you've gotten used to it.

iScroll2 enables the scrolling trackpad on older iBooks and PowerBooks. Also adds 2 finger control click. Sweet and essential for me. I rarely bother with the control click anymore.

Growl is a method of system notification that applications can use. As of now I use several of these such as Mail, iTunes, Safari and Vienna. As an example, when Vienna finds updated feeds it uses Growl to pop up a notification of the updates regardless of what application I'm using. I can customize various aspects of the display such as style, length of time that it is on my screen, as well as it's location on the screen.

ICeCoffee, listed simply as "Services" once installed in the user preferences, allows me to define a subset of the currently available application services to display in a contextual menu. No need to go to the Application>Services menu, with Services I can just control click/right click and the short list of services I have predefined is right there. A great way to really use a technology that most users never remember to use. Apple should have been doing this from the beginning.

FinderPop is one of several preference panes (the above mentioned FruitMenu also does this) that I can use to add new options to the standard contextual menu. With FinderPop I can add folders, currently running applications and more.

1. Shapeshifter
2. MenuMeters
3. TextExpander
4. iScroll2
5. Growl
6. ICeCoffEE
7. FinderPop

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Mac Apps

The full list is available here.

Office
Many of this group are "office apps" but as I said in Part 1, thinking about categories of apps is tricky because so many apps can be used in so many ways. For example, as much as I love using Pages for layout for print I also have used it for creating web graphics and logos. Export to pdf and open in Photoshop or Illustrator if you need to. Very handy! For print or web, Pages has become my publishing workhorse.

Page layout and word processing
As stated above, I use Pages for all sorts of tasks, page layout and word processing among them. I'll use word if I must but I'd rather use Pages or even the Apple freebie TextEditor which will save in the .doc format. Pages also saves into the .doc format and is fully featured. There are others out there as well, some of them ported to Mac compatibility, others on the way: NeoOffice, OpenOffice.

1. Pages
2. Word

Presentation
Keynote is one of my favorite applications. I've not had much call to use it recently but should I need a presentation application this would be my first choice. Like Pages, it's younger sibling in the iWork suite, Keynote has enough export power to be useful beyond just presentations.

1. Keynote
2. Power Point

Spreadsheet
While I do have Microsoft Office on my iMac which has more hard drive space I've taken to the alternatives for my PowerBook. The perfect alternative to Excel is a new spreadsheet app, still in beta, called Tables. Not as full featured as Excel but for my minimal spreadsheet needs it's perfect. I'm still hoping Apple will introduce a spreadsheet application into the iWork suite, until then Tables will do.

1. Tables
2. Excel

Database
There is only one database application that really interests me and that is Filemaker Pro. There are others and a few years back I took a brief look at them just to see what was available. If you need a database I suggest FileMaker Pro as your first stop. It comes with a great set of templates to start with and, as I've said before, the folks at FileMaker have done a fantastic application that invites you in to explore, use, and develop.

1. FileMaker Pro

Text Editor
My primary interest with text editing revolves around web development though I often use simple notes, along with iCal and Mail, to track project tasks. I've been hand coding websites since 1997 and I've tried many of these along the way. SubEthaEdit has been one of my favorites but these days I usually work solo so the sharing feature that I love so much is not of much use and as of this writing the application still lacks tabs for multiple documents. I must have tabs in my text editor. In fact, tabs are at the very top of the list. I've tried TextMate and like it but really it's a bit more than I need and I'm not too fond of the text. When I spend alot of time looking at text I want to choose a pleasing font and TextMate doesn't cut it. Smultron is my top choice and is running on my Mac everyday. Tabs, split view, templates, snippets, web page preview using the OS X WebKit, and excellent find/replace. Why pay for BBEdit or even the much less expensive TextMate?

1. Smultron
2. TextEdit
3. TextMate
4. SubEthaEdit
5. BBEdit

Graphics
As I stated above, Pages is my workhorse. I've been using it to create a whole slew of graphics for small print projects and websites and it is a joy to use. For graphics that need to be optimized i can jump into Photoshop. I've even used Pages to create line art such as logos that can be exported into pdf and opened in Illustrator for further export to whatever format is needed.

1. Pages
2. Photoshop
3. Graphic Converter
4. Illustrator

Web Creation and Blogging
If the goal is easy and quick web development I'd go with RapidWeaver. I've also tried iWeb and Sandvox which both off to a good start but as version 1 apps they have plenty of problems and oddities. RapidWeavers been out for a while now and is at version 3.5. The maturity shows in the power and flexibility of the app. Beginners will find it easy to point and click their way to a new website using one of the built-in themes. Developers can customize the themes or build their own from the ground up. The MacProductive website you are viewing was built using RapidWeaver and a custom theme.

For blogging I wouldn't hesitate to suggest Ecto or MarsEdit. Both are great apps.

1. RapidWeaver
2. iWeb
3. Sandvox
4. Ecto
5. MarsEdit

Video Players
Flip4Mac is a fantastic improvement for the playing of Windows Media right in Quicktime. No more need for Microsoft's cheesy player. VLC is great to have on hand as an alternative to Apple's Quicktime player. It will play almost anything you throw at it.

1. Flip4Mac
2. VLC

More coming soon in Part 3...

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Mac Apps

This is my list of essential Mac apps and as such it is shaped by the kind of work I do! In most cases I've tried each app listed but am only or mostly using the first one in a particular category. Others I've likely tried but only use as back-up if necessary or not at all though I consider them to be useful and others may prefer them. Something else about a list such as this, while I have apps categorized by usage it is worth noting that this is a very loose kind of categorization given all the potential for crossover in the usage of any particular app.

Launchers
Essential. While Spotlight search makes things a bit easier when I'm using someone else's Mac it's not really a substitute for a real Launcher. Quicksilver is my favorite by far because it is  free and with it's plugin architecture it does more than Launchbar. Another benefit is the great community of folks that can offer help in getting the most out of using Quicksilver.

1. Quicksilver
2. Launchbar

Virtual Desktops
Leopard will bring default, pre-installed virtual desktops to the Mac via Spaces. Until then I'll continue using Desktop Manager. I've been using this for a couple years and cannot imagine a Mac without it. If you are using a new Intel Mac you can use Virtue which is very similar and under active development though a bit buggy from what I've read. 

Edit: 9/15/06 I decided to go ahead and try out Virtue again thinking the bugs would force me right back to Desktop Manager. One week later and I've made Virtue my default. Not a single crash! What I like better about Virtue: I can save desktop space by not showing the little pager all the time. Instead I have it set to pop up via a short cut. Even better, If I just click an app in the dock or choose it via the OS X Command-Tab applications switcher it will automatically switch me to the appropriate desktop for that app. Very cool.

1. Virtue
2. Desktop Manager

Browsers
In terms of speed and rendering I consider these four to be close enough that they are all excellent choices. I prefer Safari for two reasons. First, with Saft I can save my tabs at a crash or quit and I can block flash advertising. Second, I love the OS X Tiger Dictionary application which can be accessed via contextual menu in Safari but not Camino or Opera.  OmniWeb is a great browser but not great enough to pay for.

1. Safari
2. Camino
3. Opera
4. OmniWeb

RSS
Vienna delivers many of the features of NetNewsWire with a very similar look. It also has the great benefit of being open source freeware/donationware. As an RSS reader it offers an integrated tabbed web interface via the OS X WebKit. It's also got a whole slew of filtering/viewing possibilities. It really is an excellent reader with a great feature set and interface. Regarding Safari, I've come to appreciate Safari's built in RSS and used it before Vienna. If you are a heavy user of RSS I'd suggest trying a Safari-Vienna combination. If you read just a handful of RSS feeds Safari's RSS would likely be enough for you.

1. Vienna
2. Safari
3. NetNewsWire

Torrent
I don't really have a strong opinion on this.

1. Azureus
2. Bitrocket

Sharing
There are other Gnutella/Limewire clients but this one is freeware/donationware and has worked great for me. 

1. Acqlite

FTP
My first website built in 1997 was ftp'd with Fetch... ah what fond memories! I've not used it in a while but the last time I did it was rock solid. For the past couple years Transmit has been my favorite by far. 

1. Transmit
2. Fetch
3. Cyberduck

Email Client and Plugins
Over the years I've tried them all or most of them. From the days of the Classic Mac Os through X, I've used: Mulberry, PowerMail, Mozilla, Mailsmith, Eudora, Entourage, and Apple's Mail. I think I'm forgetting one. In any case, I've tried the last two versions of Entourage but never left Mail and don't plan on it. It has been, for the most part, everything I need in an email client. With add-ons such as those listed here, I could not be happier. Actually, I will be with Leopard Mail because having those to-dos and notes built in will be oh so sweet.

1. Mail
2. JunkMatcher
3. MailTags
4. Act-On
5. MailAppetizer

Chat
Tried them both and love them both. I've settled on iChat for quite sometime because Adium does not handle file transfers well. In fact, it has almost always crashed for me with any kind of file transfer. Given that everyone I want to chat with has an AIM or .Mac account I don't really need Adium's ability to handle other services. With the new features coming in Leopard iChat there is no way I'll be taking it off my dock.

1. iChat
2. Adium

More coming soon in Part 2...

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Mac Apps

Is your hard drive filling up with an iPhoto library full of photos? Here's a bit of advice. First, don't be afraid to delete images that are near duplicates. I can't tell you how many hundreds of megabytes I've seen wasted because someone was either afraid to delete photos that were nearly identical or just never took the time. Go ahead, do it. It's a great rainy day project... or a good any day project. Get a cup of coffee and enjoy your pictures as you work through them. If you have not added keywords to your images now would be a great time to do that too.

Once you've taken this step to remove photos you don't really need you may find that you still have too many images to host on your Mac's internal drive. If you have an external drive you can create a new libraries there or just move your current library. Here's how. If you just want to move your current library copy the folder, "iPhoto Library," (which is usually in the Pictures folder of your home directory) over to the external drive. When you start iPhoto hold down the option key and keep it down until you get the iPhoto dialog window. Yes, it's that simple. You'll be prompted to create a new iPhoto library or to choose an already existing library to open from. At this point you can choose your library in it's new location or, if you are keeping the original and creating a new library choose that option from the buttons presented. Easy. The next time you open iPhoto it will choose the last library you used. If you have opted to start a second library just hold down the option key during iPhoto startup anytime you want to open the previous library.

Back it up! If you have so many photos that you are using an external drive to move your current library or are creating new libraries you should be thinking about where you will back-up. Do you have a second external drive that can serve as a backup for the 1st external drive which will now be hosting photos? If not I'd suggest going back to the beginning of this tip. Delete the photos you really don't need. Don't expand or move your iPhoto libraries until you have a separate drive you can back-up to. This means at least 2 external drives... on for your iPhoto libraries and another one for backing up.

One other note of caution that I'll mention since I'm on the topic of iPhoto libraries. While this hint discusses moving the folder "iPhoto Library" so that you can save space on your internal drive, do not, ever, for any reason, move or delete files or folders inside of the iPhoto library. Never. The contents of this folder are not for you, they belong to iPhoto. If you want to work with images that are in the iPhoto library you use iPhoto. No exceptions.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, iPhoto

I finally sat down and created an FileMaker Pro invoicing database for myself. I've been experimenting for a while with a combination of the OS X Address Book, iCal, Pages, and Spotlight to track projects, tasks, and invoices. It works very well for everything except for the invoicing. I wanted to try this first because I like having everything tied in by Spotlight and FileMaker Pro data is not. Alas, even with keyword tagging the invoicing was just not working. I'm still going to track task and project job time with iCal but will output that to FileMaker for all aspects of invoicing.

I used the nice Pages invoice as the basis for my printed invoice in the invoice table then added tables for contacts/clients and line items. Pretty basic but it works well for my needs. I'm sure I'll customize it a bit more as I use it and save it as a template for any future client that needs invoicing. As it is now I can track outstanding balances much more easily and send off a pdf invoice via email with a single click.

One final note. I think I'm getting better at the visual aspects of FMP database design. Of course there's plenty of room for improvement!

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, FileMaker Pro, Invoicing, Small Business

Great timing. A few month ago I was hired by some folks to help with a form that would create a Vcard from the web. From there it has evolved into a regular web maintenance and content update gig. Early on in the process I suggested that we move the code over to valid xhtml and possibly refresh the design in the process. Well this past week I've been updating the code to valid xhtml and wouldn't you know it just as I was preparing to convert a large and messy table I came across this hint at MacOSX Hints which details using TextEdit for converting text to valid html or xhtml. I code most of my sites by hand using Smultron so this caught my eyes as a great potential time saver and particularly helpful for converting this table.

From the hint:

...if you work in a native Cocoa application like TextEdit using only the tools Apple provides for word processing (which admittedly take some getting used to, and handle only basic formatting needs -- much like basic HTML itself), you can easily work in a WYSIWYG mode and then convert the file to clean HTML that you won't be embarrassed to call your own.

Until yesterday, I thought TextEdit's HTML conversion ability was on a par with that of Word and Pages. That's probably because in its default mode, it is. However, unlike those apps, the surprisingly powerful TextEdit provides some very handy, simple options to produce clean HTML when you need that. Here's a brief set of steps to take advantage of this capability:

1. Copy and paste your Cocoa-formatted text into a new TextEdit document. (Hint: TextEdit provides an Application Service (New Window Containing Selection) in the Services menu for this once you select the text in the originating app.)

2. Open TextEdit's Preferences and select the Open and Save tab.

3. Change Document Type to either HTML 4.01 Strict or XHTML 1.0 Strict, depending on whether you want your code to be XHTML compliant or not.

4. Change Styling to No CSS. Note that this will strip all font and style information from the file, except for the basics like bold and italics.

5. From the TextEdit menubar, select File/Save As.

6. In the Save As dialog box, give your file a name and hard disk location. Then, change the File Format selection to HTML, and click Save.

7. Now, when you click on your new HTML file in the Finder, it will open with your default web browser. If you examine the source code, you'll see nothing but simple, pure HTML (or XHTML).

I set TextEdit's prefs to export with no css and copied the table in question directly from the page and pasted it into a new TextEdit document and sure enough after export to html I had a lean and mean valid table with all of the garbage stripped out. Wowza! Saved me oodles of time and I have a hunch it will be a handy trick I'll use again for other quick edits.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, TextEdit, Web Development