Toolbox


This is a list of the programs that I have installed in my system and use on a regular basis. 90% of these programs are all free or open source software. Take an hour or so and download and try each of these out.

- Audio - 1
- Graphics & Video - 1
  • VLC
    http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
    From their website :VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

- Internet - 2
  • Cyberduck
    http://cyberduck.ch/
    This freeware FTP and SFTP browser is one of the most Mac-like that I have come across.
  • Firefox
    http://www.mozilla.org/
    Personally I am completely satisfied with Safari and rarely use anything else, but just in case you want to try out a different web browser, there are three different choices over at Mozilla for you to pick from. You can use the full MozillaSeamonkey package, which includes mail and a few other features, you can use the lightweight Firefox, or you can choose Camino for the security features that it includes.

- Other - 2
  • Tofu
    http://homepage.mac.com/asagoo/tofu/
    Read any text by scrolling from side to side through a simple interface. It's a completely different look on the way we view text on a computer, and is much more like reading a book.
  • Yum!
    http://nixanz.com/products/yum/README.html
    Freeware program to store recipes. It has a great little feature to automatically do conversions based on how many people your recipe feeds and how many you want to make it for.

- Servers - 4
- Web Design & Scripting - 4
  • CocoaMySQL
    http://cocoamysql.sourceforge.net/
    Great open-source MySQL manager. Use this to manage databases on any server. I use this daily for my work. I do still need phpMyAdmin installed on a system for a few things, most notably for managing users, but other than that, this is the one to use.
  • HTMLTidy
    http://blackbird.casaparrina.it/programmazione/progetti/19
    Cocoa wrapper for the command line script HTMLTidy. This will take any amount of crappy HTML code and make it pretty, fix errors, and reformat it to my liking. I open this up at least once or twice a day.
  • SubEthaEdit
    http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/
    The gold standard as far as simple text editing goes. Opens large amounts of files fast, does code syntax coloring for almost every language ever invented, and has a nice live HTML preview feature that uses the Safari engine to render in real-time as you type.
  • Xcode
    Included with the Developer Tools CD that comes with Mac OS X. This is a great IDE. For what I do, I don't use more than 10% of the features that this program comes with, but it is a great tool to manage whole websites.