The Underground Man

Adding Apps to Mac OS X

I'm exploring what is available in building the set of apps that I use on my OS X laptop. I'm not terribly happy with the complexity of BBEdit. In part because it seems to assume I don't know how to write DHTML and HTML so a huge number of its menu choices are devoted to shorthand keys which do simple pastes of text. I haven't used the tool in something like six or seven years (since I switched to a PC platform for business reasons) but I had hoped that it would be a little more user-friendly. So I'm sort of still looking around for a good editor to speed my hand-coding of DHTML/XML/HTML.

As far as design theory goes, I tend to be an adherent of the school of "add complexity as requested by the user". The perfect app, to my mind, is one that has a minimal set of functions to be classed as useful to very useful. It has progressive and logical "layers" of additional functionality that can be added as the user grows in technical sophistication. Unfortunately, BBEdit has grown but its approach to the user has not evolved. You get two hundred odd functions (at a total wild-ass guess) with little or no differentiation as to level of utility or ease of use.

I've added VLC, Spring, NetNewsWire, GIMP/X11, LimeWire, Transmit, VoodooPad, and CodeTek Virtual Desktop to my Dock. I'm evaluating a ton of other apps to see whether they are worth my time to invest in.

I was most annoyed to see that iChat requires either a .Mac account or an AOL Instant Messenger account. I would much rather use a free chat account than have to pay. It's just a convenience and not a huge one but it's a great app made useless by its limitation to paid services.

I'm very interested in Spring, especially as an interface to a project I'm developing conceptually but its requirement of an AOL account (for the use of the AIM mechanism) is very annoying. Why on earth does anyone expect that users want to use AOL? Granted, it's got a lot of users (even if you cut there estimates down to a more likely one-fifth) but that's still a vast minority of both American and international Internet users. It holds down a place in my Dock 'cause the general idea of a new interface metaphor really appeals to me. I've designed quite a few Web site and application interfaces in my day so I know a little bit about the subject. Anything that promises to be revolutionary or to alter the way we interact with our desktop is something that I have a keen interest in. That being said, I've got a couple of VoodooPads full of ideas on how I can use it and I'll be playing with it over the next couple of weeks (and putting up screenshots).

VLC I love because I can take MPeG4's I've created and view them - something I've found just doesn't work worth a damn in Quicktime (yet). So this means that I can take movies I've ripped from my DVDs and store them on my hard drive. Very cool.

LimeWire looks like a great app though as with all P2P filesharing apps it really is only usable over a fast connection. Still, I've found some pretty obscure stuff with it and it's a great alternative to Kazaa Lite. Besides, it's Open Source!! The only downside is that it doesn't work well (or at all) through a firewall/proxy.

I like Transmit's simple interface. It's easy to use, conforms to the guidelines for Acqua so it looks like a part of OS X, and it's not too expensive (important in these days where I'm looking for full-time work). Fetch quite disappointed me. It was a mainstay when I first started out in Web development on a Mac (1993) but it doesn't appear to have improved all that much in the last ten years. Amazing.

NetNewsWire seems to be great at aggregating RSS feeds - though as yet I haven't found a way (in an admittedly cursory examination) to search for a particular blog before adding it to my feed.

I'm considering using Desktop Manager rather than CodeTek Virtual Desktop (CTVD) 'cause it's free. But in the course of using it I've had it crash three or four times in as many days. Not a big deal but this can leave windows stranded on your non-current desktops. Also with CTVD I can set different images on different desktops which is a lovely feature. It's currently discounted, just before the release of V3, so I'll most likely buy it.

VoodooPad is a very cool little app. Sort of sticky notes with Web page/Wiki capability (one can also paste in images). The interface can be kind of confusing (I've lost a couple of note pages already somehow) but it has a pretty high utility value. I use it right now to keep track of invention and startup ideas as well as topic ideas for this blog.

I just installed xbMovieSaver that allows me to use my Matrix trailers and BMW QT films as screensavers. Very nifty. Seems to work flawlessly. The only drawback is that the CPU seems to work hard enough to require the fan to fire up when playing the films. I may yet have to change to a less active (flashy) screensaver.

Finally, I should mention Adriaan Tijsseling's work here. He's got a cool little app called Kung-Log that allows one to author blog entries on your desktop or laptop machine. I can save the entries locally (on my TiBook) and upload them later when my connection is up. It's a nice piece of work.

Posted by artandscience at January 15, 2004 08:56 AM