tin-men

Desert Island Apps

Recently on the British Mac podcast a new feature has started up called Desert Island Apps. If you’re not from our lovely rainy little island, there is a feature on BBC Radio 4 called Desert Island Discs where celebrities come on and choose five records that they would take with them if they were stranded on a desert island.

Anyway, time to get to the point. The idea is you choose five Mac apps that you can’t live without. I’m going to ignore all the usual things like Microsoft Office and the iLife suite, and focus on lesser known apps.

Quicksilver is my first choice. I truly couldn’t live without it, I use it literally all the time. Basically it is an application launcher, but it is so much more than that. To start off with it is instant with its results. You know how Spotlight takes a moment or two to come up with results? There’s none of that with Quicksilver. It also seems to be psychic. It nearly always comes up with the right result, and if it doesn’t it learns for next time.

But the real beauty of Quicksilver is in the other things it can do. It can manipulate files, run scripts - pretty much anything that you can think of. And if you can think of it and it isn’t there then you can probably find a plugin that will make it happen.

My second app is Feeder. Its made by Reinvented Software, and it is used for the creation and management of RSS feeds. I have a couple of podcasts and I use it to make my feeds. Sure, creating RSS feeds isn’t particularly difficult, but it is a bit of a pain in the bum. Feeder just makes it easier since it handles the creation of the feed, and it will also upload any other files needed to your webserver. In short, it does what all good apps should do - takes something tedious and repetitive and make it quick and easy.

Keeping with the “making something tedious nice and easy” theme comes app number three - CSSEdit. It is a visual CSS editor that uses webkit (the rendering engine that Safari uses) to display your edits in real time. Its especially useful to me since it can pull a website from the internet (such as your wordpress blog that is running on your server) and apply your custom styling to it.

And speaking of blogs gives me a lovely link to my next app. TextMate is my default text editor. Now I know what you’re thinking “I already have TextEdit, why do I need another editor”. Well, there are editors and there are editors, and this is the latter. There are countless add ons, it recognises what language you’re writing in (that’s computer language) and has code completion. It does everything I need and more than I will ever use.

My last application is MPEG Streamclip. My digital camera records in plain old MPEG and of course, iMovie only likes more modern formats. So I use MPEG Streamclip to convert my videos into a more iMovie friendly mp4 format. This can be done with many other tools, but this one is not only free, but it is really rather fast when compared to the others.

Well, there are the five apps I’d take to a desert island with me. Hope they’ve been useful to someone.