OSX Apps I Can't Live Without
Frabjous day - I have a new laptop. I'd been waiting for ages for the next model of MacBook Air to be released, so I pounced at the weekend. And I think that makes it time for the geekblogger's favourite: the "OSX Apps I Install First" list. I'll avoid the obvious ones like Chrome, Spotify, Dropbox & XCode, and skip straight to the meat. Hopefully there's something here you haven't heard of before that you can try...
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Do you like Terminal, Spotlight or Chrome's universal search feature? Then Alfred is for you. It's a fast app-launcher, file-finder & web-searcher that's absolutely the first thing I put on every Mac. More flexible than Spotlight, faster than QSB and currently thriving (unlike the almost-zombie Quicksilver), I can't recommend it enough.
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We were burgled last year. My laptop - my working life - was taken. I had Time Machine backups, and I got lucky (they didn't steal my external hard drive) so I got it all back. But never again will I risk my music & my photos1 on the laziness of thieves.
In the weeks following the burglary I tried several off-site backup solutions2. BackBlaze is the bee's knees. It's written by ex-Apple employees, and it shows. Actually, it hides. It just sits quietly in the background ensuring that my data's always backed up to a second country. It also does second duty as a poor man's version control system, and third duty as a find-if-stolen service. But it's absolutely, 100% worth the price of a latte a month. Get it.
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I'm not a graphic designer. I'll never be a graphic designer. So I can't tell you exactly how Pixelmator compares to Photoshop. I can tell you that it does more than everything I need, it's about 95% cheaper than Photoshop, and it's one of the most polished pieces of software I've ever used.
My 'hobby' iPad app, Time for Tea, was designed in Pixelmator and I think the result is pretty good (for a non-graphic designer):
(That's the current peak of my design skills. Any shortcomings are mine, not Pixelmator's.)