A list my ten most used applications, roughly in order of use:
1: Safari.
Internet browser. I know Firefox is cool, and I really like some of the plug-ins available for it - greasemonkey and adblock come readily to mind. But, on the Mac, safari is still my favorite browser.
2: Mail.
Email. It just does email, but it does it well. I really like the rule-based filters. I have a list of nine filters that evaluates incoming mail and highlights some mail based certain criteria, filters all incoming mail through a white list, then a black list, and then a Bayesian filter looking for junk. the result is that the mail I want to see quickly is highlighted, and the mail I don’t want to see I don’t.
3: NetNewsWire Lite.
RSS reader. In my humble opinion, the best free RSS reader for OSX if you have subscribed to lots of feeds. Like, several hundred.
4: Adium.
Multi-Protocol IM client. My parents use Yahoo!, everybody else uses AIM. (except Justin Bodeutsch, who uses GTalk). With Adium I can talk to all of them from one program. Adium is built on GAIM, which is available for Linux and Windows users.
5: iTunes.
Music Player.
6: Aperture
Apple’s Professional (and Prosumer) Photo organization application. Aperture handles 10,000 images as gracefully as 100. It shines when I import 200 photos and want to quickly drill down to the ten best shots. Aperture does basic editing tasks - say, 80% of my editing needs - but it is primarily about sorting and managing a photo library.
7: Photoshop CS2
Photo / Image editor. I use it for all serious image editing, with one exception. When prepping .png’s for the web, I typically turn to Macromedia’s Fireworks.
8: Cyberduck.
FTP. It’s free, it works.
9: Textwrangler.
Text editor. Not to be confused with “word processor” if I am writing a paper, I use Word (like most everyone else), but for writing or editing code for this website, or even for drafting posts (like right now) I turn to TextWrangler. It’s also Free.
10: Delicious Library.
I have a few books. Okay, more than a few - enough, in fact, that organization is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. I use Delicious Library. When I get a new book, I open the program and hold the bar code up to my webcam. Delicious Library scans the barcode and grabs all the information about the book off from Amazon.com’s servers - including a cover image. Cool, indeed.
Concluding observations: Most of the programs I use most often either came with my computer (Safari, Mail, iTunes) or are free (Adium, NetNewswire Lite, Cyberduck, Textwrangler). I think that’s interesting, and probably not uncommon - even amongst people who have the big dollar programs.
What are your 10 most used applications? don’t forget to specify whether you use OSX, Linux, Or Windows
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