so, having recently got a MacBook Pro from work, I thought I would do as countless others have and write about my experience. however, in the general spirit of this blog, whose raison d’être is to provide that information I found difficult to simply Google, I have limited this post to what I installed to tone down OS X’s “bubbly” personality and streamline my workflow.
this list is not exhaustive. I would welcome any further suggestions to improve my OS X life.
things I changed.
RightZoom: I really don’t understand the reasoning behind the default + button behaviour. install this to turn it into a Maximize/Restore button.
Dock unfucking: everything is run via Spotlight (Cmd+Space) for me. so I unpin everything from the dock, and use it to track what is actually open, which also saves me a load of clutter in the menu bar up above. I also turn off the over-cute magnification, and force applications to minimize into their dock icon, because the little dock previews are generally useless and Exposé does a much better job.
Remove useless menu bar icons: you can get rid of these by Cmd-dragging them off the menu bar. after a while, it all gets too much and starts obscuring your real menus, which is pure shit. use the dock for open apps; that is what it is for.
Keyboard shortcut for opening Finder: sorry, it doesn’t seem to exist. use Cmd+Opt+Space to cheat.
Google Chrome: install AdBlock, keyboard navigation, set up your search engine keywords, and the three-finger down Exposé style tab switching, and you have a far more efficacious experience than Safari.
Growl: unifies all your notifications and almost everything supports it. without this, you get everyone’s idiosyncratic notification UI polluting your desktop, and no centralized control.
The Unarchiver: unpack everything ever. that is all.
Twitter: the latest version lets you set a global hotkey for tweeting. I bound mine to Ctrl+Cmd+Opt+N.
QuickCursor: opens the contents of any edit field in your favourite editor with Ctrl+Cmd+Opt+Enter. I use MacVim, reserving Aquamacs for Lisp stuff.
Terminal: for the love of God, make the Pro theme default, unless you want your favourite ncurses apps to look like total shit, and any colorized command-line output to be nigh-on unreadable.
unDock: if you are on a laptop, this is essential for when you need to close the laptop and move, but you have a lot of peripherals and external drives connected. plays well with Time Machine.
Perian: install. play every movie format ever through QuickTime. easy peasy.
Macfusion: I use this to mount remote SSH drives as local volumes. really essential for working with remote servers.
Tuxera (payware): if you ever have to connect external drives that use NTFS, you need this.
VMWare Fusion (payware): this is really the best way to run Windows apps on Mac. I tried using Wine to run MyLife Organized, my task manager of choice, and it was painful and really a poor experience. the Unity feature in VMWare Fusion makes Windows apps look integrated into the rest of the environment, which is something that they should roll out to every OS ever.
it’s kind of expensive, though, if you are on a budget. get work to buy you a licence.
Fluid: lets you create “real” apps based on web apps, which has the benefit of reducing the zillions of tabs stuffed into one browser window, visibility in the dock, and separate controllability of sessions. I used this for my internet banking, Google Docs, and Google Reader.
Transmission: best ever torrent client. just get it.
TinkerTool: lots of stuff to mess around with here. use with case. I turn off the irritating quarantine warnings for downloaded files.
Google Contact sync: you can sync Address Book with Google Contacts, if you go to Address Book preferences. how do you force a sync though? click the sync icon in the menu bar, and do Sync Now. great for Android users.
Xcode: install this or you will be able to compile approximately nothing without a load of headache. cheapest from the App Store.
Terminal keyboard shortcuts: not so much a change, but a bunch of tips. Cmd+Shift+Double Click will open a URL in Terminal. Fn+Shift+Up/Down will scroll up and down when you are screened. useful for IRC.
gfxCardStatus: tells you whether your MBP is using the integrated graphics or discrete graphics. but more importantly, allows you to force integrated on battery and discrete on power.
GPGTools: makes using GPG less painful by integrating nicely with Mac OS X, offering a reasonable GUI for key signing and retrieval. you might need to forcibly reinstall GPGServices to get the integration just right.
iA Writer: best app ever for writing without frills, especially with the Focus Mode. this has replaced my text editor for general thought dumpage.
Reeder: awesome app for reading Google Reader. things like this convince me that browser-based apps are total shit, and what we really want is integration with online services.
Gitbox: after messing around, I settled on this for a Git GUI. it has a clean interface and good integration with diff tools like Kaleidoscope. it also has nice features like automatically checking the remotes for changes. some people swear by Tower for Git, but I found it a complete eyesore.
Unison: a pretty decent NNTP client. can be a bit messy, but you should see the alternatives.
Google Precipitate: integrates Google Docs with Spotlight.
Soulver: a really nice line-by-line calculator with a dataflow update model (so like a spreadsheet, basically), some unit support and nice percentage handling. I no longer load up the beastly Excel for simple calculations.
Tea Time Widget: a pleasant widget for those arbitrary timer moments.
Loremify Widget: generates Lorem Ipsum text. has a nice button mouse-over thing that lets you pick the amount of text you want, and can do HTML.
Currency Converter Widget: guess.
Mighty Monitor Widget: checks the battery status of whatever Apple Bluetooth devices you use with your Mac.
things I wish I could change.
Scrollbar buttons: they seem pretty pointless, given the multitouch scroll. can I thin the scrollbar and remove the buttons? even better, can I hide the scrollbar except when I’m scrolling?
Closing applications: I just hate that closing the last window on certain non-document-oriented apps doesn’t close the app. why is that?
Cloud Time Machine: I quite like Time Machine. but is there a way to have it backup to a remote service without replacing it altogether? Dolly Drive seems like one way to do this, but I can’t see myself subscribing brashly.
Resource forking: the .DS_Store and __MACOSX or whatever it is folders are just as detestable as Thumbs.db was on Windows. how do I globally disable it, and remove it wherever it is still hanging around?
if you feel like you have developed some idea of my tastes, then I welcome any further suggestions that match.
