Mac OS X Essentials
The hard drive on my MacBook died last week. Which wasn’t a great experience, even though the friendly folks at the local Apple Store managed to get it replaced in under 24 hours, and also replaced the whole top case including the keyboard and trackpad. Which was nice, since the only thing wrong with it was that it was dirty. Nonetheless, I’ve had to spend some time reinstalling all my software. This is a list of the handy little pieces of free software that I use on a regular basis.
- Firefox 2.0
- A far better browser than Safari.
- Camino
- Also a better browser than Safari.
- LiquidCD
- Disk burning and copying software.
- Text Wrangler
- My favourite text editor for Mac OS X.
- Cyberduck
- A nifty little FTP and SFTP client.
- iChax
- A plug-in that adds tabbed browsing in iChat.
- Google Earth
- Maps galore.
- Stellarium
- Planetarium software.
I’m an idiot. Tell me what makes one browser better than another, other than compatibility issues? I use Safari for most everything, except for one message board that I must use Firefox for if I want to post something.
Firefox renders pages faster than Safari, and there are a lot more extensions available for it that make life on the ‘Net a little easier. That’s pretty much it.
Oh, and Safari doesn’t work properly with Gmail.