Flawless software. Recommendations from a Macintosh enthusiast, update

I am not mentioning bigger apps that my computer life depends on

and that work flawlessly too, like MS Excel, Camino (replaced Firefox, on Arno’s advise. Thanks!), Safari, Preview, Mail, Interarchy, Adobe Reader, Terminal, GraphicConvertor, NetNewsWireLite, iTunes, TexShop, MicroSoft PowerPoint, Calculator, ScriptEditor, FileMakerPro 8, and Chronosync. These are all five-star apps.
There are also a lot of applications on my computer that I have used at one time, but fully neglect nowadays for obvious reasons. Apart from MS Word and Internet Explorer, I shall not name these.

Like the previous time,

I am not going to explain exactly why and how I use these applications, but ask you to take my word for their great strength. I have in almost all cases tried out many of the available alternatives, and picked the ones mentioned below for their ease of use, their power, and most importantly: for their doing their job as expected.

iTunes iPod-scripts enable me to pluck tunes from the iPod.

To show yourself what IP-address your computer is working from, I use IP in menu bar, which provides the IP-address in the menu.

Today I heard there is a solution for the winmail.dat files that MS Windows’ MS Outlook turns its mail attachments into—and which cannot be opened by normal earthlings like myself: TNEF’s Enough.app.

Audio-video apps

I am converting all sorts of audio and video files of late. There is lot of Open Source software around for this.
Unrar.app unpacks .rar files.
xACT.app unpacks a lot of the other formats.
To view video files, I use VLC.app.
To synchronise subtitle-files with avi-movies (or other formats), I use an impressive and impressively simple app, SubSyncX.app.
Sometimes it is difficult to add the subtitles to a movie. VLC.app (which is great for viewing) does not help. djoPlayer.app does!!
To view series of pictures, such as scans of Manga novels: CocoViewX.app

These I may start using as soon as I found out how they work:

ffmpegX.app (it is based on Unix apps, and is supposed to be able to convert all sorts of video formats into each other, but I haven’t succeeded yet).

Internet-stuff

With Enkoder.app I encode my mailto: links in my websites so as to prevent spam-bots from using the addresses. It looks good but I am not sure whether it is doing me any good. It is my procmail spam-filters that keep the spam away.

To automatically turn a web-address into a link to past into HTML-pages, I use BlogAssist, which provides an icon with a menu in the menu bar.

I recently installed a JavaScript that prints a footnotes-list of all the links on particular page (when it is printed), and adds footnote reference numbers to the text where the links appear: footnoteLinks (by Aaron Gustafson). Works great; took me some time to install though.

Stuff that looks interesting

I have downloaded and installed Flock.app, which is a webserver that somehow has me share my bookmarks over the internet, but I haven’t found out how to do it. It looks interesting though.

Older recomendations that still hold

iPod ripping: It took a while before I found out how to extract songs from my iPod. There are several small applications, often freeware, available on the internet, but they have their drawbacks. For instance, Robs iPod Exporter does not, by far, show all the songs that are on the iPod. Apparently, the solution was available a long time already, small, elegant and efficient: iPod tracks. It is a set of AppleScript scripts, with an installer, that allows you to extract single tunes, groups of tunes or the whole set, to whatever place on your harddisk you want.

Batch renaming: With Renamer4Mac (a cocoa application) I can rename a whole bunch of files in one go! That is, without using the Terminal.

I haven’t used this one for long: XHTML-code checking: I now check the code of my website in amaya, a browser developed by the W3C-institute, working under OS X’s X11. This is not a normal browser, but one which checks your code, and does a better job at this than W3C’s online validator.

Unix software installer: To install amaya, I used FinkCommander, a cocoa application, based on Fink, which updates all things Unix available to Terminal, and elsewhere.

Weblogging: My weblogging software still is: Blosxom and Blapp.
Maintenance, until recenly I did by hand, until I found out that Blapp can upload changed blog-entries without changing their date to today. In fact, you can ask it to merely add a few seconds to its old last-modification date. This works only if you edit your entries in Blabb, but that is okay.

HTML-editing: BBEdit, still the best.

MySQL and php: I am trying to apply MySQL and PHP to my websites, starting from tips from Dutch magazine, MacFan. For the small database I have set up, this works fine. The challenge, of course, is to make it work for a complex site and produce real interactivity. It is a bit too early to decide, but I’ll be back.
“The PHP Function Index (PHPfi) is a simple browser to quickly look up any PHP function.” Works great; provides examples, explains all php commands in clear language. Beautiful cocoa interface.
The MySQL-databases I manipulate with phpMyAdmin and/or CocoaMySQL both open source from sourceforge.

PostgreSQL: ICT colleagues who are in the know have presently advised me to switch to PostgreSQL, on account of that software being more dependable, and “cutting less corners”. I made the switch, but unfortunately got nowhere. What doesn’t help either is the absence of cocoa-software. Any help appreciated.

Other helpers with web-building: To decide about the colors of my websites:
DigitalColor Meter
4096 Color Wheel
And, of course, DigitalColorMeter, one of Mac OS X’s utilities, which helps me pick the finest colours off anything on my screen.
Apache (webserver, both local and online): very flexible and utterly stable
Interarchy (to automatically mirror my websites between local and online). (commercial, dependable)

Terminal: Learning the power of the Terminal every day. It is addictive. A book recommendation: O’Reilly’s “Unix Power Tools”. Brilliant, helpful.
I use htpasswd to lock certain folders on my website; this is managed in Terminal.

Alternative for MS Word: My present research project is written in LaTeX from day one. Again, perfect software! And BibTeX for the bibliographical stuff. (I wrote a short script in Terminal (tcsh) that converts my bibliography from TeX to XHTML and puts it someplace in my web-directory, where I can show it to myself all around the world).
I have just installed OpenOffice.org (like Amaya an X11-app), but haven’t tested it. It looks good at first sight.
Now, there is also NeoOfficeJ, which has a rather Windows-kind of feel, but seems to be able to achieve everything Word can (and maybe even more).
This is a great Online English Thesaurus: Nisus Thesaurus: very helpful.

BTW, Did I tell you that all of this (apart from BBEdit and Interarchy) is Open Source, free software? Most of this I get through Versiontracker, who send you a weekly email with downloadable new software.