Vital software. Recommendations from a Macintosh enthusiast

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.

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.

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). Since I have chosen for LaTeX I am not going to pursue this.

Local data-management: I am not exactly sure about its powers and functionality, but Webmin seems deeply helpful to manage whatever can be done with what is on my local discs.

English ThesaurusOnline: Nisus Thesaurus: great, 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 Techtracker, who send you a weekly email with downloadable new software.