The 10 Mac apps you meet in heaven

Verily, I sayeth unto ye, how many apps do you have installed on your Mac and how many of them do you actually use? If you had only a 500mb hard drive (c'mon, some of us have been there!) and you could only fit 10 of todays modern programs on it, which ones would you choose?

Let me set the scene for you a bit, if I may, so as to make the choices more real - your life and the lives of your entire family could depend on your answers. I'll wait here while you digest that dramatic pause...

Ok, so the scenario is that everything is the same as it is today - you have bandwidth, the web, media galore, blah blah blah you spoiled punks get off of my lawn - I remember having a 14400 modem and I was happy to have it, and then in double-ought-one, I got a...

Sorry, let's try again - so everything is the same, except you only have 500mb of space - what do you put on it? Think about that one for a second - browsers, image editors, movie and music players, utilities, screen savers, games and toys - which would be the ones you most desired?

As an end to this verbal water boarding, I will now reveal to you 10 apps that I want to take to California and not be able to marry.

1Password - My love for 1Password is well known and almost embarrassing, in a Lindsey Lohan/ Sam Ronson kind of way. It's simply the best password manager for the Mac. It's iPhone app is revolutionary in how it synchs data, and the browser integration is so vital to my everyday workflow that I feel naked when I use a computer without 1Password installed. Mainly because I am old and can't remember anything anymore.

FireFox - Yeah, yeah. I know Safari is native and seems to be faster, but when it comes to extensibility and getting things done, nothing beats Firefox for me. I meandered toward Flock for awhile, and frankly still open it on occasion if I want to see what new feature they've added, but the good old base FF does it for me. Add a few essential plugins like 1Password (I am truly pathetic, I know), Delicious manager, Aardvark, Better Gmail and BugMeNot and you have the best browsing bargain you've never had to pay for.

VMware Fusion - I was a big-time Parallels fan for a couple of years, but over the summer I converted to Fusion and am not looking back. It starts faster, has smaller VMs, better OSX integration, a superior VM manager and more options for sharing between the host and client OS. Did I mention that it can run Snow Leopard and Windows 7 in a VM?

TweetDeck - I really like Twitterific - it's small, stays out of the way and Hockenberry is an insane developer, but TweetDeck has the features we Twitter fans crave: built-in search, keyword monitoring and grouping capabilities.

Coda - I code all of my sites by hand. By that, I do not mean that I carve them from chunks of balsa, but that I touch every line of code - no gui apps for me. Maybe it's because I am stubborn (or maybe stupid) but I relish the idea of tearing open a 2000 line php script and seeing how it works. I've learned more about html, css, php and javascript from using a text based editor than any book or class, and a damned site more than any fancy $500 web design program could ever teach.

Back to the point, when I need to crack open the code, I reach for Coda. It has syntax highlighting for nearly every language that exists, built-in ftp/ssh capabilities that remember where I am logged into and what files I was last working on, stores code snippets and even has a terminal included within the app itself. The list of things it does goes on and on, but the one thing it does not do is protect you from the beautiful guts of site design. PS: Panic is so high in the pantheon of Mac developers that I almost feel obligated to add Transmit too, but I really don't use it since Coda includes most of my ftp needs.

QuickSilver - for a loooooong time, I resisted QuickSilver. Looking back, I don't know why - again, probably stupidity related. But now I rank QS up there with 1Password - if it isn't installed on a system, I am lost. I use QS so much that my space bar and Apple key perpetually have little worn off spots. With plugins for every other application ever written (ok, most of them) and support for scripting, there is nothing you can't launch, modify or create within just a few keystrokes using QS.

NetNewsWire - I wrote about NNW just recently when I decided that the new iGoogle was pissing me off with it's weird behavior. I had used NNW a few times before but not regularly or in a 'power' fashion. I do now though - I have some 200 feeds added and can scroll through them in a heartbeat, reading news and updates faster than with an online RSS reader, and with offline access to boot. Add to that the iPhone app which syncs with their NewsGator aggregator (online reading too, yep), and NNW is the RSS feed combo to beat.

xPad - Text editors, notepads, to do lists, etc are a dime a dozen. But I want something that stays out of the way, saves automagically and takes virtually no tweaking to run flawlessly. Enter xPad. Now free, it is a small, lightweight but super powerful way to write and store anything from a blog draft to a shopping list. It's almost always open on my system and is a keystroke away from accepting my hot clipboard love, aww yeah.

Cord - Remote access to Windows machines from a Mac - the bane of an IT guys existence. Before, there were only two choices: Microsofts RDC app or to install VNC on your servers. Cord takes those two options to the woodshed (see what I did there?). It supports RDC in a more Mac like interface with the addition of having a connection manager that makes sense, in addition to allowing you to switch between sessions. It's a lifesaver for those of us who frequently have to login to WIndows machines for home or work.

Ecto - As someone who writes for half a dozen different blogs and frequently wants to toss off a quick post, Ecto makes perfect sense. It has a nice interface that keeps track of my different sites, has templating features, supports both wysiwyg and raw html input, manage images well and is extensible with scripts. It supports practically all major blog platforms and can automate so much of what makes blogging a pain that it's well worth the cost.

So there you have it - the 10 apps I can't live without. What are yours? Comment and link below if you'd like.

PS: Don't forget to register your shareware and support small developers - if it's free, donate a few bucks for a beer or coffee!

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