My Apps

 23.01.2006 -  Louis Kowolowski -  ~3 Minutes

Useful Apps

This is a list of some Apps (and links if they aren’t in the Apple App Store) I find useful (many are available through homebrew’s cask system).

App Store

• Pages/Numbers/Keynote Wordprocessor/Spreadsheet/Presentation: Useful for handling those business tasks that come up.
• Omni Suite Set of tools: OmniGraffle, OmniPlan, OmniOutliner, OmniFocus. All good tools which help with diagrams, resource planning/tracking, outlines, and task management.
• Kindle Sometimes, when you’re reading a technical book, its handy to be able to look at your screen and flip back and forth between something you’re working on, and your book. This makes it easy.
• 1Password Everybody needs a password manager. This one integrates across platforms (Mac/Windows, iOS/Android). Easily creates passwords of differing complexity (not all web forms have the same requirements), and updates when you change the password.
• Airconsole   This is a nifty tool, both the software and hardware. Good when you have to connect to a serial console and you don’t want to tether your device directly.

Homebrew

• Wireshark   Invaludable for digging in to a network dump to figure out exactly what’s going on (apps aren’t communicating, network gear acting strangly, etc)
• Viscosity   OpenVPN client that lets me tunnel traffic, and use a proxy on the remote end dynamically . Also, I can export profiles directly from pfSense, which is nice.
• GeekTool   I use this to keep information updated and displayed on my desktop. Executing scripts, providing my daily “todo"list, even rotating pictures.
• GPG(2)   Encryption is good, even if email sucks
• iTerm2   Started using this before the built-in terminal improved. May or may not still be better.
• Meerkat   SSH tunnel manager (not supported any more, but still works in Yosemite).
• MacTeX   Plain text documents can be easily revisioned. Additionally, I have control over how they look. I can export to PDF and then I know what the other person will see when they look at the document.
• Sketchup   (basic) 3D modeling tool
• VLC   Video file player
• Owncloud   private cloud and replication (not the same as syncing)
• Firefox   Browser
• Dropbox   Handy way to share large files with people
• TorBrowser   Useful for making semi-anonymous connections (want to look at a competitors products w/o alerting them to the fact?)
• RStudio   Fancy interface for working with R scripts
• Xquartz   X11 for OS X
• Skype   There is always somebody that feels the need to talk via skype
• TexShop   Decent editor for *TeX. Offers both edit and preview.
• graphviz  
• ical-buddy  
• imagemagick  
• keybase  
• macvim  
• mtr  
• pandoc  
• sipcalc  
• socat  
• tmux  
• xplanet  
• youtube-dl  
• QuickSilver   I would die w/o this. It makes everything faster and easier. Spotlight search is nice if you are looking for something, or just wanting to launch an app. QS gives you much more, including things like changing songs in iTunes, sending email, opening browser links, etc.

Other

• VMware Fusion   Handy for deploying small test virtual machines
• Fluid   This app allows you to build browser based apps that have a pre-defined URL. You can have dedicated cookie and cache storage as well.
• Bartender   Take control of the icons in your bar. Not all screens are wide enough to have so many icons.
• ExpanDrive   Nice access to remove volumes over protocols like sftp.
• iStat Menus   Keep track of resource consumption in your menu bar (CPU, memory, disk, network, temperature). The date/calendar is also a nice improvement, offering timezones in addition to a full month.
• Lingon   Nice interface for dealing with launchd setup/config, particularly things like specifying when an application or script will get launched
• Little Snitch   I like to keep track of what my apps are doing on the network.