Rohit Nair’s Blog

Now that I’ve entered Mac Land, I thought i’d list out my top apps that I use almost regularly. All freeware of course.

1. Quicksilver : Trust Quicksilver to be the first app to be listed on ANY such list. It just is the most useful and amazing app on a Mac. Basically a keyboard app launcher, its has a lot more features that can be customized using some of the many plugins that are available for it.
2. Adium : Adium is the most popular multi protocol chat client on Macs. It supports AIM, Jabber, Yahoo, MSN (in case somebody still uses it) and everything else that you can think of. You can also set the current track playing on iTunes as your status message.
3. iTerm : The terminal on OS X Tiger is pretty basic. Therefore iTerm is not an option, its a must! It has support for tabbed terminals and everything else that you would be familiar with on a normal Linux terminal. If you are a vi/vim user there is this issue of the arrow keys not working for navigation. You could always go back to the original HJKL navigation keys but if not, this is what i did to fix it.
4. VirtueDesktops : Virtual desktops is another feature Tiger does not natively support. Worry not as VirtueDesktops fits the bill perfectly, with Compiz/Beryl like desktop transitions as well.
5. Growl : Growl is a system notifier, and it’s highly customizable. You can set which apps should notify you and when they should do so.
6. SizzlingKeys : This gives you the power to control iTunes without leaving your current app. Plus it notifies and gives details when a new track starts. (Keyboard shortcuts to control iTunes can be set using the iTunes plugin in Quicksilver as well, just make sure you don’t enable both together, especially with the same shortcuts! )
7. Azureus : This not an obvious choice, but in the end i use Azureus because its highly customizable thanks to plugins. SpeedScheduler is one cool plugin with which you can schedule your downloads without staying awake waiting for those unlimited download time slots(BSNL broadband users will love this) It is resource heavy and has a lot of useless and unnecessary stuff in it though.

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Finally got a laptop for work, and man,the wait was surely worth it! A MacBook Pro! With a 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB ram, a 256 MB Nvidia 8600 card, 200 GB hard disk, DVD Writer and so on, the MBP is a beast of a laptop, easily one of the fastest ones around.
Sadly, IT supports only Tiger and thus there’s no multi-touch support, no Spaces, no Boot Camp (Come on!I need Windows to play games and exploit that Nvidia card! Plus to run that useless but indispensable app called Internet Explorer) It’s a bit weird to have just one mouse button but hopefully will get used to that. And although OS X is based on Unix, certain updates do require system restarts.