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I use my mac for something like 3 years now.
There is more and more switchers currently… And people often ask what I’m using.

Keep in mind, this is a work machine, and my work is related to software development.

Here’s a my list, most software are free, unless noted.

General Stuff

• Google Notifier : Pings you when gmail or google calendars events pop up. Works with google for your domain accounts. I just have to think to quit it before sharing your screen during keynotes.
• QuickSilver : a quick launcher or “visual shell”, a quick press on “alt-space” runs applications, call contacts and the like.
• Growl : Display nicely various events sent by other apps.
• iStatMenu : Shows cpu, memory and network usage in the menu bar, useful to launch the activity monitor to kill a task.
• DiskInventoryX : Visually display which files are taking so much space on your pricy disk.
• VMWare Fusion To be able to launch virtual machines of windows and linux. (not free).
• DropBoxA “network drive” useful for sharing files between office/home, between colleagues and between multiple personal machines.

Network apps.

• VPN Tracker: A VPN Client with a nice ui, and works for contacting my office. (not free)
• CyberDuck : Client for FTP, SFTP, S3 protocols and others.
• Transmission: A bitTorrent client, to download your lastest linux distros of course.
• JollyFastVNC : A VNC Client, maybe there is one included with MacOSX, but I keep using this one.
• Skype : Works really well on mac, with the webcam
• Adium : Multi protocol IM client. I’m using iChat for gTalk at home and Adium with a specific configuration at work to be allowed through the firewall.
• EchoFon: Twitter client, with nice mac-style UI, do not eat 95% CPU like others, and have a companion app on the iPhone.

Sounds, Images, Videos…

• iPhoto : I store every photo from my dslr and my iphone inside it. It takes a awful lots of place, but I really enjoy the program.
• Audacity For the rare case where I have to edit sounds, most of the time to send it to the nabaztag @ work.
• Gimp For image editing, not very integrated to the mac platform, need to link to tips and tricks to make it a bit more integrated.
• VLC: Plays every video with no codec to install and mess up your system… like on windows.
• DivX : DivX Codec, only useful to have divx video preview in the finder (and also watch divx in default QuickTime Player)

Browsers

• FireFox My default browser. My current plugins : YSlow, Firebug, EchoFon, CoolIris & JetPack
• Safari Nice and slick, quick, but I’m used to firefox.
• Google Chrome Fast an convenient, for now still in beta on MacOSX, very promising though.
• Opera Used only to make some sort of web tests.

Dev Stuff

• Eclipse, NetBeans and IntelliJ exists on the mac. I use eclipse, too much intoxicated to compile-on-save to switch. You need to change or disable some default system key shortcut to be fluently switch from windows, more on this in another post.
• TextMate Simple text editor (not free)
• Araxis Merge To compare, merge files and directories alike. (not free)
• WireShark Network analyzer, useful to debug web service and network traffic.
• XMind To draw MindMap, not THAT good on printing, but IMHO the best in the free mind map software.
• Subversion Up to date command line subversion client.
• Version Graphical subversion client, not as good as TortoiseSVN. I don’t use it much. (not free)
• Git Up to date command line git client.

Apple released Java SE 6 on MacOSX 10.5.2…. at least…
As most of us already guessed, they have made it available only on the latest MacOS version and on the latest hardware (64bits intel only).

As my team has released a cross platform product, we are stuck with JDK5 for a looooooooonnng time, too bad.

More links :

• Release notes
• Download page

I found Matt Raible post titled “History Meme” fun, here’s mine, on my work macbook pro :

bigwoot:~ jlf$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
125 cd
103 ll
 81 mvn
 60 svn
 32 mate
 14 less
 13 ssh
 11 rm
  6 open
  5 ant

More Maven than svn and of course ant…, mate is TextMate a text editor.

I was very frustrated, so I’m sharing this in case it helps someone using the latest stable Eclipse (3.3.1.1) on MacOSX Leopard.

I have frequent “bus error” crashes (1 out of 5 use of ctrl-shift-t or r) to load file or resource from the classpath…

Due to the crashes and the manual browsing of classes (since open type won’t work) It’s almost impossible to be productive.

The error log (not in Eclipse, it’s in MacOSX Report bug window) looks like :

Current thread (0x005014c0): JavaThread "main" [_thread_in_native, id=-1604722848]
Stack: [0xbf800000,0xc0000000)
Java frames: (J=compiled Java code, j=interpreted, Vv=VM code)
j org.eclipse.swt.internal.carbon.OS.DisposeWindow(I)V+0
j org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Shell.destroyWidget()V+88
J org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget.release(Z)V
v ~RuntimeStub::alignment_frame_return Runtime1 stub
j org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget.dispose()V+23
j org.eclipse.jface.window.Window.close()Z+65
j org.eclipse.jface.dialogs.Dialog.close()Z+26
j org.eclipse.jface.dialogs.TrayDialog.close()Z+12
j org.eclipse.ui.dialogs.FilteredItemsSelectionDialog.close()Z+33
j org.eclipse.jface.dialogs.Dialog.okPressed()V+6

But today I stumbled upon this message from the eclipse mailing list stating that since version 3.4M3 (download link) a fix is available. This fix is not in the main trunk as for now.
I just tested it, and my eclipse looks more stable than ever.

The latest version of MacOSX (Leopard) is out, and despite the fact that it comes out of the box with jdk5, apache maven, Junit and apache ant, there is no jdk6. I just can’t imagine spending my time in front of windows again.
Henry Story is calling for action, so here’s my contribution :

13949712720901ForOSX

More info at Javalobby.

I switched to a pretty MacBook for something like 2 weeks now, I’m still learning how to use MacOSX properly and found my way in most challenges up to now.

But I stumbled upon having the JDK sources inside Eclipse. I mean viewing the source code of the java.lang.String class for instance.
On a windows or linux environment, once you know where to look it’s pretty simple, in the preferences menu inside Java->Installed JREs you have to change the JRE to a JDK. Of course you must have installed the sources when you installed the jdk, but this option is checked by default, so chances are you already have the sources.

But as on MacOSX, if I’m not mistaken, Apple is providing the JDK not Sun directly, you don’t have to install it yourself, it’s already installed for you. Pretty decent. But I couldn’t get a hold on the sources. The solution is pretty simple… they are not there. You have to install yourself the documentation which contains the sources.

1. Quit Eclipse
2. Download & install the JDK documentation which can be found at http://developper.apple.com/java/download.
3. Launch Eclipse.
4. F3 on the first String in your code… Tadaaa

Here you are
Source location can be found locally in your system in /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/src.jar

I didn’t find it myself, thanks to David Gageot for the tip !

I want a mouse like this.
And the companion computer of course…

Update: there is a nice review (with vid�o) of the mighty mouse on Russell Beatie blog. And another one, probably better on Ars Technica since they tested it on a non Macintosh system