Pixelmator (and Acorn)

At some point, you want to get started doing photo editing, composition, or even original digital art - definitely more than you can do in Picasa or iPhoto - but you don't want to shell out $600 or more on a current or recent version of Photoshop (the acknowledged standard for professionals). Fortunately there are options. Pixelmator and Acorn.

Both of these programs are fast, effective, powerful enough for anything short of a "pro" workflow, and most of all, because they don't have all of the pro features, cheap. Both also use automator scripting to do repetitive or batch processing. 

Pixelmator looks and feels more like photoshop, with floating palettes for tools, color selection, etc.. Acorn tries to get it all done in one tools window with options that change based on the current tool in use. Acorn also lets you do some very basic editing with a restricted feature set after the trial is over.

The choice is more a matter of personal style, but both are solid products I can highly recommend. 

Update on Wednesday, February 9, 2011 at 11:27PM by Darius Garsys

I've got to note that, with the introduction of the Mac App Store, Pixelmator is now available for an incredible price: $30. When you factor in that this is effectively a family/household license, the deal gets even sweeter. And while no, it's not Photoshop, it is - as this Ars Technica review notes, an absolutely killer program, and one heck of a deal.

Transmit

Transmit from Panic Software is my overall favorite FTP program, used to upload web pages to websites and do large file transfers across the internet. Cyberduck is also worth a look (and free), and Interarchy is also really a good program – though I was forced to stop using it due to unresolved issues (at the time) when accessing windows-based WebDAV servers. They've fixed those problems since. Since I’d already happily used Transmit for many years before that, and it currently fit my needs, I haven’t looked back.

Stellarium

Stellarium is a free "planetarium" program for your computer that allows you to look at the night sky at any given hour, at any given place in the world, at any given time rate, and point out the moon, constellations, planets, and major objects visible to the naked eye and binoculars. Slick, simple, and plain pretty to look at.

Blender

Blender is a 3D modeling, animation, and rendering program with capabilities bordering on the professional (and certainly with features I only wish I had in my Lightwave 7/8 days) that is, nevertheless, absolutely free.

Yes, free. And it runs on a Mac, on Windows, and in Linux. 

Will you get a big career in 3D animation using Blender? Probably not, even if it was used for animatics in Spiderman2. What it will let you do, though, is learn the basics of building models, creating surfaces and textures, and animating your creations without spending thousands of dollars for Modo, Lightwave, 3DSMax, or Maya. I think the "free" price tag (compared to the thousands Lightwave cost when I bought it) and its inherent capabilities combines with the opportunity learn the thought process of 3D modeling more than make up for the learning curve of a new set of tools once you decide that you wish to pursue it further.

Skitch

Skitch is my screenshot software of choice. Not only can you specify and take a snapshot, but you can then mark it up to hilight and point out relevant info, as well as draw mustaches. Then you can upload the results directly from Skitch or conveniently drag it to wherever you need it be it a new email or your desktop.

DropBox

I can't say enough good things about it. Dropbox provides transparent, constant, internet-based backup and synchronization of a folder that remembers previous versions, with a few extras thrown in to allow easy sharing. It works on the Mac, on Windows, on the iPhone, the Android, the web, almost anywhere you can get to the internet. And it starts out free.

But what does this mean?

It means that you get a folder on your computer that acts like any other folder. You can move or copy files in and out just like any other folder. And because it is a local folder, it's just as fast as any other folder on your local hard drive. But this folder has the magical property of being backed up, to the internet, in the background, and that backup is updated every time you make a change. 

And that backup is tied to a user account and login. Add another computer to the account, and anything you move into the dropbox on one computer ends up on the other computer. Or it's now visible via the dropbox app on your iPad or mobile phone.

Or in a pinch, at a friends house, you can log in via the web and download the files that way.

The fact that it does this transparently in the background is awesome enough, but that's not all! Every time you make a change, it keeps the previous versions for the last 30 days - so you can go back and recover that file you deleted or overwrote while on the road.

And that's still not all. You can share any folder in your dropbox with other dropbox users that you specify. Now, anything you move into that subfolder shows up on their computer.

But, you ask, what if they're not on dropbox? Or if I don't want to share a folder with them? Well, there's also a "public" folder. Move or copy a file in there, and right click on it, and select "Copy Public Link". Now send them the link, and they can download the file directly from Dropbox. No need to fiddle around with yousendit, etc. for those occasions something's too big to email.

Dropbox starts free at 2GB of storage, and you can pay for more. You can also refer your friends to get extra free storage for everyone who signs up a new account using your referral link.

And joking aside, it is an outstanding product that they constantly improve to make it faster, smaller, and more reliable than it already is. I evangelize it every day, and I keep all of my "current project" files within my dropbox folder. If I lose my laptop away from home, I'll be able to recover all my current stuff up to my last internet connection, and anything older is archived to other backups anyway.

TextWrangler and BBEdit (and TextMate too)

Ahhh, text editors. All of these are designed from the ground up to handle text, and specifically, write computer code and web pages, with syntax highlighting and color coding to make it easier to tell what's going on.

TextWrangler is the free little brother to BBEdit and replaced BBEdit Lite. It is so powerful that it’s almost hard to justify paying for a full-blown editor until you are heavily involved in coding on a regular basis and really need some of the power-user features like code block folding, macros, and snippets that BBEdit and TextMate provide. File comparisons and graceful handling of large files also make the Bare Bones editors hands down winners compared to TextMate.

 I've used TextWrangler for years, but use BBEdit now. I own TextMate, really like it, and used it as my primary editor for a couple years, but it chokes on large files and hasn't had any significant work done on it in a while to cover some of the odder quirks or oversights in an otherwise beautiful 1.0 release. Textmate 2 has been "coming someday" for quite some time now.

That said, TextMate is also much cheaper than BBEdit, and with TextWrangler to handle a prettier GUI-based file comparison when needed, can handle almost anything most people will throw at it. It's more a matter of taste and style - much like the war between the also free and extremely powerful Vim and Emacs editors (also available in Linux) which I don't use because at this point in my life, I don't want to learn all the commands of yet another text editor until I have to. 

Play with all of the free ones, and even try the trials on the paid ones. Then settle in and really learn and get comfortable in one and stick with it as much as possible unless something truly new comes around. You'll end up having to learn other editors and development environments (Xcode, Eclipse, etc.) often enough as it is, there's no point in deliberately making your life more difficult.

Scrivener

My all-time favorite program for writing and research projects. It's light on formatting and layout features, but doesn't care. What it's meant for is writing, writing, and more writing. And organizing that writing (as well as all the background info and research you accumilated, and characters, and...) in a clear, concise, effortless way. It also has export formats in place for screenplays.

Give it a shot. If you like the minimalist writing approach without the research and filing features, then also check out Writeroom.

Growl

Growl is a notification tool that puts little unobtrusive message bubbles on your screen to let you know what's happening in the background.  It doesn’t work with many of Apple’s built-in apps, but does work with a number of third-party programs and extensions. These include file transfer programs like Transmit, instant messaging programs like Adium and Yahoo, dashboard widgets like eBay watcher, and many Mac twitter apps. This can be when an upload or download is complete (Transmit), when a new IM message comes in (Adium), or when your plugged-in status on your laptop changes (Unplugged).

Google Chrome

This Windows and Mac (Intel-only) browser is incredibly fast, incredibly lightweight, somewhat more secure than IE for Windows, and better than Safari when it comes to juggling multiple google logins to different domains. I recommend it to any Windows client who doesn't have to use Internet Explorer due to banking or other access requirements - and in many cases those people use Chrome for everything else. 

While I still prefer to use Safari on the Mac due to the bookmark synching and a slight aesthetic preference - I often turn to Chrome.

Chrome is available from google at: www.google.com/chrome

Adium

Adium is a chat client for the Mac that can handle almost any messaging network in existence. While it doesn't provide some features (say, video chat) and I've yet to find ANY Mac AOL client that gracefully deals with AOL chatrooms, this has completely taken over for iChat. The times I'm using iChat it's for screen sharing or video chatting (and Skype has been cutting into that somewhat).

OpenDNS

openDNS is a company who's purpose is to replace the sometimes flaky DNS service that comes with your ISP (Hi, Comcast!) and provide an alternate means to look up addresses on the internet. This means that every time you try to look up www.apple.com, their computer takes the web address and sends back the numerical address, much like looking up phone numbers in a phonebook by name.

The side benefit of this is that with openDNS, you can also specify corrections of typos, define what kind of websites you don't want visited from your household or office, and specify what exceptions you want to allow, because they control what computer you connect to when you ask for a website.

Specifying what you want to block follows the same categories used in many common filtering apps, and the logs give you a nice list of sites that have been denied. What it doesn't do is let you know who in your network made the request, give you a weight for how strict to be within a category, or let you see what sites have been visited that were not blocked.

I can deal with those weaknesses, as it simplifies my computer setup and makes it a little more difficult for the kids to work around the restraints (I still make sure I eyeball their activity and computers on a regular basis). It has one other "plus" - the instructions. They have excellent documentation that should go a long way in helping you set up your router or computer to use their DNS servers as well as tracking changes in the IP address your ISP hands you.

Best of all, it's "free."

1Password

Now available for the Mac and Windows, 1Password from Agile Web Solutions has earned a space on my drive. While I still use Little Secrets for a lot of miscellaneous information, 1Password shines in its ability to interface with multiple browsers and provide you with a convenient menu of applicable logins for the vast majority of sites including google, yahoo, logmein, and many banking sites. One click, or a command-\ and you're logged in.

Mail Act-On and MailTags

A pair of extensions for Apple's built in Mail application from InDev software. Act-On allows you to use keyboard shortcuts to redirect your current or selected mail via a set of custom rules. In my case I use it to file away several common general categories of mail, flag them or not based on whether I need to see it again (with a smart folder to view flagged mail), and forward them if needed, all in one easy step.

MailTags stands alone - allowing you to tag your mail much like Google Mail, letting you search for (or create smart folders to find)  mail based on key words that you specify, including useful presets like "Waiting" (for reply). It also allows you to append notes to your mail messages.

Of the two, Act-On is the most useful, and a strong recommendation.