Ideas for a book "OS X On a dime" -- free/open source software for OS X

M

mercmobily

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Hi,

I am about to start working on "OS X On a dime" for Apress. Yes, I am the same Tony Mobily who manages Free Software Magazine (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com).

In the book, I would love to talk about free/open source software that tends to be indispensable if you use OS X.

There are the obvious ones -- Firefox, etc. However... what about less obvious ones? Things like MacJanitor, for example, which are fantastic and usually under-rated!

So, what pieces of software would *you* like to be reviewed in a book about OS X and free software?

Thanks a lot!

Merc.
 
Most definitely CyberDuck (FTP), and it would be nice to mention something from the "gray" area of the internet -- perhaps Transmission (a BitTorrent client), and HandBrake (a video conversion software).

Maybe mention that a lot of open source software available for Windows and Linux also has ports to Mac OS X, like OpenOffice (and the Mac-only port, NeoOffice).
 
Hi,

THANK YOU everybody!!!
This is absolutely fantastic.

If anybody has any more ideas... please let me know!

Merc.
 
Adium (msn/aim chat) inkscape (illustrator replacement) GIMP (photoshop replacement) ffmpegx (video encoding) virtual box (emulation) GPG (encryption) synergy (software sharing of keyboard/mouse)
 
I used almost daily:

TigerLaunch (menu for all applications)
iTerm (better Terminal.app)
JView (image viewer)

Some others:

Emacs.app (for some reason, emacs is better than xemacs in Mac)
MPEG Streamclip
AquaLess
 
TextWrangler is a fantastic text editor. It has many powerful features like regex find/replace, sorting, filtering, and syntax highlighting for a variety of programming languages.

Butler is the first thing I install whenever I have a fresh installation of OS X. It has a slew of features that I feel suffocated without.

Handbrake offers a great combination of ease of use and flexibility. It doesn't have quite as many options as ffmpegX, but it's MUCH easier to work with.

EasyFind provides content-based file search that's more accurate than Spotlight. It's also a lot simpler to use for name-based searching than the Finder's mucked-up Spotlight interface.

RSS Menu is simple and works. That's all I need to be happy with it.

A few other favorites of mine are in my sig.
 
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