Bryan’s Big List-o-Crap: Mac Edition

Adium
This is my IM client of choice. I know some people use Trillian now that a decent Mac version is out there, but fuck them.
What’s Great About it: It handles the more popular IMs, and the less popular. Even does Skype. You can extend it through an ‘xtras’ system, and you can apply a lot of looks to it. It’s pretty light, even for an IM client.
What Sucks About it: It doesn’t seem to play that well with a lot of enterprise proxy servers, though I’ve read it’s improved. Where I work is more locked down, and it’s SUPPOSED to be blocked, so I have no update there.

Adobe Creative Suite 5.5
This is obvious enough, but it’s here so just read and shit. Primarily, I use Photoshop, Dreamweaver and when I can… After Effects.
What’s Great About it: Well, the newest version adds more cool crap that I never use… mostly I just got it for the few things I’d been waiting for. Adobe Audition for Mac, Photoshop for 64-bit Mac improvement, iPad/iOS settings and stuff, but really the last version was the big update. In reality, I’ve been using this stuff less lately, and I have a long list of app-specific stuff I’d share, I’ll probably just do an edition for some of that later.
What Sucks About it: Dreamweaver. For that matter, Flash. The improvements made seem to be for everyone but who used the products before. Dreamweaver is more buggy now, doesn’t support proxy servers worth a damn, and worst of all the Adobe Updater has a lot of problems requiring manual updates. It’s a disappointment. Adobe Acrobat is still the most senselessly bloated piece of office software you can buy.

Adobe Kuler
This is a great little Adobe Air app that lets you explore color palettes and crap. It’s great, you can find one color, or a couple you’d like to base yours on, then explore what others have done that include your colors. You can also just browse newest, high rated, and others. You can just download the swatches and import them into your Adobe apps.
What’s Great About it: I just fucking told you stupid.
What Sucks About it: Really, this is more for the Creative Suite thing… why the fuck does Adobe hate it’s users? The short version is, once again, they are breaking some way of hooking into their apps, and it breaks a few things for Kuler. I really hate this shit, because once again Adobe has gone out and created this way of hooking into it’s apps that has a very short shelf-life. They did this with the extensions for Flash/Dreamweaver… it was all but removed once they took over. Anyway, it just seems like these extensible solutions are short-sighted, or just the flavor of the week over there. I don’t like this app being broken, it creates for a stupid manual process that shouldn’t be required to get full use of the thing. I wrote this without thinking it through, or re-reading it.

Air Video Server
So this is the companion for a great iOS app, Air Video. Anyway, get a video in any format your Mac can play, and Air Video Server will convert it on-the-fly to iOS-friendly video. This is really great if you have a ton of DivX formatted stuff, or you d/l stuff you haven’t converted yet or even (in my case) if you have a ton of 720p (or higher) that just isn’t bandwidth/wireless friendly. Works well for devices on 3G, accessible from the web and all that fancy shit. Just tell it where you want to be able to access movies, and you can browse folder structure, resume videos and stuff like that.
What’s Great About it: Uh… that stuff. Maybe I should rethink the organization of these entries. Oh, it’s free too (the server part). You can also setup conversions from the client software, so that the file will be converted already for future plays.
What Sucks About it: I wish you could set access on a per-share basis, or passwords and stuff like that. It really could use a client/internet management component, so that you could make changes to the server-side settings with a OS account user/pass.

AirPrintHacktivator
What’s Great About it: Hey, you know that great print-from-your-iOS-device feature that pretty much nobody you know actually owns a compatible printer for? Yeah, fuck that. This is the fix. It creates a compatible printer for your devices, using your printer that you know and love.
What Sucks About it: That you have to have a machine up and running all the time for this to work. I just run it on the media server, and it handles it. What really sucks about it, is that it has to exist.

Aperture
Pretty damn good photo management.
What’s Great About it: I like that it’s somewhat easy to manage multiple libraries, and that it will handle it’s own backups directly from the app, on a per-library basis. The basic editor is really just for quick-cleanup kind of actions, but it works pretty well for most functions, and there ore a lot of plugins out there that bring a lot more to these tools. Stability has been MUCH improved over previous versions.
What Sucks About it: I really don’t like the organization approach. I’ve gotten used to it, but it’s different than the OS, or most of the other tools that I use. It’s like there was too much work put into making it act like physical boxes and albums, and not thinking about what works best for digital management. Just my take on it.

AppFresh
Keep your Apps up to date.
What’s Great About it: This will monitor your non-Apple applications for updates.This helps with those apps you don’t open all of the damn time, and hate dealing with updates only when you launch them.
What Sucks About it: Of course you either have to run it at login, or launch it… so it’s like a launch one to keep from launching the individuals. With the App store on Mac now, it’s less necessary for a lot of apps.

AppTrap
Keep your damn computer cleaner
What’s Great About it: drag an app to the trash (or uninstall it) and AppTrap will ask you about all of the other bullshit left behind.
What Sucks About it: It’s not obvious enough what you should do when doing a software upgrade.

Audio Hijack Pro
Audio, and Hijacking. A great way to get the audio for something without a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
What’s Great About it: You can capture an isolated source, even with other shit going on. You can be watching a movie in Quicktime and capture audio on the input port, or from a browser window without fucking things up.
What Sucks About it: The need to restart a target app is pretty damn annoying. The additional install for capturing is kinda stupid as well.

Automator
So what if it comes with your Mac… don’t discount this important little bit of software.
What’s Great About it: Make your Mac do all kinds of cool shit automatically, simplify complex tasks, do batch renames and file actions with far less effort. This thing is great.
What Sucks About it: It’s not as obvious as it could be for simple use, and it really should be tied to some kind of repository of extensions for third-party apps, or more advanced examples. Finding these on your own can be a pain in the butt hole.

Axure Pro
This is a wire framing tool for Information Architecture/User Experience design.
What’s Great About it: Wireframing it handles pretty well, but it’s dynamic panels and user interactions for prototyping where this thing is really great. You can draw out simple shapes, buttons and text, and point-click your way through expanding menus, page actions and all kinds of crap, without doing any scripting or code. Think of it as wire framing meets FrontPage without all of the bloated suck. I use this tool a great deal to communicate what I want a page to DO, for designers, clients and people with no clue what the fuck is going on.
What Sucks About it: Copy/Paste is kinda stupid, the object libraries are really clunky and have shit support from the planet at large, I don’t like the drawing tools and the app is designed for more technical people. It’s funny, I think the application needs a good IA person to go through it. I’d like to see a more Mac-centric version of it.

Bosco’s Screen Share 3
What’s Great About it: Cross-browser screen sharing, pretty simple.
What Sucks About it: You do have to walk the person on the other side through this crap, which if you are being forced to screen-share with them, chances are, they are a pain the ass to walk through anything anyway.

CamTwist
Your iSight camera, only better.
What’s Great About it: Camera control, effects that can be layered, you can switch to your desktop, view movies or whatever.
What Sucks About it: The controls are goofy, and it’s hard to do this while you are using it, or screen casting or something.

CandyBar
Liven up your Mac with some control over how things look.
What’s Great About it: It’s pretty easy to change all of your icons, theme things, save different themes and crap like that. A lot of this can be done manually, but CandyBar makes this simple, and even allows you to organize all of your icons and crap.
What Sucks About it: I get a lot of compatibility alerts and goofy claims of logout/in/restart kinda shit that just aren’t true. Maybe there is an update I should be doing, but fuckit… it works.

Celestia
Space.
What’s Great About it: A shit-ton of information and objects for space. You can even add in new shit, far away shit, fake shit, Sci-Fi shit… neato. You can plot courses to and from different shit in the app too.
What Sucks About it: It’s absolutely not simple to use, and there is no valid reason for it. I’d also like it very much if the 3D was higher quality than it is, there certainly seems to be a lot better available in the open-source universe.

Coda
Simple(ish) coding app, not bloated, all the tools needed.
What’s Great About it: It does what it should, and seems to be written for what you are doing with it (and not for workflow or some other marketing fueled bullshit.
What Sucks About it: It would be nice (without going crazy) if there was some great project management in there. It really makes it easier when you go back to something you haven’t worked on in forever. This is (unfortunately) why I can’t seem to step away from Dreamweaver.

Cyberduck
FTP client of greatness.
What’s Great About it: I personally like this FTP client better than the much more popular Transmit. I like the resume/reload features, and prefer the way favorites are managed.
What Sucks About it: Could be a little more Mac-like, the sweet-spot is probably between Transmit and Cyberduck in design.

Deeper
OS Tweaking and customization that Apple didn’t want you to do.
What’s Great About it: Change visual effects for performance and crap, enable some that you don’t currently have (animated background anyone?), tweaks for Finder like always viewing hidden files/folders, tweak up the dock, change the background at boot, disk utility… it’s great.
What Sucks About it: Now that it’s updated for Lion… none.

Drive Genius 3 Disk management, only geniusier.
What’s Great About it: Better scans of problem discs, better formatting options capabilities. Good basic repair stuff too.
What Sucks About it: It’s really just a step or two farther than the built in utility. Obviously it does more, but it’s not really the incredible solution that it’s painted up to be.

Dropbox
File-sync and such
What’s Great About it: Free, works well and shit
What Sucks About it: The privacy stuff is slightly questionable, but fuck it.

Evernote
Mind Mapping, or organizational tool or whatever.
What’s Great About it: Whatever they are calling it, I call it a nice cross-platform organization tool. Great text recognition from photos or whatever. Dump audio, images, text, create to-do lists… this is my go-to note taking tool, and the place I have a lot of history in for notes like this. Search works really well since all images have been through the text recognition engine.
What Sucks About it: A few note composing features aren’t supported on iOS, and it annoys me.

Final Cut Pro
Video Editing Goodness
What’s Great About it: I’ll probably do this on it’s own, or with video software one day. There are any number of sites that will say what’s great about it.
What Sucks About it: Final Cut X.

Flip4Mac
WMV files on your Mac
What’s Great About it: Extends Quicktime player, so playback is familiar.
What Sucks About it: A bit slow, reading the file into Quicktime can be very slow if it’s large. In “open-with” menus, Flip4Mac is treated like it’s own application, even though your file will open in Quicktime. It can be annoying.

FontExplorer X Pro Font Management
What’s Great About it: This application will keep your laptop from being a boat anchor when the OS tries to load 6,000 fonts on startup.
What Sucks About it: I’ve never been fond of the defaults when importing new fonts, or activating fonts outside the libraries. I’ve also found that it seems to introduce as many font conflicts as it’s able to resolve.

GeekTool
Lots of neat on your desktop
What’s Great About it: Think of it as your OSX dashboard, only more customizable, and running on your wallpaper.
What Sucks About it: It’s a bit clunky to learn to do your own customizations. Be prepared to script if you want anything other than exactly what someone else has made.

Handbrake
Video Ripping. Awesome.
What’s Great About it: Rip DVDs, transcode and make things all happy for h264 destined media sources (and some other legacy stuff). Batch conversions. CLI makes this thing super awesome. Scriptable batching with CLI.
What Sucks About it: I’d like to be able to do batch conversions from the GUI, and would love it if the crew creating Handbrake could trouble themselves with some really well thought out Automator actions.

iPhone Backup Extractor
Extract stuff from your iPhone stuff.
What’s Great About it: It’s pretty easy to use. Point it at the backups of your iOS device, and pull any one or several files out of the backup as needed.
What Sucks About it: This shouldn’t require third-party software to do easily.

iTunes-LAME
LAME encoder with easy iTunes integration.
What’s Great About it: Makes it reasonably easy to do high quality encoding from iTunes using playlists.
What Sucks About it: Seems like if you want to make a GUI version of a command line tool, you should commit to GUI controls. This one still requires you to input your switches and options into a form field. Pretty easy to learn from the help though.

Join.me
Remote screen viewing/control
What’s Great About it: cross-platform and web based. This is easy to use, and requires very little from the end-user. It’s free too.
What Sucks About it: It won’t slap the user on the other side for you.

MAMP/MAMP Pro
Dev environment for your Mac
What’s Great About it: Easy to use Apache/mySQL/PHP server.
What Sucks About it: It uses enough resources that you may not want to leave it enabled all of the time. It’s definitely mostly low resource usage stuff, but it’s not NO resources.

ManyCam
iSight/Webcam control
What’s Great About it: Control multiple camera sources while chatting/broadcasting. Includes watermark/image overlay, desktop view and more.
What Sucks About it: It’s not very Mac-like.

MenuMeters
menu bar management for your system resources and tasks
What’s Great About it: Simple views of system resources like memory and processor usage. Makes sense out of multi-core processors without showing too much crap (I’ve got my dual quad showing as a single percentage). I find iStat to be too much crap to look at (though it is MUCH better looking). I also found that iStat didn’t handle 8-cores elegantly when i7 quad Macbook Pros first came out.
What Sucks About it: It’s a bit clunky, and some of the minimalistic indicators are too generic.

MetaX
Meta tag management for media files
What’s Great About it: Easily batch write tags for a bunch of video or audio files, manage extended meta tags and crap.
What Sucks About it: It’s a little clunky for sequential files. Software speed doesn’t seem to be as fast as it could be.

Monolingual
Optimization utility
What’s Great About it: Remove the languages you aren’t using from your Mac. Get some space back, remove a bit of bloat.
What Sucks About it: It’s slow, but I’m sure it’s unavoidably slow.

OmniGraffle Professional
Wireframing/organization
What’s Great About it: Mac-like wireframing and organizational tool. Great interface, good tools, great library and a lot of third party content. It’s like Visio, only not.
What Sucks About it: Some of the snapping and auto-alignment stuff can be super annoying, but I think I’ve gotten used to it over the years.

Onyx
Maintenance Utility
What’s Great About it: Lots of maintenance and problem solving here. The go-to box for a slow Mac, or a problematic boot environment. Start here, run every script you can find. Return to business as usual.
What Sucks About it: Better status while actually doing stuff would be nice, and I’d like it if it did the unnecessary defrag that I rely on Drive Genius 3 for.

@Larkitect 47753 wrote:

RE: gfx
my wife’s windows laptop just died a few weeks ago so i got to upgrade my MacBook and give her the old one. installed gfx by default. good to know i don’t need it anymore. i’m pleasantly surprised by these AMD graphics chips.

Well, apparently it’s been updated for Lion and may still be useful, if not necessary. The one thing you can’t do on Lion is see what you are currently using (you can guess from battery estimates, but that’s fucking stupid, yo!) and still set it to each dedicated mode, as well as the dynamic mode.

So maybe it’s worth using it still. I may install it and compare how I use it to the built-in dynamic crap and see if I have a real preference.

I’m going to add to this to say that apparently I had not updated it while I still had my laptop at Study Island, because there are some cool new features that the last version I had did not support. -Like power source based switching. Yeah, that’s something I could have used on the last machine I had. Set it to discreet for plugged in, and dynamic on battery power. I also like that you can use the menubar icon to tell you which mode you are currently in. Nice.