#Osx

Past posts have probably nailed me by this point as a huge fan of Ruby on Rails and the Ruby language in particular.

While I think a huge mythology now surrounds how much more productive it makes you which causes difficulty in separating the hype from reality, my personal experience has made me a raver about it in terms of just getting things done. In one (ok, mostly sleepless) weekend, I managed to get up a canvassing and get out the vote application, web enabled across the internet that was used successfully and to great effect in a Canadian federal leadership campaign (and the person ran rings around the other candidate partly because of its contribution). The party in question had been unable in several years of trying to accomplish the same thing.

I mentioned the quick Applescript I hacked together](http://blog.wakatara.com/2005/10/10/vienna-rss-reader-and-news-aggregator-for-osx/ ) the other day to allow the superb and free Vienna rss reader and aggregator by Steve Palmer to work with my fave blogging app, MarsEdit.

Steve posted it up and in no time flat Graeme West tweaked it a bit and made it even better with attribution and block quoting. You can find his tweak here (nicely done Graeme).

I made a super minor mod to them to fit my style and am using it already myself.

I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about the software ecosystem on OSX, so I’m always surprised when someone points me at a program I’ve never heard about before, particularly when it’s better than what I’m already using.

Vienna 2.0 , the free, open source news aggregator and rss reader from Steve Palmer is fantastic. I’ve said how much I like Ranchero’s NewsGator’s NetNewsWire before, but it has been bogging down with the volume of news I’ve been looking at lately and getting slow, particularly using functions like “Mark All as Read” which sends my hard drive spinning and slows down the rest of the system. It is also commercial, and while reasonably priced for the professional version (particularly when bundled with the MarsEdit blogging program), I still prefer my programs open source and free in principle whenever possible.

I’m really surprised at how few things have broken since moving to Tiger. I was relaly expecting it to be much more jarring and for a lot more things to have problems, but with a few exceptions things have been unbelievably smooth.

Quicksilver, one of my favourite apps seems to be having a bit of trouble and even an update today seems not to have fixed it. MenuCalendar as well though it’s more a nice to have than a need to have.

(posted via a Dashboard widget no less!)

OK, so at this point you could probably slap an i in front of anything with an Apple logo and I’d buy it, but I did go out 15 minutes after it was possible to get a retail version of tiger and plunk down the cash for the install.

Due to family obligations, I didn’t get to install it until late last night (after backing up to my very handy iPod) and Tiger installed things in the usual effortless way that Apple seems to excel in, while I played Monopoly against my nephew.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from friends again about what I’m using on OSX. A friend just had to switch over to a government provided Powerbook (yes, I hate her), I managed to switch several other friends to Firefox on a bunch of platforms, and another friend is thinking of retiring her ailing NT laptop for a shiny new iBook.

So, thought I’d better update the previous list , flesh it out, and structure it a little. Only desktop apps. If I’ve missed any categories or there is other stuff you think I should have in there (or apps I should know about), please let me know. Virtually all this software is free or open source.

I was kind of sad to read the review of the latest Carmen Sandiago game this morning.

First off, I remember the original game, Where in the World is Carman Sandiego ? from Brøderbund which I thought was a fantastic platform for teaching kids geography.

It was great fun and educational. It was not just a “memorize the capitals” flashcard type thing, but taught you some details about the country and culture there and allowed you to use deductive reasoning to figure things out. It also taught you the value of researching, going and looking up something, and in a lot of ways, was an inspired title educationally. You’d use the clues, research and storyline to determine where Carmen had escaped to in the world and then track her down there and recover the artifacts. OK, it was never that big a challenge to me (I am scarily good at world geography) but after having an adult last month ask me where exactly the Netherlands were, I definitely think that some people could use it even now. The things I loved about it were that it was engaging, played well and was chock full of educational content (I can still remember that is where I learned whose currency the zloty was).

Yesterday’s post about Firefox raised some questions about what else is on my desktop. I have to admit I feel much more productive on Macs. I’ve also selected the apps that really enhance my productivity. Macs have excellent apps. These are the ones I think help the most with little comments as to why I’ve selected them. Some of them have windows or Linux equivalents for those of you who haven’t switched or find other platforms work better for you.