Ron's Techie Blog

For fellow Mac users I know (actually, some of these are cross-platform so apply to Linux and Windows too), here is a list of software I frequently use and would recommend:

• iTerm – Open source tabbed terminal client (Mac only)
• Ecto – Blogging client (Mac and Windows versions)
• Firefox – Open source browser. Fast, full featured, and lots of great plugins (love the web developer tools). Cross-platform.
• Freemind – Open source mind mapping software. Pure Java so it runs on all major platforms.
• MacPorts (formerly darwin ports) – This is a collection of open source Unix/Linux software ported to Mac OSX/Darwin as well as a packaging system for easily installing the ports. I’ve used it to install Python 2.5, memcached, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and many more packages.
• Adium – Open source multi-protocol IM client. Adium uses the Gaim libraries for the multi-protocol stuff. (Mac only)
• Colloquy – Open source IRC client. I don’t use IRC that much, but when I do, this is the client. (Mac only)
• Quicksilver – Quicksilver lets you carry out many tasks using a few keystrokes – launch applications, find and open files, send an email to someone in your address book, etc. (Mac only)
• Growl – An open source notification system for Mac programs – get unobtrusive notifications of chat messages, received emails, finished downloads, etc. (Mac only)
• NeoOffice – A port of OpenOffice for the Mac.
• MyEclipse – A commercial distribution of the open source Eclipse IDE with additional plugins.

I installed a new version of Freemind recently. Freemind is a great program for mind-mapping. I use it for organizing thoughts (papers, project plans, etc.) as well as for keeping notes. One thing I particularly like about Freemind is that you can easily navigate around and author maps using the keyboard – much faster than switching back and forth to the mouse and easier on the wrist.

Mind Manager from Mindjet is also a great piece of software for mind-mapping. It does what it does very well, is intuitive, and doesn’t get in your way. Unfortunately, Mind Manager was a Windows-only program at the time (although they now have a Mac version). When I switched back to Linux and then Mac OSX, I had to find a cross-platform alternative, which is where Freemind comes in.

One thing I noticed with this version (0.9.0 beta9a) of Freemind is that Mac OSX Spotlight is able to find search results in Freemind files. Maybe this isn’t the first version in which this works, but I know I tried it out in a 0.8 release. At any rate, I was glad to see it working because Freemind doesn’t currently have a feature to search across multiple maps – one of the few features of Mind Manager I missed.