Mac & iPhone Apps I Like

I'm currently a Mac/iPhone user, and I have some applications that I have found extremely useful over time. For those new to these platforms, I thought I would share my favorites:

Communications

Adium (Mac): really nice IM aggregation client. Beautiful, extensible interface. Wish it did video ...
Blogo (Mac): my new favorite blogging client, which has taken over from the venerable MarsEdit. Love the Twitter integration. Blogo's microblog view has replaced Twitterific for me.
Skype (Mac): combined with my Audio-Technica AT2020 mic and my CEntrance Microport Pro USB preamp, I sound like I'm doing phone calls in a recording studio. It's awesome.
Facebook (iPhone): very nicely implemented version -- just what you need in the mobile app.
Twitterific (iPhone): great little microblog browser on the phone. Particularly speedy at loading linked sites.
BlogPress (iPhone): since I am still on Blogger for the time being, this is the best iPhone blogging tool I've found. If I ultimately go to Wordpress, they have a nice looking iPhone app. Both let you post iPhone photos to your blog.

Productivity

Evernote (Mac & iPhone): billed as a memory extension tool, this is really simple but profound. Easier to see than describe, I use it to keep track of all those little bits of info that you end up looking up ten times a year (i.e., opening times for the zoo). Highly recommended, particularly given the Mac's awesome ability to print anything to a PDF.
OmniFocus (Mac & iPhone): the Swiss Army Knife of GTD.
Quicksilver (Mac): I'm still figuring out all the cool things that this can do. Basically, it runs as a background process on your desktop, and can be used to quickly launch apps. But that's like 1% of what you can actually do with it. As close to geek magic as software gets.
JungleDisk (Mac): a really nice front end to Amazon Web Services S3. Storage in the cloud, represented as a drive on your desktop.
MobileFiles (iPhone): if you use the iDisk feature of Mobile Me, this rules. Let's you access your iDisk in the cloud from your phone, view files, download, etc. The upcoming pro version will include viewers for the Microsoft Office suite.
1Password (Mac & iPhone): the Ferrari of password vaults. Really, more of an identity management solution. Integrates with your browsers on the desktop (although not on the iPhone). Generates strong passwords that you don't have to remember. Fills out forms. If you do a lot of login/ecommerce, this is a must have.

Media & Entertainment

NetNewsWire (Mac & iPhone): my all-time favorite news reader and feed aggregator. Syncs to cloud so you can use it on multiple devices and not miss anything. Nice interface, even on iPhone.
Yelp & OpenTable (Web & iPhone): two great tastes that go great together. The Yelp iPhone app is not as sexy as UrbanSpoon, but it has better reviews. OpenTable's iPhone implementation is great, and it's one of the most useful services around.
Chroma (Mac): very pretty movie player that supports avi's as well as quicktime and DivX. Has some cool movie-specific features. Also nice substitute for the built-in DVD player.

Development

TextMate (Mac): an integrated development environment masquerading as a text editor. An essential tool for coding Rails. Highly recommended.
CSSEdit (Mac): an amazing single-purpose product for editing cascading style sheets, the visual language of the web.
Sequel Pro (Mac): the new name for the wonderful CocoaMysql code base. A powerful, easy-to-use front-end for Mysql databases.

Moving to Blogger

I'm moving Bizpunk to Blogger.  I have to move my web server up to northern California over the summer, and I want to have a stable site in the interim.  I may go back to my Typo blog after I move, but I'm here for now.

I'll try to back-fill my old posts here when I pull them off the server.

Beyond & Back

I'm back after a long hiatus from blogging, necessitated by my job change. I've got some catching up to do -- a backlog of posts about pop culture and business.

Notes from a Beleaguered Small-Time Sys Admin

My family is highly computerized and connected. In fact, we have more than twice as many computers in the house as TV's; two computers for every family member. Despite the cozy domesticity of the setup, it's a pretty high-demand environment. The need for reliable, high-speed connectivity, permissions, security, file services, mobility, etc., make this much more than a "plug in the WiFi router and cable modem" system

Over the years, I've experimented with a lot of technologies. In the mid-90's, I ran Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 and IIS on a retired Pentium, with mostly Windows 9x machines connecting as clients. It was a constant maintenance headache, and I got hacked more than once. I needed to do dynamic, data-driven apps and that proved too hard for me in the NT environment (SQL server, Active Server Pages, etc.).

Finally, in a fit of frustration, I switched to Linux as the server on the same machine: Red Hat 6 & 7. I had only a passing familiarity with Unix, so it was a huge learning curve. But by the end I had a secure, flexible environment: serving files internally through Samba and running Apache, PHP, and MySQL for the web. Great performance and stability. Like night and day compared to NT Server. And it was much, much faster on the same hardware.

But it really sucked to administer. No matter what any of the religious zealots say, Linux is fine if either you don't need a very interactive environment, or you are willing to get very deep into the configs. But the "ease-of-use" factor is just not there. Sure, there are good tools out there with graphical front-ends to some of the configurations, but IMHO they are not integrated or particularly easy to use.

So, when I could afford it, I bought myself a rack-mount server. A Mac XServe G5; dual processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM, RAID, the works. I wanted the Mac OSX Server tools as the front-end for administration and I wanted ARD. I figured all the benefits of Unix and all the benefits of Mac simplicity and vertical integration.

It's actually both better and worse than I expected. With Mac clients and the Apple Wifi hub, it's incredibly stable and fast. I'm getting more functionality for my PC clients, but given how great it is for the Mac clients, the PC's are definitely second class citizens.

Interestingly, Server Admin and Workgroup Administrator are not as great as I expected. Good, mind you; certainly better than anything I had with Linux. But not quite as polished as the best Mac consumer apps. I haven't totally figured out the launchd thing, either.

From the total amateur's perspective, the benefit of Mac desktops and a Mac OSX server are legion. The combination of ARD, ubiquitous terminal access, WiFi admin, LDAP/Open Directory, etc. make the routine admin a joy.

What could be better? Scripting, for one thing. It would be great if AppleScript was as good as Ruby or Python. I need a launchd wizard. They should allow Server Admin to accept plugins so somebody enterprising could make a Mongrel or Lighttpd front end that works as nicely as their Apache one. It will be interesting to see how they integrate Ruby on Rails in OSX 10.5.

Finally, I think there is an appliance play for Apple here. They can use the same form factor as the iTV and offer DSL/Cable routing, a WiFi hub, web serving and file serving for the home power user. I think Apple are 90% there with the current toolset -- they need one more ease of use refinement.