faf : Mark Goody

July 7, 2010 in General by Angelina Roberts

Picking five favourite applications is tough, and tougher because I do so many different things. I’ve decided to go for a couple of the ones that I use every day and some apps that smooth out my computing experience. Missing from the list are others that are used daily and relied upon (Mail, iCal, Things, Xcode, Coda, iTunes, Safari, Aperture and more). This, perhaps, isn’t the most exciting list you’ll see.

1 TextMate

Word processors and their layout capabilities are a necessary evil, but I try and avoid them as much as possible. Plain text is handy for everything from keeping notes of little bits of information to drafting documents. I’ve tried many different editors, but TextMate is my favourite of the lot. It’s also great when I’m hacking together some PHP. [Link]

2. Pukka

Delicious.com is invaluable for keeping web bookmarks organised and accessible, but it’s a faff to use. Pukka is a tiny little app that saves a bookmark at Delicious. It’s bookmarklet sits in the first position of my Safari Bookmarks Bar, so all I have to do is hit ‚åò1, enter some auto-completed tags and hit return. [Link]

3. Caffeine

If you’ve ever given a presentation and discovered mid-sentence that you’d forgotten to deactivate your screensaver, Caffeine is for you. Click it’s whimsical menu bar icon and the screen won’t sleep without you telling it to. [Link]

4. SuperDuper!

I’m paranoid about backup. SuperDuper! keeps no fewer than three external disks in different locations up to date for me. If my main drive dies on me, I can plug one of them in and pick up where I left off. [Link]

5. 1Password

It seems like every website needs you to sign up for a user account these days, each with its own username/password pair. (You aren’t using the same password everywhere, are you? No? Good.) We all know that unique, complex passwords help keep your accounts and details secure, but they’re a nightmare to remember. 1Password can generate nice long, difficult passwords for you, and then remember them behind a master password. So I have tricky passwords everywhere, but only have to remember one (admittedly, it’s a cracker – but that’s okay when it’s the only one I have to keep in my head).

Handily, 1Password has plugins for most of the major browsers (not Opera, yet) that will lookup and fill the login forms on your websites, and that let you save passwords as you. Coupled with the very handy iPhone application (even better since cut and paste), I find it completely indispensable. [Link]

Mark Goody
http://markgoody.ie/
http://www.marramgrass.org.uk/

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