BrockLi Soup

At some point in our lives - let’s call it “college” - many of us downloaded illegal copies of software because we didn’t have the money to purchase it, or because we needed the money for something else - let’s call it “beer.” Not that I would do such a thing, of course.

Now that I’m not flat broke, I’m more willing to pay for well-designed software that I find useful, and much less likely to spend a lot of time trying to find and figure out flaky free alternatives, or consider “other” means of acquisition. These are some of the Mac apps that have been deemed worthy of my purchase lately.

AppZapper

Uninstalling applications on a Mac usually just means dragging them to the trash. It’s a simple method, though incredibly difficult for PC users to get used to. However, not all applications can be removed so easily. Sometimes, configuration files lurk in your Library or elsewhere. Furthermore, it can be hard to get rid of things like plugins and widgets if you don’t know where to look.

AppZapper fills this hole - it’s the “uninstaller Apple forgot.” It’s true that Apple should have just included this functionality in the OS, but since they didn’t, AppZapper is definitely worth the $12.95.

Transmit

It seems like there should be at least one free FTP client for the Mac that doesn’t suck, but since I haven’t found it, Transmit was worth $29.95. After the 15 day free trial, you don’t get to use favorites and it limits your session to 10 minutes. For months, I resisted the price tag. I assumed that there simply had to be a good free alternative out there, and any FTP’ing I had to do was done in 10-minute increments in Transmit. I don’t know why I held out for so long, because Transmit is a great product, and the developers deserve to get paid for it.

TextMate

This isn’t a new purchase (I’ve had it for about a year), but TextMate has become more and more useful to me lately. I wrote a post about it a couple days ago. It was a little cheaper when I bought it, and $64 seems pretty steep for a text editor, but it meets needs I didn’t even know I had.

OmniFocus

OmniFocus is the kind of thing that I should really use more than I do. It’s a fantastic GTD-style task management app, but it would be a lot more valuable to me if I could just get in the habit of using it to track things I need to do. I’ve made a few well-intentioned attempts at my own GTD system, but I always seem to put a bunch of “I should do this eventually” type stuff into my system (in this case, OmniFocus), and then I never want to open it because I’ll be faced with all this crap that I need to get done, so I just keep making little post-it notes and ad-hoc lists and things still fall through the cracks. It took me about a dozen tries to quit smoking - maybe it will take me a dozen more to start using OmniFocus.

Here’s a neat trick I didn’t know about. I already knew that hitting Command+Shift+3 will take a screen shot, and Command+Shift+4 will allow you to select an area of the screen to shoot. But if you hit Command+Shift+4, and then hit Space, you can take a shot of a single window without having to carefully select it.

Remember when I was complaining yesterday about the dock in 10.5.2? Well don’t I feel silly.

I guess I didn’t really bother looking for an answer, because 30 seconds on Google got me a forum thread about this very subject. To use the folder’s icon in the dock, you just need to remove it and re-add it to the dock, or switch it from folder view to stack view and back again. For some reason though, restarting the machine won’t do it (I tried that first, just in case).

And since I didn’t describe it well, this is what I had to start with:

And this is what I’ve got now:

The Finances icon was made for me by the lovely and talented Sarah Friedlander, and I made the Atheist icon using the same tool she did, Can Combine Icons.

MacTipcs .org has an article about the new Stacks features that came with the latest update to OS X. The big thing everyone has been talking about is the ability to display a folder as a folder when you’ve got it in your dock. Up until now, a lot of people have been using the method explained here: basically, put an icon file in the folder you’re going to put in the dock, and it will appear at the front of the stack.

Now, the folders in the dock will actually look like folders. This is a start, but it would be a lot better if they actually used the folder’s icon. For example, I’ve got two folders in my dock: Atheism and Finances. I want icons for each dock item to make it clear which is which - an X icon (or something else) for Atheism, and a dollar symbol for Finances. I was accomplishing this by dropping icons in those folders so that they would appear at the top of the stack, but it’s not an ideal solution. Now that the dock can display these as folders, I would rather use that for consistency.

The problem is that they just look like folders in the dock. I mean, in a perfect world, the Finances folder would have a dollar symbol on it, just like the Applications, Documents, Music, and other folders in OS X have icons to denote what they’re for. So I put an icon on the Finances folder, but alas, the icon isn’t used in the dock; it’s still just a boring folder. Everything else in the dock has the right icon - why not my stack folders?

I can’t tell you how happy I am that I found Lickr on the del.icio.us popular page. It’s a GreaseMonkey script that replaces Flickr’s flash image with a regular JPEG image and text links for the tool bar. Apparently there’s a bug in Firefox on Mac OS X that causes Flash movies to “disappear” if you scroll the wrong way. My options seemed to be converting to Safari, or removing Flash so I could at least view the images sans tool bar. With Lickr, I get all the options and a shorter load time.

Sometimes the Internet gives me things that make me happy. Like this. And porn.