Ben Rockwood definitely uses a "real UNIX workstation" for his daily work needs; however, he does love his MacBook Pro for a few reasons, one of which is that OS X has UNIX underneath. Believing that there are others who too love Mac OS X, Rockwood lists what he identifies as his "must have apps" for his beloved Mac laptop:

• iTerm: Although the default terminal application has improved significantly making iTerm unnecessary, Rockwood remains faithful.

• Adium: In Rockwood's opinion, Adium is the best multi-protocol IM client available for Mac. "I just can't stand having a real discussion in those iChat balloons," he writes.

• NewsFire: Best RSS reader.

• TrueCrypt: TrueCrypt makes it easy to create small encrypted drives on which to store sensitive data. Plus, the virtual drives it creates are cross-platform.

• Things: Light-weight and easy to use, Rockwood names it the best to-do application available.

• RealVNC: Maybe not as "sexy" as "Chicken of the VNC," but it works every time without a problem.

• Colloquy: If you are an Xchat user who is looking for a nicely integrated IRC client for OS X, Colloquy is the best.

• VirtualBox: Very powerful and free to boot.

• Apache Directory Studio: The best alternative to Microsoft Windows Softerra LDAP Administrator.

• iShowU: Best screen recording app since it's easy to use, very flexible and lightweight. Rockwood recommends using the Quicktime Animation CODEC when creating screencasts.

• globalSAN iSCSI initiator for OS X: Free and works very well with COMSTAR.

• Cornerstone: If you do a lot of SVN work, Rockwood states you won't want to miss trying Cornerstone.

His honorable mention list includes:

• Textmate
• iWork '09
• iLife '09
• Skitch
• iStumbler
• Netbeans
• Navicat Lite
• OmniGraffle
• ...

Rockwood also discusses hardware and shares two lesser known points about Leopard.

More Information

Must Have Apps for the Mac - Rockwood's blog entry

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