Feaverish

From time to time friends of mine’ll be like “Hey man I need to do X (the variable, not the drug) with my computer but I can’t find any software with which to do it” and I’m all “Worry not, dear friend, here is some software that will aid you in your quest.”

Frankly, I’m tired of them asking, so here’re a bunch of links to the software I use on a semi-regular basis to keep the wheels of industry turning at Feaverish.com.

Everyone already knows about the big ones (Quicksilver, NetNewsWire, Transmit et al.) so I’m not going to cover them here, even though I wouldn’t be able to function without them. No, the following are the programs that don’t get written up on Macitt every day, and that in some cases I had to do a bit of sleuthing to find. Keep in mind that most of my computer time is spent listening to music, surfing (and bookmarking) the web, and making websites.

Let’s start with some music software.

Sometimes I get CDs from the library that are all scratched to hell. iTunes won’t encode them without skips and pops, and they occasionally lock up iTunes entirely. What to do?

Max is a free (10.4 required, Universal Binary) audio ripping and encoding app that can read and write just about any format: LAME, FLAC, Monkey’s Audio, Ogg Vorbis, and many more. It can also read and write using any of the Core Audio codecs that QuickTime uses. Best of all, you can rip CDs using Paranoia, which is great at making an exact copy of the data on the disc without any skipping or popping. You can also specify the number of simultaneous encoders, which makes encoding a bunch of files a lot faster than using iTunes, especially on multi-core/processor computers. I’ve used Max to rip hundreds of discs, and I’ve only ever had it fail to encode one track on a very badly scratched disc.

That’s when I found out about xACT (Version Tracker page; the SourceForge page doesn’t have the download, for some reason). xACT’s functionality overlaps a lot with Max’s (they both use Paranoia, and can read and write to many of the same formats) , but for some reason xACT was able to read the scratched track I mentioned above without any problems. xACT also has a more detailed log system that shows exactly what errors (if any) it found on your disc. xACT is a free Universal Binary, and works with 10.3 or above. It’s fairly technical, but I found a short tutorial showing how to extract audio from a CD and encode it using xACT.

You know how sometimes a band will have a hidden track at the end of their album? And how usually that hidden track is like 14 minutes long? But 13 of those minutes are just silence, or maybe someone moving folding chairs around a room or ocean waves or something? Super annoying, right? Well, if you’ve got the album, you can just set the start and end points of the mp3 (or whatever) in iTunes and re-encode the AIFF file from the CD, and iTunes will only encode the part you specified. But what if you only have the MP3 and not the original CD? You could use GarageBand or iMovie or Audacity to edit the song, but you’ll lose quality with each of those options, since they have to re-encode the MP3 as AIFF before they can edit it. In other words, you’re taking an already-compressed song file, uncompressing it, editing it, and then compressing it once again, and unfortunately the re-re-encoded track won’t sound as good as the original.

Enter MP3 Trimmer. As far as I know, this is the only Mac app that actually edits the MP3 files without any re-encoding. The interface is a little un-Mac-like, but it gets the job done, and it even works on Variable Bit Rate (VBR) MP3s. It’s $11, and works with OS 9 or OS X. A Universal Binary is “coming soon.”

CoverFlow (alternate icon by Jasper Hauser) is an iTunes album browser. It presents your iTunes library in a jukebox-style interface (watch the video on the homepage, or check out the Flickr gallery) that lets you quickly flip through the album covers to find and play what you’re looking for. Yeah, it’s mostly eye candy, but what eye candy! It requires 10.4, and it’s a free Universal Binary.

PodWorks is Buzz Andersen’s $8 iPod utility. I’ve tried several other utilities, but none of them offered anything that would make me give up PodWorks. It’s got an iTunes-like interface that lets you browse and listen to the songs on your iPod, and makes it easy to transfer them to your computer. You can copy them to a folder or import them directly into iTunes. It can recreate playlists in iTunes, and it copies a lot of metadata that isn’t included in the ID3 tags, such as Play Count and Date Added. I keep the app right on my iPod, so I can copy the songs to whatever computer I’m near. It runs off the iPod, and even remembers your registration information when you’re connected to a new machine! What more could you ask for? PodWorks requires 10.2 or higher.

Buzz also makes the excellent Cocoalicious del.icio.us client. It’s free, and basically lets you add, delete, search, and visit your del.icio.us bookmarks without having to visit del.icio.us. I’ve got over 5000 bookmarks in del.icio.us, and if you’ve ever tried searching for something on the site, you know it can be a little tedious. Cocoalicious lets you search your bookmarks and their extended descriptions, browse through your tags, and even view the bookmarked pages right in the app. Although it syncs with del.icio.us every time you open it, it can keep a local copy of your bookmarks for when you’re not connected to the internet. There’s even a “Send to Cocoalicious” bookmarklet that fills in the bookmark’s extended description with any text you’ve selected in your browser.

Pukka is a posting client for del.icio.us. Like Cocoalicious, Pukka has a bookmarklet that sends any selected text as the bookmark’s extended description, and it’s the fastest way I’ve found to bookmark sites with del.icio.us. I set the Pukka bookmarklet as the first bookmark in my bookmarks bar in Safari. When I come across a page I want to bookmark, I hit Command+1 (which opens the first bookmark or folder in the bookmarks bar; this works with numbers 1–9, by the way) to send the page to Pukka. Pukka opens almost instantly with the bookmark form already filled out with the page’s title and any text I’ve selected. I add a few tags (which Pukka autofills as I type) and hit Command+Return to submit the bookmark. Pukka disappears, and a second or two later I get a Growl notification that the bookmark has been posted. The whole process takes just a few seconds, and I never have to take my hands off of the keyboard. Pukka is $5 and requires 10.4. It’s a Universal Binary.

Del.icio.us is a great service, but what to do when it’s down, or running slowly? delicious2safari is a free little app for importing your del.icio.us bookmarks into Safari. It can put your bookmarks in the bookmarks menu, the bookmarks bar, or in with your main bookmarks. It can even organize your bookmarks according to their tags, though if you choose this option it’ll create a new instance of the bookmark for every tag (i.e. if a bookmark has five tags, there will be five instances of that bookmark in Safari). Once your bookmarks are in Safari, you can search them just like any other bookmark, and I don’t have to tell you that searching from within Safari is much faster than searching del.icio.us (although delicious2safari doesn’t import the extended descriptions, as there’s no place to put them in Safari). delicious2safari requires 10.3 or later, and is a Universal Binary.

I know TextMate is the text editor du jour, but I’m an skEdit man myself. It’s got tabs, code hinting and completion, excellent site management (e.g. start typing an img tag and skEdit suggest images from your site. Nice!), integrated SFTP/FTP/WebDAV, site-wide find and replace, snippets, code navigation, user scripts, Subversion support, and a million other features. skEdit is only $24.95 for a lifetime license, and requires 10.3 or better. It is a Universal Binary.

For CSS editing, I use CSSEdit. It combines a powerful source code editor (with code hinting and completion) and a visual editor (à la Dreamweaver) while still being lightweight. It has an excellent code grouping feature that lets you group and organize your styles, and can extract and import the CSS from any site on the web. It works great as an external editor for Transmit. CSSEdit requires 10.3.9 or better and is a Universal Binary. It’s a steal at $24.99.

Xyle scope is one of those apps you didn’t realize you needed until you tried it, and now you can’t live without it. It combines Safari’s rendering engine with a detailed and customizable view of the DOM, HTML, and CSS of web sites you visit. Click on any page element and see the CSS applied to that element, including styles overwritten by the cascade. You can do some style editing right in Xyle scope (supposedly there are more advanced editing features on the way), but it also integrates with external text editors. There’s much, much more to Xyle scope, but suffice it to say it’s a must-have for anyone doing web design on a Mac. It’s $19.95, and a Universal Binary. Requires 10.3.9 or better.

One of the hardest things for me with any design is color. I’ve read color theory, and I have no problem saying what looks good and what doesn’t, but when it comes to me actually deciding on colors for a design, well, I’m often clueless. At $49.99, Color Schemer Studio was worth every penny. It’s got everything a designer needs to find and organize colors, from a basic color wheel view to more complex color harmony and website mockup tools. It has a PhotoSchemer tool that lets you pull colors out of any image, and a color mixer that creates either a single mixed color or a gradient path between two colors. It can export color schemes to color palette formats for many common apps, like Photoshop, Illustrator, and FreeHand. You can print your color schemes with their values, and even import color schemes from a web site or style sheet, GIF image, Photoshop color palette, or Color Table file. It’s true that some of Color Schemer Studio’s features overlap with the color picker included with OS X, but the extra tools are well worth the price, and it’s got a lovely icon that classes up any Dock. It requires 10.3, and is a Universal Binary.

Okay, that’s it for the music/bookmarks/design software. I guess all that’s left are the miscellaneous utilities.

MenuMeters is my system monitoring utility of choice (although the upcoming iStat.app from iSlayer looks intriguing). MenuMeters is a system preference pane that lets you choose various system statistics to be displayed in your menu bar. Unlike a lot of similar utilities, MenuMeters doesn’t eat up many system resources. I generally only show the processor load and RAM usage, but it’s nice to know when some background process has maxed out your processor, or when it’s time to restart Photoshop, which has gradually eaten up 1GB+ of your memory while you worked on that 12K web image. Sigh. MenuMeters is free, requires 10.2 or better, and is a Universal Binary.

Next up is IC-Switch. All this little guy does is sit in your menu bar and let you change your default web browser, email, RSS and FTP client. Say you want to open a Mail link in Firefox, but Safari is your default browser. Just click on IC-Switch and select Firefox, then click on the link in Mail. Change the default back to Safari when you’re done. Yeah, you could just load the page in Safari and then select “Open page with Firefox” from the Debug menu (you did enable the Debug menu, didn’t you? No? Try Safari Enhancer.), but depending on how many sites you’ve got to open, IC-Switch could save you a few clicks. IC-Switch is free, and requires 10.2 or better. I don’t think it’s a Universal Binary, but it’s so small you’ll never notice.

Everyone hates the gel icons Apple introduced for the Tiger version of Mail, right? Right. So far the best replacement icons I’ve found are from MailFixer. It’s a small app that replaces the Mail icons with some nice flat grey gradient buttons. Free, not a Universal Binary, but works fine on Intel Macs for the one time you need to run it.

Library Books is maybe an app that only I use, but oh man do I use it. As I’ve mentioned before, I use my local library a lot. Library Books is a small menu bar utility that taps into your local library’s database (check here for supported libraries) and tells you what you have checked out, when the items are due, and what you have on hold. The nice-looking star icon changes color to show you, for instance, when an item is overdue, or when an on-hold item has arrived. Library Books is free, and a Universal Binary. Do yourself a favor and get the more stable beta version from the download page.

OnyX (alternate icon included in the installer) is a must-have system maintenance and customization utility. Besides running all the expected maintenance and cache-cleaning tasks, OnyX lets you configure hidden settings in the Finder, Dock, Safari, Dashboard, Exposé, Disk Utility, and more. For instance, I don’t much like the Dock, so on my work computer I have the Dock hidden and pinned to the top right of the screen, something that isn’t possible by default. Also, you know those annoying buttons in iTunes that point to songs, albums or bands in the iTunes Music Store? With OnyX, you can make it so those buttons point to albums or bands in your own library. So if you click on the arrow next to, say, a Beatles song, it’ll take you to the Beatles in your own library. It’s pretty handy, really. Anyway, Onyx does all of that and a whole ton more. It’s a free Universal Binary, and there are separate versions for 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4.

Finally, SuperDuper! is the best backup software for the Mac. It can make an exact, bootable clone of your system, so in the event your hard drive fails you can boot from the clone and get right back to work. It’s incredibly easy to set up, and once you set it up it’ll do everything automatically. In my case, it starts itself at one every morning, mounts my backup firewire drive, checks to see which files have changed since the last backup, copies those files, makes the backup drive bootable again, unmounts it, and finally quits itself; I never actually see it run. It doesn’t have to make a bootable clone of your system, of course. You can set it to back up just your User folder, say, or whatever folders you want, really. In short, it’s well worth the $27.95 for a license (it will run without a license, but not all of the features are enabled; you can make a good backup, though, if you’re cheap and desperate). SuperDuper! is a Universal Binary, and requires 10.3.9 or later.

So that’s the short list of off-the-beaten-path software I use. Anyone want to share their list?