Effective Mac - the beginning of a journey

2008-07-04 Personal Tips & Tricks Mac

yesterday i finally finished my upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

overall it went well. i did an erase and install (as a 20 year windows user i feel much more comfortable with clean installs. maybe next time if will try it the mac-way :)) and also used the exercise to clean up my disk and the way i work. the biggest problem was that leopard does not come with iLife, means you need to find your old tiger CDs and reinstall iLife from there (or buy (!?!?) iLife 08, no comment).

using a mac is like using any other tool. just using it is not going to give you the maximum ROI. using it effectively is going to make the difference.

therefore i decided to start a little series of blogs and i am going to call it "Effective Mac".

this is the first one and i just want to give a summary of tools that i am using on my mac. please feel free to comment and add to this list.
  • mail - looked at a couple of options, but for the time being will stick with mail.app. using YAI to deal with exchange invitations and will probably checkout MailTags.
  • calendar and contacts - have not looked around and will stick with iCal and AdressBook.
  • todos - did look at the functionality in iCal and did not really like it. did a little bit of research and finally settled for iGTD (get things done).
  • browser - currently using safari and occasionally firefox (especially, if i am in london heathrow airport. the safari browser cannot get me onto the bingo wifi network there). also looked at Flock to get a grip on my social networking (xing, linked-in, pulse, facebook - it is madness).
  • RSS reader - looked at safari (and a couple of other browsers) and the wonderful TimesReader (looks very good. almost like a newspaper), but settled for the new RSS reader in mail.app.
  • communication - using iChat (AIM), Skype, Aqua X-Chat (IRC) and Twitterific (James also pointed me to GTwit, but i still need to makeup mind, if and how i am going to use it). tried to find a universal "chat" client. stumbled over Fire, but it does not support SSL enabled IRC server (and keeps on crashing on me).
  • programming - still like my emacs :). using Aqua-Emacs, but have also started to use Dashcode for my web developement.
  • brainstorming - using Freemind for my mindmaps and OmniOutliner for structured bullet list type brainstorming.
let me know, what you think about the toolset. anything missing? anything that could/should be replaced by a better tool?

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