Besides Scrivener which is by far the best “Golden Nugget” around, I am curious as to what your “Golden Nugget” is.
By saying Golden Nugget I mean that little application that is a must have in your inventory. The one where if you were doing a fresh install of the OS this would be your first little application that you have to have on y our computer.
I use the widget and is a must have for me. It is a “nerdy” app in the fact that it is a monitoring application but is beautiful in not only its presentation but its usefulness.
It monitors temperatures, HD space, IP, CPU usage , memory usage, bandwidth, battery, etc. etc. etc.
One click and all the information I need is right there at my fingertips.
So I ask you. What is your “Golden Nugget” of must have software.
I ask because this is a good way to find future nuggets
I have lots of software ‘toys’ that I enjoy, but the ones I first put on a writing laptop, for instance, are Scrivener, WriteRoom, and Adobe Acrobat (for my research). I also set up my peripherals: scanners, printers, etc.
When I recently set up my Eee PC, first thing I did was set up my wireless, then I put JDarkRoom on it (since I can’t use Scrivener or WriteRoom) and kind of set up Open Office (it’s ok, but not great). I had trouble connecting to my printer (that’s on an Airport Express) so that I put off until a couple of days ago, after doing some research. This time I figured it out in just a minute, so now all is set up the way I want it.
Oh, yeah, I should probably mention my love/hate relationship with Solitaire, a program I remove and put back more times than I care to admit.
I hate getting up. I hate stupid beeps. I hate needing a different app for future alarms, timers for alarm and timers for shutdown.
Awaken get all my timing needs with the ability to launch apps (email in the morning), use iTunes or standard alarm sounds, is extremely flexible for scheduling and is cheap, I mean inexpensive.
I NEED to be able to play Jumpman on long train rides. Or Aztec Challenge. When I switched to the Mac I was glad to find an emulator that’s much nicer than CCS64 on Windows.
You’ll probably think I’m an utter geek for this, but if I get a new computer that doesn’t have vim installed, I install it myself as soon as I have a net connection. Luckily, OS X is based on FreeBSD, and includes vim by default. When I’m given a new Windows box at work, however, or if I have to use a disk image to reset my PC to its “factory default” state, Vim is the first app I install. For people who aren’t into Unix, vim is based on vi, an ancient text editor written by Bill Joy in 1976. I learned it in college (along with Unix), and have come to regard any computer that doesn’t have it as crippled.
Vim rocks. I have registered TextMate too (for which I wrote a python/py.test plugin). MacVim seems to be an amazing piece of work. If you haven’t tried it you should. It’s not 100% yet but it’s a very very very good application and quite Mac like.
LaunchBar and, to a lesser extent, PathFinder are my must-haves.
The list of stuff that I install immediately after installing a clean OS and use regularly is a bit longer, but those are the two that I’d miss the most (as in try to use them without thinking about it before I remembered they weren’t there).
I’ve started using VooDooPad and I must adjust I’m finding it both insanely powerful and very flexible. I’m using it to help me world-build and it looks like it could easily replace my current toolkit (mediawiki).
I’m only using the lite version at present but will probably end up going pro so I can categorise my content and use the webserver.
