Apparently, there’s a new list of Mac bargain programs from Macworld. 75 different programs that need a spin on my hard drive. Actually, it appears there is a whole department devoted to this.

Today, I found two great utilities for the Mac. One which reminds me of the One Ring from LOTR and another which is just neato.

The first is LaunchBar from Objective Development. I used to have a lot of icons in my dock that were nice to have there, but I only kept there because it was a pain to find them from the Finder or even to Ctrl-Click my Favorites or Applications folder which I also have in my Dock. This little gem allows you to simply type a partial name of any program, document, email, or any number of things and get what you want right away. The developers have apparently made this better by paring off some features that were outside the core usefulness. This simpler version is now a lot smarter and easier to use. It learns which programs you like to use by watching what you select for a particular key combination. Now it does favor people who can type pretty fast, like myself. It uses a delay mechanism to figure out when you are trying to find something new. I can now launch NetNewsWire by simply pressing NNW or launch Emacs by typing EMA. It’s great because now my dock can go on a diet of persistent icons. This may be the first piece of shareware on the Mac that I will actually pay for.

FetchArt is a utility program that enriches the iTunes experience. Many a track has been ripped, imported, and otherwise found a home in my music library. I’ve even paid a couple bucks for some Missy Elliot rhymes from the iTunes Music Store. Apple p0wnz me, what can I say? Well, I’ve wanted to have album art for a lot of these tracks when I do play them on my iBook rather than the iPod. FetchArt makes that happen. Although, it doesn’t download cover art from the iTunes Music Store which would seem easier, it does manage to find them at Amazon. I’ve been able to add cover art to over 80% of my library now. Fun little utility and it’s free.

Here’s another program I’m looking at using. BootCD from CharlesSoft apparently lets you make an OS X boot CD. This kind of tool is invaluable when you really need to diagnose your computer. I’ve been using Disk Utility from the Apple install cds, but that is a little tedious. This program gives you a finder, dock, and any other programs you want. Pretty cool. Well worth using a CD-RW disk.

Apparently, there’s a list of useful cheap programs from Macworld.

I’ve been looking lately for a new IDE. I’ve been trying Project Builder, but it is not that great a development environment. It is really good for doing user interfaces. It needs some code completion action action and an easier way to get new files into projects. I miss my UltraEdit and plain old shell commands. I can get the shell on Mac OS X, but I’m looking for a good editor to work on multiple files and stuff. I’ve gotten so desperate as to try to learn Emacs again.

I was up late into the night trying to figure out how to get emacs to build on my OS X 10.2.8 environment. There were a couple of good pages from Andrew Choi about how to build from CVS. Unfortunately, gnu.org is under a cloud of paranoia and has restricted their CVS downloads to two versions: a snapshot from 3/19/03 and another that is the current version. The stable builds just keep reporting that they don’t know how to build for a powerpc-apple-darwin6.8 machine. This sucks. So, I downloaded the CVS versions and they don’t work either. I can configure the sources, but I can’t get the bootstrap to work. Stupid CVS builds… why can’t they make sure the tagged build works. At least they’re available. I did manage to find Emacs for Mac OS X that actually worked on my system here at mindlube software.

I also found one called subEthaEdit that lets multiple people edit the same document at the same time. I think that’s pretty useful. I wish I knew others who developed on a Mac that we could do pair programming on. However, I think that the idea of pair programming kind of means that two people looking at the same screen with only one keyboard, but I think that this stuff is more geared to collaborative development.

Hopefully I’ll find my new environment soon. I have code that wants to be written.

For the past two weeks, I’ve been without my iBook. It had some weird problem where it didn’t like to be moved around. This would have been okay for a desktop, but this is a laptop that more than often sits in my lap while I watch TV. Fortunately, I followed my friend’s advice and bought the AppleCare extended warranty. Otherwise, I would have had to buy a new motherboard for my laptop from Apple. Can you say, “Sucker born every minute” ? The warranty has saved my butt, I got a new power adapter a month before this latest problem.

Well the laptop finally got back to me yesterday, after spending a week with the idiots at AirborneExpress. They couldn’t ever figure out how to get to my address. Sometimes it helps to use a map.

It’s good to have it back, but in the meantime I was forced to switch back to my PC. It reminded me that there are still a lot of good things on the PC, like ACT!, MapPoint, and Internet Explorer. It’s easier to use programs that everyone else uses.

I’m just glad to have it back now.

Most of you know that I’m now a Mac fan. My current lust is for the new Apple G5 desktops. However, new Powerbooks are rumored to arrive any day now. It’s hard not to feel like this guy.

Oh well, just wanted to share my frustration with the rest of you. New toys… so fun.