A good while ago, I wrote a blog post called Softwares, where I laid out my basic workflows for a lot of different applications and why I liked them. I figured I'd revisit that topic now, more than three years later.

Sadly, looking over that post, it seems like very few of the apps mentioned there have any staying power. Most of them might remain on my hard drive, and I might keep an eye out for updates, but many of them have nevertheless been superseded. One thing that remains true is that I do use applications for these; Jesse Wolf commented on my last one that he uses a web browser for almost all this stuff, but I still do vastly prefer the OS integration, the responsive, native UI, and the deep functionality of a proper Cocoa (in most cases) app to the convenience and universality of a web app. The cloud, however, has definitely made a big appearance in my life since that post was written.

Here's a quick list of those that have dropped off the leader board since then:

• Copywrite and Jer's Novel Writer are both still great pieces of software, but these days, any fiction or long-form writing I do, I do in Scrivener. It's incredibly well-put together; it has the flexible document- and project-level categorization and management of Copywrite, with the long-form editing features of JNW, and a whole lot more stuff. But when it comes to these applications, it's such a personal decision, necessarily attuned to one's personal writing style, that I would strongly recommend any writer--of fiction, of articles, of technical documentation--to download a demo of all three. And try out Ulysses, while you're at it. It's expensive, and in some ways terribly uncompromising; but for people whose preferences slant in the same direction as the Ulysses developers' there might be nothing else that comes close.




• Nisus Writer Express has been succeeded by Nisus Writer Pro; same app, more features. But that too has been feeling some competition recently, in the form of the venerable Mellel. My main problem with Mellel was always--and I am not ashamed here--the weird UI. But many of the kinks in that have been straightened out by now and it is undeniably fast and powerful. To be honest, though? I try to stay out of a word processor as much as possible. They are big and clunky, yes, but they also as a rule are way too much what-you-get and way too little what-you-mean, if you get my drift. The word processor--a single stream of text, with visual formatting metadata--is simply a completely out-dated way of working with long documents, and therefore the Nisus/Nisus Pro/Mellel war is a very very cold one, as I simply try not to think about it too much.




• Notational Velocity has finally kicked the can. This is a really new development; just a couple weeks ago I finally removed it from my login items. But the truth is I hadn't been using it at all for some time before that. It had been relegated to the most-instant-capture stage; that is, if someone is on the phone and starts telling me something I need to write down, I can open NV very quickly. But I could also grab a pen and paper. Once it gets into NV, there's not a whole lot you can do with it. What has replaced it, I will discuss below, as the answer is far from simple.




• Text Editing, on the other hand, has simplified itself nicely, I am glad to report. Pretty much every item in that list--Smultron, Textwrangler, Textmate--has improved itself and become more appealing in the past 3 years, and more options have come into existence as well. But as I said at the bottom there, I am a vim man. And the most important new text editor to come into the OS X world, as far as I am concerned, is the new, shiny, well-updated, well-integrated, Cocoa version of macvim. It's got everything you'd want a Cocoa version of vim to have. Native file dialogs, native tabs, terminal and useragent and services integration. The list goes on. I use it exclusively.




• Ecto has also dropped off, in fact, because of the aforementioned. I'm writing this post in macvim, using the vimpress plugin. It's barebones--it's got a New command, a Send command, a List command and maybe a Save command, and that's it. But it's also vim, so for instance it's trivial to add automatic Markdown syntax highlighting whenever you start a new blog post. There's a couple out there, but this one has worked the best for me.




• Azureus is done, done, thank god, gone from my computer; its massive Javaness has been replaced by Transmission. It's fast and it lets you select individual files in a torrent not to download; what else does one need?




• irssi, while still very close to my heart, has finally also been replaced by a fancy Cocoa client, called Linkinus. Some people will balk at the notion of paying for an IRC client; I can understand that but it doesn't bother me. Colloquy, anyway, while still not preferred by me, has gotten significantly better since we last spoke.




• Sbook5 is much lamented but it has gone away. Its developer ceased maintenance on it and it is now defunct. It is missed.




• remind/Geektool have also finally given things up to iCal. It's a matter of playing nice; if all the applications I use can send their information to all the other applications, my digital life works much more smoothly.




• Tofu is still around--it actually just was updated for the first time in an awfully long time--but it's just as likely these days that I'll be doing my reading in Stanza. They both have their dis and advantages, but Stanza's big ad is that it can sync with the iPhone.

Quicksilver also deserves a special mention; up until about a week ago I hadn't touched the thing for a year. It had gotten too bloated, to unmanageable, it hung itself at all the wrong times. I was using Launchbar, and I strongly recommend anyone interested in app launchers to check it out. It's stable and quick. But I guess I got restless, or I guess it wasn't quite quick enough, because QS is back on probation. We'll see if it can stay around. Its development status is in some serious limbo right now, which is not heartening.

Wow, so that leaves, what--NetNewsWire, Adium, and DEVONthink? That's not a very encouraging track record. Especially when we consider--well, NNW is now free, and still great, and Adium is chugging along marvelously. But the DEVONThink situation has itself been complicated.

I wouldn't say that it's been retired, because it hasn't. But the truth is that I haven't been using DEVONthink very much at all these days. The interface and the mechanism of the app are very outdated, and its delightful indexing abilities aside, it doesn't make it very easy or pleasant to get information in or out. In short, it's not something you want to work in. So I've got it indexing a couple folders on my drive, and every so often I automatically sync it up with them and it has a nice corpus for me. That's about it.

And what takes its place? What is the 'junk drawer' app of choice? That is a question for the ages. The place where you go to be able to drop information--text, links, images, webpages--and find it later, or have it be suggested to you, is one of the most
actively developed fields in the OS X software realm. Zillions of them have sprung up. My own favorite is EagleFiler. It's completely filesystem-based, ie, all of the stuff it stores is organized in directories on your drive where any other app can read them; it's got a global automatic capture hotkey that can talk to the application you're working in--Finder, Mail, Firefox--and automatically import whatever it is you're working on; it's got Smart Groups; et cetera.

I've tried pretty much every app in that field, and I like EF the best. The file-based storage is what does it for me. It makes it extremely modular, so that I can have it also indexed by DEVONthink for free, or synced with all my other computers.

Yes, the Cloud. one thing that wasn't around in 2005 was the expectation--unless you were working in a web browser all day--that your data and settings would be synced to all of your computers, automatically, gratis. But it's the future now. Two apps take care of all of this for me (in addition to IMAP, whose praises we should not stop singing).

First, get fruux. It's free, it works pretty well. It's a prefpane that automatically syncs your Safari bookmarks, contacts, and iCal events over the web, through OS X's own sync services. Next is dropbox. This is, again gratis, 2GB of storage to sync and backup over the web. It's got a great tool for OS X that will automatically sync up anything that's written in its directory. So my active working folders, I just create a file in there, start working on it, and whenever I save it dropbox beams it up. And because EagleFiler stores everything as normal files, I just have dropbox pointed at my Eaglefiler directory and now whenever I open EF on any of my three computers I get the same library. Pretty good.

So, let's see what else I've found myself using these days.

I would recommend that anyone teaching themselves a language--or anything else that can be expressed in n-dimensional flashcards, I guess--go get Anki. It's Java, but it's not too clumsy. It uses these fancy algorithms to time repetition of facts based on how well you learn them for optimal retention, I think.

There's another field that I never actually find myself using that much, but nevertheless am consistently interested in. Both DEVONagent and Selenium seem designed to do the same thing--to help you do research on the web--albeit coming from different directions. The former basically consists of a series of very sophisticated web scrapers that will search a very wide range of web resources, then parse the resulting data and, using the same algorithms as in DEVONthink (it seems), present it to you in the most useful manner. Selenium has less fancy web scraping tools, but--and I haven't used it very much--sets up research projects for you, and lets you assemble web searches and web pages of interest, while annotating them or organizing them into notes. I'd be interested to hear from anyone who has more experience with either app.

Nocturne is another program from Blacktree--the same guy who wrote Quicksilver. Quite simply, it lets you put your screen into a low-light, low contrast mode, inverting the screen (but keeping the hue accurate, smartly), pulling down the whites and blacks, covering the desktop, and tinting everything for a more eye-friendly experience. I find it invaluable at night time.

Dterm is a great single-use app that makes my life easier. As simply as possible: if you press a hotkey, it will pop up over the active window and let you run terminal commands. It can automatically take you to the working directory of the frontmost window, which is neat. It's great for every time you need to drop into the terminal for a moment but you don't want to open up a whole new shell, and then close it when you're done, just to md5 something.

File Management is a sore subject. It's one that's not really resolved for me right now. As of right now, I am using Path Finder. It is a full Finder replacement. I used it for a long time, then stopped when Leopard came out; but they recently released Path Finder 5 and so I'm back on it. It's got a zillion features that are lacking in Finder and a few things that make me wonder if I'll stay with it permanently. Some of the former are a proper trash can on the desktop, a drop stack (drag and drop files from anywhere into the same little target in your window, then manipulate everything on the stack at the same time or pop them off FILO-style), constant Info and Preview panes in every view mode, built-in terminal, and many more. As of PF5 it's got a dual-pane mode, too--and I love dual-pane. Which is why I am not yet totally satisfied, because Path Finder's dual pane mode is definitely inferior to [Forklift][fl], which is a full, cool Commander-style dual pane file manager. So I am torn. Path Finder replaces every part of the Finder, and does it well. Forklift does what it does much better than how Path Finder does the same thing, but is also more limited. I think they both need a little more time. In the meantime, what's the best app in the world if you: a) love dual-pane file managers, and b) love vim? vifm, of course! It's a curses-based dual-pane file manager that obeys vim key commands. vifs, have my mouseless baby.

Disturbingly, my file management exploration doesn't end there. For good measure, I also love Leap, a file manager that basically takes all the Spotlight metadata of all your files and presents your entire filesystem as a series of filters or metadata views, rather than a hierarchical system of folders. Very cool.

For email I use Gyazmail rather than Apple Mail. It's an odd choice, and there's no one killer feature in it that makes it a must-have, but there's just a thousand interface things in Apple Mail that drive me nuts. If you feel the same, check it out. It's never failed me, which is more than I can say for the Apple offering.

For watching videos, I am a huge fan of Movist. I have all of them on hand, of course: VLC, Quicktime, Mplayer--the world of codecs gives me little choice--but Movist has a great interface, and most nicely, can switch between the ffmpeg engine and the Quicktime engine in one app. And really pretty subtitles, if that's your thing.

There's a bunch of applications that I don't actively use very often, but that I like to have around because I think they approach their space in an interesting or distinctive way. Here's a non-comprehensive list: ASCII/edit, Eddie, Flow, MindNode, Name Mangler, Nifty Box, Shovebox, Rita, Shelf, Stapler, Tinderbox, Typeset.

Popchar is great if you find yourself employing a lot of Unicode characters and the like. It sits in the menubar and gives you quick access without having to load the whole character palette.

And that looks like it, for now. I've not mentioned every single app on my computer; FTP programs, for instance, are passed by, for the reason that there's a lot of them, they're all pretty good, and I haven't used any one for so much to have developed a preference. To be honest, though, the world of OS X software is pretty healthy. There's a lot of enthusiastic developers out there, they've got good aesthetic taste, and Apple has given them good tools to write code with--and most of it's not too pricey either. It is a sickness I have; I spend my time watching the applications, downloading them, playing with them. I hope that some of my labor may be of use.