If there’s one common thread I’ve noticed about software I deem “good”, it’s that it changes the way I use my computer; sometimes subtly, and sometimes profoundly. I’ve been meaning to put together this list of recent habit changers for a while:

NetNewsWire 3.0

This update to my favorite RSS Feed reader is not even up to beta level yet, but the layout redesign has had a profound change on how I read things on the web. The last version had embedded a web browser with tabbed viewing, but I never made use of it until the UI was tweaked. With the addition of a visual tab bar — filled with thumbnails of the loaded pages — my whole outlook on how I see the web changed, and that’s only one of the changes under the hood.

MacFusion

This is a front end for MacFUSE, which allows you to mount different file systems onto your computer. Before MacFusion, I couldn’t find a good reason to pull it into daily use. With MacFusion, I can now easily mount my web sites using SSH or FTP just like they were another hard drive — a real godsend for a web designer who needs easy access to his code. What’s more, it goes great with….

TextMate

A clean, fast text editor that handles HTML and CSS like nobody’s business — especially if those files live locally on your computer. It’s only downside was the way it interacted with my FTP program of choice, Transmit — one document per window. When you’re trying to make changes to an entire site, that’s a real deal breaker. Now in unison with MacFusion, I’m in coding heaven.

Twitterriffic

One of the biggest additions to my site this year — not to mention my online life — has been the use of twitter. This little light-weight program makes posting updates and keeping up with your friends’ Twitters drop-dead simple.

iScroll2

Those of you with newer Apple laptops already have two-finger scrolling support built in, but for those of us with slightly older (read: most 2003 to 2004) PowerBooks and iBooks, this little software patch adds in that same feature for us. Seriously, it’s a wonder I was able to get along for so long without the simple two-finger solution to page scrolling.

Tags: Software

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.