The first piece of software in my series of essential OS X software is a very handy tool which reminds you when you haven’t attached a file in an email when you intended to. How does it do this? Well, it searches for key words in the email and reminds you if, for example, you […]
I have recently discovered PyDev – a Python IDE which runs within Eclipse. Although I’d given up on big all-singing, all-dancing IDEs a few years ago I’m really liking it. The Ctrl-Space completion is very handy, as are the number of refactorings that are available from the menus. Anyway, I use the Enthought Python Distribution […]
For a while I used Quicksilver, but it seemed to be rather unstable on my machine. Then I used Quick Search Box, but it got terribly slow. Then, somehow, I found out about Alfred – and it’s replaced them both. Alfred, like the other applications mentioned above, is a launcher, but it does far more […]
Ahhh PDFs…., or more formally, Portable Document Format files. I remember the days when I thought that PDFs were only for instruction manuals downloaded from the internet, or electronic copies of things that you don’t want people to be able to alter. Not so – I have recently discovered the joys of PDFs, particularly through […]
Every so often, on my travels around the internet, I come across a piece of software which is so great that I wonder why on earth I haven’t heard of it before. The software listed below falls into this category, and hopefully by posting the list here I will allow more people to find them. […]
I’ve spent the last couple of months getting used to my new MacBook Pro, and I must say that overall I’m really liking it. Continuing my previous posts about my mac, here are my favourite three pieces of OS X software: Preview This is the built-in image and PDF viewer that comes with OS X. […]
Git is my favourite version control system (see Why is Git better than X for some good comparisons with other tools, and my GitHub repositories to see what I’ve been doing with it lately). I now use it for all of my programming projects, and many of my writing projects (as I’m now using LaTeX […]
Sometimes you may find that your Mac OS X installation has an old URL for the software update service in its preferences, which may mean that you can’t successfully run the Software Update tool under the Apple menu. In my case, I got my Mac from my university and the update server was set to some internal […]
Well, as mentioned before, I’ve recently been given (by my PhD funding body) a MacBook Pro laptop. I’m really getting to like it, but there are still some things that frustrate me. So, this will be one of two posts: my favourite things, followed by my least-favourite things. So, the good bits first: Instant Sleep/Wakeup […]