doug nelson: DISENGAGE!

Today was a milestone of sweetness: Nailed down the comps for the new Viget blogs and set up the shiny new Macs the design team acquired. New blogs, new people, new Macs…I’m seriously excited about this month at the Labs.

One fun bit of software I already love is Growl, a program that interacts with systems like Twitter, IM, Mail, Google Reader, CyberDuck, and even Campfire to provide slick black little notes that pop up from time to time. I’m not sure if it’ll make me “more productive,” but, it will certainly entertain me.

Another note was that I hadn’t realized how picky and specialized my OS X setup had become until I was installing the massive glut of freeware I’ve grown accustomed to, plus a few more items I’d found while scouring for toys.

So here’s the setup:

Design and Development
Adobe CS3 Suite
Aptana Studio - Free development IDE with tons of support for filetypes and languages
TextWrangler - Nice, simple tool that can access and edit hidden files like .htaccess with no hassle
CSSedit - Rob hooked us up with this hotness: CSSedit allows you to collapse and open entire groups of CSS using some simple comment formats.
CyberDuck - Freeware FTP with a ton of capabilities.
CSStweak Widget - Not sure how great this is, but it’s one of those CSS compressors, packed into the Dashboard.
Linotype Font Explorer X - Linotype’s free font manager is far better than its pay-for competitors.

Communication and Notification
Twitterific - It’s just Twitter, but, not in a web browser. Absolutely essential, of course.
Growl - Get notifications from IMs, Tweets, mail, and Campfire chat that might be hanging out on another Space or minimized.
Adium - Has everything you could want in a chat program, except Pidgin’s brilliant “psychic mode.”

General
VMware Fusion - Our preferred method for running a virtual Windows environment (IE testing)
Quicksilver - Superflexible launcher/task completer.
NeoOffice - Open Microsoft Office documents without having to do/purchase something horrible.
Dashalytics - Awesome Dashboard widget that feeds your google analytic stats.
Remember The Milk / Google / Wikipedia Widgets - Anything that replaces browser tasks with Dashboard tasks is good in my book.
iClipLite - Initially baffling, this widget helps you saved clipboard items for later use, or even record a whole string of CMD-Cs for reuse later.

Video
VLC - As always. The most flexible video player around.
Flip4Mac - Windows Media Player replacement, for those times when you absolutely must view a WMV.

Clips
I’m pretty sure I told some people here that Clips was the only reason I wanted Leopard, and I am so effing psyched about it. The only thing I’ve done so far is cut down on more in-browser time by clipping all the stats from my sites on commandshift3.com, which is such a sad, petty use for an amazing tool.

Hardware
NuLooq Controller - This odd item is a controller that can be easily customized to perform unique actions in different programs, the most powerful of which being a tactile move/zoom which can be achieved by pushing or rotating the outer ring. Mele got it for me ages ago, but I didn’t have a chance to work with it until today.
Evoluent Vertical Mouse - Okay, I don’t actually HAVE this…I’ve been waiting for it to since the beginning of November. But when I DO get it, it’s an interesting mouse shape that relieved the radial tunnel problems I periodically have, so, yeah, I’m looking forward to that.

Am I missing anything? What’s everyone else using on their Macs?