brian hefele's untidy space

So, Nine Inch Nails has slowed down for a while, and for that I am thankful. I know this is like heresy to my fellow electronic and industrial fans, but here's how I see things… NIN released Pretty Hate Machine in the late eighties. It was this quirky, somewhat minimalist, danceable industrial album in the vein of a lot of other work that was going on in the scene. It wasn't revolutionary, except for the fact that it hit the mainstream. That isn't to say that it wasn't a good release, or deserving of its popularity - it was (and is) a great album.

Then things changed a bit, and we got Broken, Fixed, The Downward Spiral, and Further Down the Spiral. I lump these all together because of Flood's influence, there's a very particular sound about these two sets that never quite returns to NIN. Broken is fresh, the start of something new. It has a great cover of 'Suck' by Pigface. But then The Downward Spiral happened, and nothing else mattered. To me, this is the best release in the entire NIN discography. I would not be surprised if up until this point, many would agree with me - NIN had a good start, and got better and better with subsequent albums. But then (and this is where my words get treasonous)…

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First, an introduction to a series. I have realized that when I want to find the best piece of software for a given category, I read some reviews, I check out screenshots, but mainly I install every player in the category and put them all through their paces. This should be evident from my roundup of Mac text editors. In my head, I rate them for many things, and figure out which suits me best. But aside from just writing rambling reviews, I figure I should make these raw evaluations more readily available. So I would like to regularly review a pile of apps in a given category, and accompany them with comma- and/or tab-delimited tables. In the future I will also compile these tables into a regularly-updated SQLite database. Today is terminal emulators, of which there are apparently more than just Terminal.app and iTerm.

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There are well-known best-in-class Mac apps for tackling many tasks. In fact, many Mac users are Mac users because of certain tools (Final Cut Pro) that are well known and highly regarded. Aside from the obvious choices (Creative Suite, unfortunately, is still the only serious contender for design work), there are a handful of programs that every serious Mac user knows about - Quicksilver (and now, Google Quick Search Box) for a launcher, TextMate for a text editor, Transmit for an FTP client, Dropbox for cloud storage, and Quinn for Tetris. There are excellent alternatives to most of these, and power-users know and have tried them all. But we each have our own lesser-known favorites, without which we probably couldn't make it through the day…

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