brian hefele's untidy space

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…

ForkLift

ForkLift is probably the best known of the three bits of software that I'll be briefly touching upon in this post. Those who haven't used it, however, are missing out on something big. The Finder is one of the weak points of OS X, having changed little over the years, and offering little to power-users. Two common complaints are a dual-pane browsing mode, and full (not read-only) FTP support. ForkLift tackles these issues first and foremost, and does so in a fast, graceful, beautiful way. There are plenty of good FTP clients out there for the Mac, so I won't go into much detail on what ForkLift offers, but I will say that its FTP support is the fastest I have used, incredibly stable, and you get an amazing dual-pane file browser along with it.

So, on to that part! As far as dual-pane browsers go, nothing compares to ForkLift. Your options are basically Midnight Commander¹ (a TUI that runs in the terminal), TotalFinder (a Finder hack which is neat but not very stable in my testing), and Path Finder (a bloated, messy, unstable grandfather of a file browser). And then there is ForkLift, which feels exactly like what the Finder should be. I use it every day to manage my files, and as my FTP client to manage my sites. I've been beta testing the upcoming version 2 (now in public beta) and it's better than ever. ForkLift is $30, users who buy now will get a free upgrade to version 2 when it launches.

Base

A spreadsheet is a program which presents the user with a table, simulating a paper worksheet for accounting. It is, basically, a big grid for doing math with. A database also (may) present a user with a table, but the difference is that this table is for putting data into. So whenever I see someone storing arbitrary data in an Excel file, I'm really rather sickened. I do understand, however, most databases are big daunting servers that must be connected to, with users and code and who knows what else! From a common user's perspective, I can see why Excel is the choice over Access - but that doesn't make it right. Formats like SQLite are designed to be simple databases wrapped up in one clean file, easily transportable and manageable. But the common user still needs a decent GUI to handle their database - enter Base.

There are a number of expensive multi-SQL database interfaces for the Mac, but none of them feel very Maclike, and using them is really quite tedious. There are a few free SQLite browsers, mainly written in REALBasic, which I can only assume had some decent inbuilt SQLite support. So these all suck simply because they're REALBasic programs. Base is a native Cocoa app, exceptionally quick and pleasant to use. I use SQLite databases a lot for personal info and various business things, and I do it all through Base (okay, I do maybe 1% on the command line). Base is a fairly young app, and occasionally bugs pop up, and it could be more feature rich. But the developers are exceptionally responsive, to the point where sending a long-winded email full of feature requests led to 4/5 of said features slipping into the next point release. The devs obviously care about this program, and for good reason - nothing can touch it for a Maclike SQLite interface. Perhaps this will change when Sequel Pro adds SQLite support, but that remains to be seen. Base runs £10 (right around $15 at the time of this post), an incredible price for database software.

Telephone

SIP, as a standard for VOIP, is a good thing. Standards mean the availability of many programs, compatible with many services. Unfortunately, this compatibility is not widely advertised, it seems, and many of the programs are vile things, branded with a SIP provider's name and aesthetic. Even the non-branded SIP clients for Mac are reminiscent of horrible skinned MP3 players with a strong 90s vibe. Telephone is the exception to the rule. Plain-Jane Cocoa, out of your way until you need it, with excellent Address Book integration.

I've been using Telephone for months now in conjunction with Google Voice and Gizmo5. It works wonderfully - sound quality is fine, the app hangs out quietly until needed, and every piece of the puzzle is free. My only real complaint about the app would be its icon, an ugly flat thing that sticks out like a sore thumb in my dock. But that's a small price to pay for effortlessly taking calls on my Mac. Telephone is free, and open source as well.

^*1: I like mc, and I use it from time to time when I'm feeling glum. But for some reason, the build I have does not exit properly - it leaves an mc process running in the background which will peg a core of my cpu until I throw it a SIGTERM. Weird, eh?