OS X Software Round-up Part 1

Tuesday, March 7, 2006

TextWrangler
For the programmer on a budget, TextWrangler is an almost-full-featured text editor from the makers of BBEdit, without the price tag. Even its most basic feature – a multi-document interface – makes it stand out among other text editors for the Mac. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines may frown on MDI’s, but as a programmer I simply cannot bring myself to work without them as I’m frequently jumping back and forth between a dozen or more source files and do not want to manage that many windows on the desktop.
Fugu
The University of Michigan brings you Fugu: a graphical frontend to SFTP, SCP and SSH for the Mac. This tool is simple, and simply invaluable.
MenuMeters
MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk and network monitoring tools that live in your menu bar. They come in a somewhat displeasing blue-red-green color scheme, but can be customized.
Disk Inventory X
This handy application shows you a color-coded visual representation of the sizes of files and folders on your hard drive.

X Audio Compression Toolkit (xAct)
xAct is a graphic frontend to audio compression tools like shorten and shntool. It gives you a quick and easy way to encode and decode lossless SHN audio files.
MacFLAC
Like xAct, MacFLAC is another graphical frontend for tools that let you encode and decode lossless audio files. MacFLAC gives you an interface to FLAC, the Free Lossless Audio Codec.

Azureus – Java BitTorrent Client
Azureus is an intuitive BitTorrent client with a featureset that gives you extensive control over your downloads.