Open Source Apps

I am a fairly new Mac user and over the past few months I have tried out many apps, many were awful but a few work great. Now I have a chance to share my experience and make a few recommendations. The qualities I look for are usability (UI + overall design) and performance (no memory hogs please), Here goes..

Smultron is a great free/open source text editor. For editing pages hosted on WebDAV servers or editing local stuff, this is a great app. It looks great and works great as well. The UI is very clean, its is a very light prog and the color coding is very nice. This is the most easy to use text editor I have found.

TextWrangler is a great app. Let me start off by saying that it is really ugly. I generally don’t let things like this bother me but this app is hideous. Luckily, it is a very powerful text editor, especially for FTP applications. This one would probably be at the top of the list if it was more pleasing to look at and the UI was improved slightly. I want an ^ button damnit!

I just got a copy of Quicksilver and I must say that I am not quite used to it, however there is almost nothing that this app can’t do. It made me pancakes yesterday morning. Everybody loves this one so Im going to shut up, but I urge you to try it out. It will change the way you find files and launch progs with your Mac.

Cyberduck is a free FTP browser for Mac OSX. Sure it it a little buggy but it has some great features, its customizable and its free! This little prog is a real workhorse and its pretty light as well. There are better FTP browsers out there but its hard to deny the value of a free app that is as functional as this one.