Software Review for Year 2004

Title might be a bit misleading. Some of these applications have been around longer than just this past year; but they are new to me this year. They helped me get a great deal of work done.

In no particular order…

  • skedit – A nice editor for web development. Why get use to bbEdit if you there are nicer options out there? Skedit has one really neat feature for me, the “Sites Manager”. Every project you work on is organized by their URL or file path. This editor supports sftp and cvs, and subversion (svn) is in the works.
  • camino – My safari installation hasn’t been write since I installed saft. Firefox has been a little quirky and slow. Camino is quick, has a small footprint and is pretty on the eyes.
  • iterm – I still mostly use terminal bundled with OS X, but with the tabs that iterm implements I sometimes use it instead. I wrote about this previously. It’s a little heavier on memory usage and has an occasional crash, but overall it’s really fun to use.
  • adium – I’ve written about adium before as well. With the latest release the meta contacts work really well and jabber chat is finally stable. They really should create a menu item to inject xml directly into the jabber session though. There are lot of admin commands I do with jabber that you can’t do with this application yet.
  • dvarchive – This application was one of the main deciding factors between getting a tivo and a replay. I bought the replay. It’s also the best working java application I’ve used in OS X.
  • iwork – Makes managing time and services fun. I’ve organized and invoiced both my own contract jobs and my wife’s with this application.
  • netnewswire 2 – Currently in beta, it’s the best news aggregator I’ve used. Today they released a new beta that has podcast support as well.
  • wordpress 1.3 – In beta also. Themes support, nuff said.
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Comment (1)

  1. indy wrote:

    You forgot firefox, the best software–period– for 2004

    Friday, December 31, 2004 at 10.56 pm #

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  1. Software Review for Year 2005 at jstownsley.com on Wednesday, December 28, 2005 at 9.09 am

    [...] Last year I wrote about a handful of applications I discovered and used during the year. I’m keeping that tradition this year, along with some commentary about 2004’s list. [...]