_J STownsle y .com    ₃₃₆

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.

• Opera, Safari, Firefox – I’m currently using Safari as my browser, the version bundled with Tiger this year is just as snappy as Camino on last years list. I also use Firefox once-in-a-while, mostly when I need the Web Developer Extension. On a side note, I used Opera for a few months and absolutely loved it. I’ve never seen pages render so fast, I need to revisit it and find out why I neglect it so much.
• SynergyKM – I use 2 laptops and a desktop system now, with one mouse and keyboard across three monitors. Synergy makes this possible and SynergyKM makes this elegant to use in OS X.
• menushade – Forgot how I stumbled on this nifty app, it decreases the brightness of the menubar in OS X and makes it not so distracting.
• Google Earth – Not released for mac yet, but it gets a nod because I peaked at a leaked release and think it’s fantastic. It’s probably equally as fantastic in Windows.
• iTunes – With the addition of podcast/vidcast support, iTunes is now always running in my dock.
• HTTPWatch – Similar to the livehttpheaders firefox extension, this displays details of a http session from cookies and post variables to http headers and the content stream.
• AppRocket – I previously mentioned AppRocket, It’s QuickSilver for windows.
• Mozilla Venkman – Although not mastered yet, Venkman has helped me more than a few times when debugging javascript.
• WinMerge – Creates a pretty diff.
• Ethereal – I’d like a native OS X version, and no I don’t want to run fink, dports, X11, etc.
• Flickr – ‘Nuff said.

Adium, iWork (now iBiz), NetNewsWire, wordpress, and DVArchive were all on my list last year. I use them daily still, so they get props for lasting 2 years. Wonder if they’ll make 3?