Indispensable Applications: A Commentary

This post comments Kieran Healy’s list [copy] of indispensable applications. I do not present my list as better, just different: different applications reflect different workflows. The following graph¹ roughly sketches my usual way of using my (Apple Macintosh) computer:

This graph indicates that I depend very much on Mac OS X applications, hence every little improvement in Safari, Preview, the Finder and TextEdit counts to me. I am quite pleased with all but the latter: I use Microsoft Word² as a replacement.

Day-to-Day

Launch and find: Quicksilver

Why not. Spotlight does the trick, however, as a good document and application launcher. Since it is embedded directly into Mac OS X, it may turn out less CPU-greedy than Quicksilver, yet more limited.

Browse: Safari

Safari rules. Flock may be a nice alternative if you need to gather a large collection of links, or if you are a linky person as I am. At this time of writing, Flock is still stuck at beta version stage and has not, in my opinion, reached the decent quality stage that makes an application an everyday companion, yet it is going in the right direction, so keeping an eye on it is a good idea. Nice add-ons are Saft and Inquisitor; much more can be found through John Hick’s excellent Pimp My Safari treasure box.

Aggregate: NetNewsWire

I am a former NNW user—which sounds quite a lot like I used to be an alcoholic, and that was it: I am a former feed-a-holic.
Abandoning most primary sources of information was a first step towards less computer time. A second one was to use Bloglines, which I can consult from basically anywhere, not only at home as with NNW. How did this turn into a time gain? In a regular day, it appears I find myself with many hours to spend stuck in classes that are boring to death. Bloglines is a good way to fetch a few interesting posts before class and then find yourself reading something funny if not interesting.
I am giving a try at the Safari RSS feature. Not bad: it helps testing feeds, having them sit in the bookmarks bar for a week or two before getting them to join the Bloglines ones. Still, Bloglines is my #1 choice.

Blog: Ecto

This suggests blogging is a good idea in the first place, which may be questionable in some very specific contexts. As far as students are concerned, I feel that blogging is an excellent exercise. I blog directly from my browser, inside the standard WordPress interface. Ecto may be of great help to some, especially to HTML-phobics.

Keep in touch with reality (and your agenda): CalendarClock

Definitely nice. Used to be free, now costs $20, which deeply sucks. Anyway, this type of practical and logical (“why didn’t anyone come out with that idea before?”) pieces of software often makes its way to being a system item (what could be called the “Konfabulator → Dashboard” syndrome).

Email: Mail

I recommend Gmail and its desktop notifier. Whatever effort you will put into it, your email will end up as a huge mess. Gmail does not try to struggle against that. Instead, it lets you filter, archive and label your stuff, and also star what really needs immediate attention. All your email stays online, a guarantee that you will be able to fetch anything you send, were sent or that you sent to yourself at any time, any place. In brief, Gmail is invaluable. Get invited.

UNIX: Terminal

Using any form of xterm pleases the geek inside you. I use Terminal as a last-resort problem-solver: moving (mv), deleting (rm) or changing properties (chown) on files, mostly.

Workflow Essentials³

Text processing: Emacs, LaTeX, AUCTeX, RefTeX

Not everyone in the academe needs LaTeX to survive. I did learn to use LaTeX myself just in case, but my studies had a null incentive effect in this decision.
As far as day-to-day text editing is concerned, I do not use LaTeX, only a few fanatics from the computer science and economics departments do. I prefer to use any application that outputs plain text (.txt) or RTF. TextEdit does the trick, Word does the trick, although both of them tend to suck for different reasons.
Coming to LaTeX editing, I use iTexMac, reputably the best LaTeX editor on the Mac.

Data processing: R, ESS, Sweave, RCS

Just like LaTeX, R is not an essential tool depending on where you stand in the academe. Just like LaTeX, I have it installed on my disk, and have followed a few tutorials. R is the free SPSS, and it’s better (yet less friendly, which, once again, strokes the geek inside you). Some of us will never be asked to perform better stats than what Excel can achieve.

File synchronization with Unison

I should be using that.

Personal additions

BibDesk

Bibdesk is EndNote with a smarter GUI and the BibTeX format. Lifesaver. Has a structural effect on my own ‘readflow’: keywords help me to group my readings into thematic clusters. Can also sort your papers for you and rename them smartly (eg. Healy1999b-Indispensable-Applications.pdf).

Social tagging: del.icio.us, CiteULike, Connotea

For the linky ones. I collect huge (and messy) collections of links, even though I hardly find the time to read more than 25% of them. I recommend using only one of the three systems cited, while reading (selectively) all of them.

PDF Browser Plugin and Word Browser Plugin

Brilliantly efficient plugins to save time at opening/reading documents. As loveable as the ‘display as HTML’ function in Gmail.

Footnotes

[1] Only little nuance would make this workflow almost perfectly exact, but adding, say, BibDesk (which nicely handles my papers location on my hard drive) or other side applications (such as FTP and other protocol-related utilities) would only make it even more unreadable. Please also note that I did not include any information on the frequency of use: I launch Preview approximately a thousand times more often than BBEdit, even though this graph tells nothing about that.

[2] I am well aware that using Word has important drawbacks and equates to heresy in übergeek circles, but I need footnotes and I cannot spend my life adjusting and debugging my (love-it/hate-it) LaTeX installation.

[3] Please refer to Kerian Healey’s original post for precise indications on the cited applications.