Top 22 Mac OS X Products: Part Two

Continued from Part 1.

10

NetworkLocation
from Centrix

Those of you old enough to have worked regularly on Mac OS 9 remember the Mac OS 9 Location Manager. It was a way to make switching network configurations dead simple. The reason for this was that Mac OS 9 couldn't do multilink multihoming, so if you wanted to switch your connection from wireless to Ethernet, you had to manually switch the active interface. Over time, you could tie a few things to that...start applications, set printers, etc.

With Mac OS X, the main reason for Location Manager died, but not the desire for the ability to say "I'm going somewhere else, do this." Actually, I rarely used Location Manager for changing network configs. I used it as a spiffy little application and configuration manager. There have been attempts to replicate Location Manager in Mac OS X throughout the years, but none ever did anything for me, until an acquaintance of mine, Phil Letourneau, part of Centrix, asked me to play with it.

I have to say, the folks at Centrix did it right. It has a nice UI, comes with a solid number of pre-built actions, and it lets me run AppleScripts, so I can have it do all sorts of neat things just by changing "location." I'm testing some internal stuff with it, but so far, it's the best location manager I've seen, and the first one I've wanted to use on Mac OS X since well, Mac OS X.

9

Apple Remote Desktop 3
from Apple

Yes, I know there's a few Apple applications and utilities. That's always a quandary, because I don't want to give Apple too much consideration, yet it would be equally wrong to not put in an Apple that I use regularly and like, just because it's an Apple product. So while I make sure that it really is something I use a lot, I'm not going to exclude something just because of who makes it.

With that, my number seven on the list is Apple Remote Desktop 3 from Apple. It is the tool I live by when I'm actively managing my Macs. Apple Remote Desktop has been a solid tool since it was called the Apple Network Assistant, but in version 3, Apple not only fixed many of the reporting issues that had plagued earlier versions, but they added in some rather solid new reports of particular use for SOX environments, and they added AppleScript support for the Apple Remote Desktop administration application itself.

A scriptable Apple Remote Desktop may not seem like much, but it has made my use of Apple Remote Desktop more efficient than any GUI improvement could have. Now, when I have to push out, say, a new version of Firefox, I don't have to fire up Apple Remote Desktop, select the workgroup I want to push it to, drag Firefox to that selection, tell Apple Remote Desktop what the destination is, and how to handle problems. Instead, I have a folder in my Dock called "Copy to all Macs' Applications folder." This has an AppleScript folder action attached to it that tells Apple Remote Desktop to "copy all items added to this folder to the /Applications folder on every machine in this computer list." Drag, drop, go do something else. I do the same for all kinds of stuff I do regularly in Apple Remote Desktop. Makes updating Microsoft Office 2004 really simple, although I have to do a bit more work due to the way Office updates. Either way, without AppleScript, Apple Remote Desktop was a solid tool. With AppleScript, Apple Remote Desktop is absolutely indispensable.

8

MacLink Plus Deluxe
from DataViz

While most of the items on this list are things I use constantly or almost constantly, MacLink Plus is one of those "just in case" tools. MacLink Plus Deluxe can open pretty much any file format. However, I don't use it so much for "unknown" file formats, although it's fantastic for those, but more for really odd versions of things, like ancient versions of MacWrite, (I know, I know, as opposed to the new versions), or old Microsoft Works files. In a past job, I used it almost constantly to properly identify UUEncoded files that were trying so hard to look like something else. MacLink Plus does only a couple things but it does them really well, and I suppose that's all you can ask of any application.

7

Parallels Desktop for Mac
from Parallels Inc.

Every once in a while, a product comes along that radically changes not just how you perform a specific task or tasks, but how you view your computer in general. Sometimes it's a specific application, like VisiCalc, sometimes it's a category of applications, like Desktop Publishing. Sometimes it's both. On the Mac, it's Parallels and Virtualization. Now, to be fair, there have been types of virtualization around for years and decades on the Mac. But prior to the Intel Macs, they were slow, and the kinds of things you used only when you had to. With the Intel Macs, virtualization moved from the...lassitude of Virtual PC to the real-world usability of Parallels. (Yes, I know about VMWare Fusion, but it's not soup yet, and I think talking about obvious betas isn't really fair.)

I use Parallels a lot, and I don't just use it with one operating system. Currently I'm running Windows XP, Vista Business, and Ubuntu under Parallels. They all work wonderfully well, and without the tremendous hit in speed that you had with Virtual PC on PowerPC hardware. If all Parallels did was provide a solid VM setup on the Intel Macs, it would be a good product. But they keep doing more. With the next version, they'll have "Coherence" mode, which allows Windows applications to just "appear" on your Mac OS X desktop without needing the Windows desktop container window in your way. (It's still there, it's just invisible.) You also get the ability to keep Windows applications in the Dock, and it will work with BootCamp partitions. There's no accelerated 3-D support yet, nor support for running on Mac OS X Server, but Parallels says its coming, and with their pace of development, I don't doubt it in the least. With Parallels, I'm able to do, well, almost anything I want with my Mac, all without having to add a Windows partition to my system. Not that I can't do that. With its BootCamp support, I can easily run my BootCamp installation of Windows inside a Parallels VM as well. The best of both worlds. Not bad for a product that costs less than ninety bucks in the United States.

6

Remote Desktop Connection

from Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit

While I love Parallels, there are things it's not suited for. One of them is being a lightweight way to manage multiple remote Windows servers. For that, there's Remote Desktop Client. A small application, (no, really, it only takes up 912 Kytes on my hard drive), Remote Desktop Client is a huge force multiplier, in that it lets one computer run many, many servers from any location on the network. It is what I use for everything from Active Directory management tasks to administering my WebSphere and DB2 servers.

While it sounds a lot like Apple Remote Desktop, it's not a remote control application. Remote Desktop Client is, instead, a way to have a remote graphical login to a Windows system. It's far closer to X Window Systems than to Apple Remote Desktop. Whatever the model, it's a tool I use throughout my day every day to get real work done, and best of all? It's free. Can't beat that with a stick.

5

Snapz Pro X
from Ambrosia Software

Snapz Pro is one of those applications that you could easily spend your entire Mac life not using, and not ever need to. But, when you need to make screenshots or full-motion screen captures, you'll wonder how you survived without it. Snapz is in essence a one-trick pony. But it's able to do that one trick better than any other pony in the stable. I've used it to create presentations, tutorials, heck, at one point, I used it to help create a tutorial DVD set.

It's not just the ability to do screenshots better than Mac OS X's built-in feature, it's that you can do menus, windows as objects, random areas on the screen, scale down the shot, save it as a wide range of file formats, make movies of what you're doing on the screen and either capture audio then, or re-do the audio in some other application. It's not the cheapest, but it is the best, and there's reams of work that I'd not have been able to do without it.

4

Boot Camp
from Apple

While I am not the biggest fan of dual and multiboot (mostly because I spent almost three years having to live that life, it's highly overrated), there are times when virtualization won't do and you need-full on native speed. (Mostly for games, but there are other reasons, too. 3-D acceleration in VMs is still not soup yet on the Mac.) For that, there's Boot Camp. It's a really simple way to turn a Mac into a Mac/Wintel box in a fairly painless way. Run the Boot Camp assistant, then use your trusty Windows XP SP2 CD, and 70 or so updates later, you're done!

While it is completely unsupported, you also can use it with Vista, although the driver install is more tedious than on XP. In all fairness, Apple isn't yet supporting Vista in Boot Camp, so if you do this, it's a bit of a science project. But, once you get it on there, Vista runs just fine, and both Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights 2 run just peachy on a MacBook Pro. So if you do need to boot Windows, Boot Camp is a pretty nice way to do it.

3

PDF
created by Adobe Systems

Note here that I'm saying "PDF", not "Acrobat" or any other application. It's a bit strange for this list, but it's also something that I use every day, and it has, since its introduction, made my life a lot easier. The amount of time I spend worrying about documentation formats has dropped to zero. It's going to be PDF: Sun's gonna shine, bird's gonna sing, documentation's gonna be PDF. I can tell you that when documentation is not in PDF, I get really put out.

PDF is one of those things that scales from the simple to the hideously complex. How complex? Well, I live in Missouri, and while the IRS allows you to directly enter your yearly income tax data into a PDF, ("Fillable" PDF), Missouri takes that one step further. OK, it takes it on a long plane ride and a nice hotel further. With the Missouri State Income Tax form, it does the calculations for me, brings up any additional forms I need, and then correctly prints and even bar-codes the PDF for me.

It can do this because Adobe had the foresight to make the PDF document format scriptable à la Word, but instead of VBA or AppleScript, PDF uses JavaScript, and it uses the heck out of JavaScript. This allows you to take a PDF from just a static representation of a form to something that's interactive and quite useful. It also can be digitally signed, so you don't have to worry about tampering, and you can use it in some pretty serious document review and approval workflows. The biggest problem with PDF sometimes is getting Adobe to tell you about it in a way that isn't focused almost exclusively on big enterprise. But even with that, PDF makes my life tons easier than it would be without PDF.

2

Lingon
from Peter Borg

With Mac OS X 10.4, Apple introduced a new way to deal with things like Startupitems, login items, and cron jobs: launchd. It's a new way of dealing with things that need to always be running, or need to run on a schedule, or need to start at boot or login, and it's an attempt to bring it all under one roof.

The problem is, actually using launchd kind of stinks unless you are, as a friend of mine said, "A Ph.D. in computer science."

However, this is software and no problem stays unpunished for long. Enter Lingon, from Peter Borg. Lingon is an application that not only gives you a GUI for creating and maintaining launchd items, but also helps you unlock the full power of launchd items. I know a lot of applications claim to do the whole "Unlock the full potential of ", but Lingon is in the minority of applications that actually do that, and do it well. It's not an application you want on every computer on the network (in the wrong hands, it's a foot-shooter of huge proportions. Elephant gun. With full auto. Exploding bullets.), but in the hands of a sysadmin, it's an invaluable tool. I know I have quite a few things running to make my life easier, and thanks to Lingon, creating them isn't a pain.

1

Workgroup Manager
from Apple

Remember when I said "don't take the order too seriously"? Really, I meant that. I needed to do 20 things for this article, and so I numbered them to help keep track--nothing more. (I must've lost track, because I ended up with 22.) I know a few people who have heard me rail about Workgroup Manager's deficiencies over the years are wondering about this inclusion, but the truth is, for all the things I don't like about Workgroup Manager, there's a lot of stuff I do like about it. If I had to pick one thing, I'd say "ACL handling." Yes, I can, and do, use the command line for dealing with access control lists, but Workgroup Manager gives me more, better tools for ACLs in a pretty solid GUI. It's not just applying and changing them. It's also being able to quickly see how various ACLs apply to specific users or groups. I also find it more convenient to use Workgroup Manager for creating new ACL'd directories, or modifying ACLs for specific directories. I'm not going to get into a "command-line vs. GUI" thing here, but in this case, I definitely prefer the GUI.

The other big reason for my appreciation of Workgroup Manager is SOX. I work and live in a SOX environment, so being able to implement auditor "recommendations" quickly and reliably is important, and Workgroup Manager is a big part of that. Forcing the use of password-protected Screen Savers, forcibly disabling that inane "Open Safe Files" setting in Safari, adding required text to the login screen, etc. I get all of that done with Workgroup Manager, and much easier than I would otherwise. Like everything else on this list, it does what I need it to do, it does it well, and makes my life easier. What more could I ask? OK, a lot more, but that's for a different article.

There you have it, my "Top Twenty" list for Mac OS X. It's probably not going to match yours, but hopefully it may give you a new trick to try. Every item on here either makes my day easier or more fun or sometimes both. I think that's about the most you can ask for from software.

See the rest of John C. Welch's list of Top Mac OS X products in Part 1.