Mac Apps, round 1
December 1, 2007 by adawes
Inspired by a recent post by Sujit Datta, I decided to start a series covering my favorite Mac applications. These are generally physics-type applications but should be useful to a wide range of people in any field of science.
First off, the applications that I spend roughly 80% of my time using:
BibDesk - BibTeX management with built-in PDF storage, bibtex citation export, and many other great features. My favorites are importing citations directly from Google Scholar, proper handling of accented characters, and cite-key completion in editors such as:
Textmate - a Unix text editor native to the mac… if that makes sense. Textmate is a native Cocoa app, making it seamless in the Mac UI, but it treats text editing like any serious unix text editor would. Great templates, shortcuts and everything in-between. I use it to write LaTeX, C++, python, MATLAB, and just about anything that isn’t in binary (including this post!). Check out the blogging bundle, easy integration with popular blog API’s. Even upload and link images from within Textmate.
DataGraph - a very intuitive, yet still powerful, 2D plotting package. Highly capable, and very responsive developer (Local too: Chapel Hill, NC). Features include formula-based data sets, a la excel, curve-fitting, and plenty of options to make plots clean, and readable.
Quicksilver - if you thought the command line was a fast way to get things done, then you haven’t seen Quicksilver. It’s a multifunction launcher with more features than I can explain now. If used well, it will shave years off your life as a computer user.
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