Computing on the Macbook
After three years with ibook G4 it was time to get a new laptop. And I decided to stick with Apple. This time I am going to give Mac a try instead of installing Linux.
Leopard comes with a huge collection of tools pre-installed. Xcode 3.0 has almost everything that a developer needs: gcc, openmpi, svn, perl, python, ruby, lapack, blas, etc. I only had to install a fortran compiler and recompile openmpi to get fortran support. The default openmpi in Leopard does not have fortran support. I installed g95 from fink and compiled openmpi on my own, though it can also be installed from fink. You can get gfortran from here.
Editor
Leopard comes with vim 7 which is good enough for me. Emacs is also installed though not the gui version. The default vim settings are not very good so I copied my settings from Linux. MacVim provides a gui version of vim. For emacs you can try Aquamacs Emacs. Recently I have been hooked onto TextMate; it is a great editor for programmers.
Document preparation/viewing
NeoOffice: Built on openoffice and works without X11. Handy when you want to view a doc file on those rare occasions. (free)
MacTex: Everything you need from tex. It has its own editor called texshop and a pdf viewer. It comes with BibDesk which is great for managing your bibliography database. (free)
Acrobat: For viewing pdf files. While Preview can show pdf files it is good to have acrobat. (free)
Skim: Another PDF viewer. Skim allows you to write notes inside your PDF. (free)
PDFPen: Fill out PDF forms and edit PDFs easily with PDFpen! Split, combine, reorder, sign and augment PDFs with text, image overlays & watermarks.
djview: For viewing djvu archive files. Most ebooks are packaged as djvu files. (free)
Plotting/visualization tools
Plot: Very powerful plotting tool for 2-D plots, exclusively for Mac. (free)
Grace: Another powerful tool for 2-D plots. (free)
Gnuplot: This can be installed from fink but it has too many dependancies. So I installed it from the octave dmg file which contains a gnuplot dmg. (free)
Paraview: A free vtk-based parallel visualization tool (free)
Visit: Another free and powerful tool for scientific data visualization. It supports many file formats. (free)
cgx: I use this to view plot3d files. Needs some trick to compile opengl on the Mac. (free)
vigie: My old favourite, great for 2D data visualization. Compiles on Mac. (free)
Image tools
Inkscape: Inkscape is a Vector Graphics Editor, similar to Adobe Illustrator, that strives to be SVG Compliant, open source, responsive and extensible. (free)
Asymptote: Asymptote is a powerful descriptive vector graphics language that provides a natural coordinate-based framework for technical drawing. Labels and equations are typeset with LaTeX, for high-quality PostScript output. (free)
Engauge: This open source, digitizing software converts an image file showing a graph or map, into numbers. The image file can come from a scanner, digital camera or screenshot. The numbers can be read on the screen, and written or copied to a spreadsheet. You can get a Mac binary here. (free)
Canvas: Extremely good for generating technical illustrations but it is a commercial software. Development for Mac seems to be discontinued.
OmniGraffle: Need a diagram, process chart, quick page-layout, website mockup or graphic design? OmniGraffle 5 handles all of these.
Terminal
While Apple’s built-in Terminal app is good enough, I could not switch off the scrollbar. And I hate scrollbars. So I installed iTerm. But I found that iTerm is somewhat of a resource hog.
Video
vlc, mplayer, realplayer
Diff tool
Leopard comes with a nice diff tool called opendiff which is a command line tool. Another good but commercial tool is Changes. You can also use tkdiff but opendiff is far better on the Mac.
System tools
istat menus: To see temperatures, fan speed, etc. in your menu bar. (free)
AppDelete: Deletes installed apps thoroughly. (free)
MacPilot: Easily enable and disable hidden features in Mac OS X, optimize and repair your system, and perform numerous routine maintenance operations with the click of a button!
SofaControl: Use your Apple remote to control applications. Excellent for making presentations.
Fan Control: This adds an option to the Preference pane allowing you to set the minimum and maximum fan speeds and the temperatures at which these speeds are set. (free)
What's keeping me ?: What’s Keeping Me? will identify the application that is preventing you from emptying the trash or ejecting a disk. (free)
Links
- Fink: A ports system for Mac
- David Alison: Blog of a Mac user.
