October 08, 2003
In my Dock...
As usual, I'm a bit behind on the times. I'm just getting around to my response to the O'Reilly "What's on your Dock?" question.
Before I go down the list here, I'll confess that I have a love-hate relationship with the Dock. It is terribly useful in some ways, and terribly broken in others. After years of thought on the subject (I've used OS X regularly since the PB days), I've come to the conclusion that the Dock is only broken for power users. Therefore, the Dock's design choices were well made. The poor design decision came in not providing an "Advanced Dock" for the rest of us.
Many developers have tried to provide just that replacement. I've tried most of them. They all suck. End of story. Drop Drawers was probably the nicest of them all, but suffered some strange limitations with the UI. DragThing was a fscking nightmare - I spent half my time fighting its obtuse theming system and a preferences pane that was designed by the Marquis himself.
Since Steve Gehrman added a shelf to Path Finder, I've used that exclusively. It can't really replace the Dock, but it works well to shore up some of the Dock's deficiencies. Its an odd sort of workflow environment, but it works for me.
But I digress. On to the Dock. I prefer Dock on the right, always shown, with bottom pinning. So, from top to bottom, we have Finder, Path Finder, Terminal, Mailsmith, iCal, Address Book, Mozilla 1.5, Safari, NetNewsWire Lite, BBEdit 7, iTunes, System Preferences, Fire, WeatherMan X, OmniOutliner, Photoshop 7, Codewarrior, and SpamSieve.
I'll talk more about each of these below.
So lets go through these in detail.
Path Finder 3: Absolutely essential. With the exception of few issues, mainly relating to the new Terminal code added for version 3, and the handling of AFP mounted servers, Steve has covered most of the glaring problems in PF 2. He's very responsive to feedback, and timely in getting updates out. I didn't realize how much I relied on PF until I sat down at Sarah's computer (which is sans PF).
Terminal: Who doesn't need Terminal. The Terminal is your friend. I'd use Path Finder's terminal, but the terminal emulation is bad fscked, something Steve tells me is a function of the code he borrowed to write it. He says it'll get better soon. I believe him.
Mailsmith 2: Until a month ago, this slot was occupied by Eudora. My trials and travails with finding the perfect email client is the subject for another post, but Eudora was fast beginning to not cut the mustard. Mailsmith was the only serious contender, but my fear of storing my mail in a database and my amusingly frustrating experiences with Mailsmith 1.5 kept me away for some time. While Bare Bones has made a lot of improvements in Mailsmith 2.0, you're still stuck with a huge database for your mail (although Rich Siegel is quick to point out that there is one database per mailbox), and the damned thing is still as slow as molasses, especially with large mailboxes. The promise of a higher degree of automation lured me in, and thus far I've been reasonably pleased with it. The tech support is good, and I expect that Bare Bones will continue to make leaps and bounds in their progress on Mailsmith, whereas Eudora's development has been largely stagnant for two years.
iCal and Address Book: I use them because Palm Desktop sucks. (And Mailsmith integrates with the Address Book) End of story.
Mozilla: Really wish I could use Firebird. There is a really annoying bug that kills Firebird's usefulness on the Mac. That, and the nightly builds for Firebird stopped in July. WTF?
Safari: Great browser, except for the fact that it doesn't even match IE for cookie management. WTF?
NetNewsWire Lite: Tried the full version. Kept crapping out with XML-RPC randomly when trying to access my blogs. I'll probably send Brent Simmons some money, just because I feel his pain about email clients (and because I posted with just my first name to his comments. Doh.)
BBEdit: Because it doesn't suck. Enough said. Though I wish I could get it integrated with Project Builder better.
iTunes: Cause there is no other choice. (Is Audion even around anymore?)
System Preferences: Because I spazzed the last time I tried to not have it in my Dock.
Fire: Despite a UI that only a mother could love, it still rocks. I still owe Nick Kocharhook some code to make Fire respect IC's prefs.
WeatherMan X: Honestly, I don't know why I bother. It sucks, hard. The author is unresponsive. It spams my logs with RealBasic debug messages. The only reason its still there is because Meteorologist is a dead project and WeatherPop clutters my menubar. I realize most people would prefer it there, but I'm lacking menubar real estate right now.
OmniOutliner: Keeps me organized. Well worth the paltry sum for it.
Photoshop: Because it keeps me fed
Codewarrior: I should probably move this into my Path Finder shelf along next to Project Builder. I no longer remember why its in the Dock.
SpamSieve: Because Michael Tsai is my hero. (99% accuracy. Woot!)
Other apps I use regularly that sit in my PF shelf instead of the Dock: OmniGraffle, Project/Interface Builder, Acrobat Reader, XChat, OpenOffice, X11, Stuffit Expander, HexEdit, PGP, and GraphicConverter.
I think that's enough for now. I may get on a tear later about how all email clients suck. I may not.
Posted by brent at 22:20