But, the installed apps can’t do everything. As part of setting up my new Mac, I’ve had to install a small set of very useful, dare I say essential software. This is the list of everything that I installed on my Mac for one reason or another.

Everything on this list is Free as in beer. These are only things that are perpetually useful. If it is a limited version it is at least useful. Nothing expires. These are not the things that I think you should look at, or any kind of best of or exhaustive list. These are just the things that I actually use. (With a noted exception or two.)

This is Part II in my “Setting up my Mac” series. See Part I: How to Transfer Mac OS X Application Data between Computers.

Video Codecs For Quicktime

QuickTime is the native video format for the Mac. However, there are many different video file formats floating around on the web. Fortunately, QuickTime is modular and there are many free components available for playing these formats. I think this list covers the most popular.

Flip4Mac

Plays Windows Media Player files in QuickTime (Except those that have DRM).

Perian

Plays some .avi files in QuickTime.

A52Codec

Adds support for AAC audio.

DivX

Maybe this is redundant with Perian?

Video Players

In a rare show lameness, the built-in QuickTime player cannot play QuickTime Video Full Screen unless you pay to upgrade to QuickTime Pro. This has always bugged me. Can you say nickel & dime? I’d rather they roll the price into the cost of OS X or my computer, if necessary. Fortunately, this is a restriction on the player, and not on the QuickTime Framework. Third players can play full screen, although perhaps at the expense of some QT player niceties like the remote control. I’ve installed these additional players.

QTAmateur

This tiny player plays quicktime full screen and not much else.

Nice Player

This is a more capable QuickTime player. I’ve had the video and audio tracks get of of sync, tho. Still evaluating.

Real Player

Necessary to play the anything in Real format, or to play Real streams in your browser.

VLC

A very capable player that does not rely on QuickTime or its plugins.

Flash Player

OS X comes with flash player installed, but you might want to upgrade. View your current flash version number.

I don’t do much with video, but these players and the prior QuickTime plugins have handled everything that I’ve ever wanted to do.

Productivity

At $400 and without the typical Windows PC OEM discounts or the student discounts available to some, Microsoft Office represents a significant investment, especially if you just need occasional word processing, or you just want to view Microsoft Office documents that people send you. NeoOffice is a mac native version of OpenOffice. I have Microsoft Office, but NeoOffice is still useful to open the OpenOffice formatted documents that people from the open source community sometimes send me.

BBEdit has been around in the Mac community for a long time. TextWrangler is its free but commercial quality and very capable little brother.

Compression

The finder does a pretty good job compressing and uncompressing zip files. (You knew it did that, right?) However, there are about a zillion different compression formats that might arrive at your doorstep via the magic of the internet.

Stuffit Expander

Stuffit is the time-honored way to uncompress stuff. However, this long standing Macintosh institution has fallen into disrepute lately. To download Stuffit, you have to surrender your email address, and they do use it. I’ve installed it anyway, thanks to a throw away email address.

The Unarchiver

I’ve switched to the free and open source Unarchiver as my primary de-compressor. So far, so good.

Chat Programs

iChat is nice, but there are more chat protocols out there than AOL and Jabber. I’ve also managed to collect a few different online profiles. You can reach me at procatajeff on AOL.

Adium

Allows you to connect to multiple chat protocols and multiple accounts at the same time. It doesn’t have all of the features of the native chat programs, but it is worth it to just have to run one program.

Colloquy

IRC client for Mac OS X.

Yahoo Messenger

The Yahoo Messenger for the Mac has many fewer features than its Windows cousin, but its not as loaded with advertisements as the windows version, either.

MSN Messenger

I don’t use MSN at all, but if you did…

AOL Messenger

Again, there are some AOL features you can’t get through iChat. I almost always use Adium instead of AOL Messenger or even iChat.

Web Browsers

I use Safari for 99% of my web browsing. However, I install the major alternative browsers, too.

FireFox

There are still some sites that do not work with Safari. For those, Firefox can usually get you in.

Camino

Same rendering engine as FireFox, but a more “mac-like” user interface.

Opera

I only use it to check web pages to see if they’re rendering correctly.

NetNewsWire Lite

Great feed reader. I’m a registered user of the full versions. This was probably the best valued software purchase I’ve ever made. I started with the Lite version, although I’ve forgotten what the differences are by now.

File Transfer

CyberDuck

The finder will do FTP, but CyberDuck does more. I use it for the synchronization capability. This program has always been a little buggy and never quite reached the level of stability that I would like, but I use it anyway.

BitTorrent

I don’t do much with Torrents, but when you run across them, use this.

Transmission

An alternative BitTorrent client. I haven’t used this one yet, but I’m gonna give it a try next time I want to download a torrent.

Utilities

There are tons of haxies, so called maintenance utilities, and customizers for OS X. I don’t use any of them. Bad memories from the System 6 extension days, I guess. Here are a couple utilities I do use.

Menu Meters

Monitor CPU, Memory and Disk usage as well as network activity in the menu bar. Very nice. Running this on my old machine was a major contributor to my decision to purchase a new one.

Disk Inventory X

A graphical breakdown of how your disk is being used. A kinda shaky 1.0, but be prepared to get an education after you run it and see where your disk space is going. Keep it around for when you need to find some free space.

Associating Files with Applications

Most of the applications on this list overlap in terms of the file formats that they can open. Sometimes, though, the wrong program will open when you double click on a file or download something. RCDefault allows you to edit the associates between file types and data types and with the applications that can use them. You can do this in the Finder to a certain extent, but RCDefault gives you more options and puts it all in one place.

Anything Else

I put this list together to keep track of what I need to install after I rebuild my machine. Take a look at part I of my setting up a Mac series.

If there is something you think I should take a look at let me know in the comments. (But keep it in the free or perpetually useful spirit of this post.)

Best of Luck

I decided to start from scratch on the new machine, rather than use the migration assistant. The previous machine had been the subject of countless experiments and upgrades. I wanted to start from a clean slate. I chose to reinstall all software and just transfer data files form the old machine to the new one.

I am recording the process on this blog to remind myself for next time and also hoping it might help someone else trying to do the same thing. I’ll probably do this again when I migrate from Tiger (OS X 10.4) to Leopard (OS X 10.5).

This guide may favor the Unix geek, but I’ll try to keep it non-geeky. If you’re uncomfortable with anything here, use the Apple migration assistant instead. These instructions represent what I actually did to move between machines. Your situation may be different. Use these instructions at your own risk. When in doubt, use the Apple supplied migration assistant. Always make backups of your old data.

I’ll assume that you can get your old mac and your new Mac talking on a network (You don’t even need a cross over cable), and that you can figure out how to enable file sharing on your old system so you can transfer your files over.

Do a Clean Install

My Mac came ready to go. All I had to do is turn it on and answer a few networking and registration questions and I was, um productive, making comic books for the kids and playing with the iSight. However, I decided to wipe the hard drive and do a complete re-install.

There were a few reasons for this. One was to be able to play with impunity for a period of time, knowing that I could wash away my mistakes and experiments. Another was to be able to do a custom install. This laptop drive is fairly small for what I want to do with it. During my custom install, I omitted a bunch of printer drivers, trial apps and language translations to save a gig or two. Its never going to be easier to do this than now. Third, I just wanted to make sure that I could rebuild the system from scratch, while I still had a warrenty and tech support available.

I’m extremely conservative with my work system. I rely on it and I want it to work when I need it. I feel its better to allocate a fixed amount of time now to learn how to rebuild, rather than have spend an indeterminate amount of time with it in the event of some mishap.

When I re-installed, the first user I created on the new machine had the same short name as the primary user on the old machine. I haven’t tested these techniques for moving user accounts with different names, but overall I think they should work.

Moving your keychain

The first thing to do after to get your machine is to copy your keychain from your old computer to the new one. The keychain contains all of your passwords. Its also one of the few centralized databases on the Mac that you can’t just regenerate. Its best to migrate it before you launch any programs on the new machine that might require authentication.

You can open the Keychain Access application to view and manage your passwords. Each User’s keychain is stored in their ~/Library/Keychains directory. (The ~ means this directory is a subdirectory of your user home directory.)

I just copied the login.keychain file from the old system and replaced the one on the new system. I would recommend logging out and logging back in after replacing the old file.

You may also want to migrate your system level keychain. This is located in /Library/Keychains/system.keychain. Notice that this is not in your user directory, but is a subdirectory of your main hard drive. I didn’t bother to migrate this one, but rather to enter the handful of passwords that it contained. If you do overwrite this file, make sure you look at its ownership & permissions via get info in the finder first, and restore the permissions after you are done.

You may want to do Keychain First Aid on the File menu of the Keychain Access application after this process, just to make sure everything is ok.

Move your Cookies

I could never figure out why some people are so paranoid about cookies. Here is your chance to get rid of them all. Well, I don’t wear a tin foil hat; I want to keep my cookies. My cookies only take up 1.5MB after years of browsing on my mac. Having a smaller cookie file probably won’t make my browsing experience any better, and there are so many it really isn’t worth trying to sift through them. For me, the best option is to migrate the whole cookie file.

Safari and WebKit cookies are stored in ~/Library/Cookies/cookies.plist. Copying this file from the old machine to the same location on the new machine will transfer all of your cookies.

I don’t do anything cookie-worthy in any browser except Safari, so I didn’t bother migrating any of the cookies in the alternative browsers I have installed. If you have FireFox cookies that you want to preserve, I believe they are located in FireFox’s Application Support folder and will migrate just fine using the generic Migrating a Mac OS X Application instructions below.

Migrating User Data and Documents

Moving your User data is easy. Just open your home folder on the old machine and copy all of the subdirectories you see to the new machine except for the ~/Library direcctory. Actually, you could copy the ~/Library directory wholesale, too, but the purpose of this post is to start with a clean slate of application settings and support files and most of these live in the Library directory.

The typical folders you will copy over are ~/Desktop, ~/Documents, ~/Movies, ~/Music and ~/Pictures. There shouldn’t be anything of consequence in these directories on the new machine. You can probably just replace them. You may also want to copy your ~/Public and ~/Sites directories if you have anything in them.

You want to copy over your data files before you launch any applications that might use that data, for example iPhoto or iTunes.

Migrating a Mac OS X Application

Almost all native OS X applications use the same file organization for their files. The settings for almost all applications can be transferred by looking in two places.

The ~/Library/Application Support directory contains folders with the same name as each application. copy the folders from the old machine to same location on the new machine for the applications whose support data you want to keep.

The ~/Library/Preferences directory contains many individual files (and sometimes a folder or two). The files have a java style naming convention. For example, Safari’s preference file is named com.apple.Safari.plist. Just copy over the preference files for each application that you want to retain the preferences for. Watch out, though, some applications have more than one preference file, such as iTunes.

As part of my clean slate initiative, I only migrated 5 or 6 preference files from my most used and most configured applications, such as iTunes, Safari and Adium.

Mac OS X applications are fairly liberal with these files. In order to conform to the Mac programming guidelines, any OS X application should be able to regenerate a fresh preference file, or a fresh application support file if their file comes up missing. Deleting these files can be a good way to “reset” an application to its standard defaults.

Moving Safari

Safari takes a bit of special consideration to migrate. Safari stores bookmarks, browser history, form auto-fill values, and other data in a special folder located at ~/Library/Safari. Copying this folder to the same location the new system will preserve this information.

Safari Doesn’t have a folder under ~/Library/Application Support, but don’t forget to copy the safari preferences file from ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Safari.

Moving Mail

Apple’s Mail.app also requires some special consideration. Mail stores its mail database in ~/Library/Mail. Copying this directory along with the preferences file at ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Mail will transfer your mail.

If you are transferring from a 10.3 system, there was a major change in file format for the mail database between 10.3 and 10.4. Mail will automatically upgrade your mail files the first time you run it, however, it will not delete the old files. This apple tech note describes how to delete the unused files from your Mail directory.

Moving iTunes

Moving iTunes depends on your iTunes Music Folder Location and if you have iTunes Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library. These settings are in the Advanced panel of iTunes preferences. Fortunately there are already some pretty good guides on how to do this. There is a Moving iTunes Music Folder tech note from Apple. This is augmented by instructions from HiFi Blog.

Following these instructions, I was able to transfer my iTunes Music without any problems.

Double Check your Library folder

Some applications store data in subdirectories of the Library folder other than Preferences and Application Support. You may wish to peruse the subfolders of the Library directory in your user directory for these stray bits of data. The Apple file organization document can help to tell you what they are and help you to decide if you should copy them over. I didn’t copy anything over, but for a couple exceptions which I’ve already enumerated above.

Don’t copy the ~/Library/Cache directory. This will just be regenerated on the new machine.

Additionally, there is a system wide /Library folder on your Hard drive. You may want to scan this folder for system wide settings that you want to transfer over. Again as part of my clean install, I did not transfer anything from this directory, although I recognized a few bits of software that I needed to install on the new machine.

Unix Stuff

If you’ve accessed the unix side of Mac OS X, you may have a variety of things to move or at least to re-install. These things are beyond the scope of this blog post, but you might want to look for custom settings in /etc or custom installed software in /usr/local or data files in /var. I’ll have a sequel to this post which covers these issues in more detail.

Repairing Permissions

Copying files between systems could end up with some file permissions and ownership problems. I try to keep my files inside my user home directory. So far, I haven’t had any problems. Your milage may vary. It’s probably a good idea to run the Verify Disk Permissions or the Repair Disk Permissions commands in the Disk Utility Application.

Rebuilding a System or Restoring from Backup

You can also use this guide to rebuild a Mac OS X installation, not just to copy from one system to another. The OS X installer has an “Archive and Install” option. If you have enough disk space, you can install a fresh copy of OS X and start from scratch. The installer will copy your old files into an archive directory. Then, you can copy your applications and data from the Archive folder to their proper places.

May you never need to use this guide to restore from a backup, but the same instructions apply. You do back up, right?

More Later

This is the first in a series about setting up a new mac. I’ll have the next installment ready in a couple of days.

I’ve certainly mis-explained some things here. I’ve probably gotten a few things wrong and have definitely omitted important details. Proceed at your own risk. Please share your experiences moving applications in the comments. Best of Luck.

I’ve been following an iterative development cycle where I deploy to my client’s site every Friday. (My old ERP colleagues would be mortified — install on Friday? My response: automated testing) Thankfully, last Friday’s upload went through, although it was the last internet connection my internal modem would ever make. It took me a couple days to rule out line quality and ISP problems and determine that the problem was hardware failure.

I have a PC with windows XP available. Its not mine and I really don’t use it except for checking web sites in internet explorer and playing an occasional game. So Sunday night I tried using it for some serious browsing for the first time. After about five minutes, I realized that I can’t stand Internet Explorer. The lack of a tabs felt like a missing finger. I had no idea how much I used that feature in both Safari and in Firefox. Also, the fonts under XP just plain looked bad.

Tiring with IE, I installed Firefox. I’m impressed with Firefox on the PC. I prefer Safari on the Mac, but I do use Firefox on the Mac for web development because of its ability to control and inspect headers, cookies, the DOM, etc. I don’t use Firefox on the Mac for day to day browsing because its interface feels a little bit off. No such feeling for Firefox on Windows. Win Firefox felt very comfortable. I like it.

When I upgraded this blog to WordPress 1.5, I integrated this blog with del.icio.us. I have been using del.icio.us for my “to blog about later links.” del.icio.us is very helpful when you have to browse in a foreign environment.

Sunday afternoon I had to start contemplating the idea that I might have do next Friday’s deployment from the XP machine or even temporarily move my development environment to the Windows machine. It didn’t take long to rule out this option. OS X comes pre-installed with Apache, PHP, CVS, SSH, and a bunch of other things that I probably take for granted. Windows has none of that. I decided that setting up a development environment under windows would probably take too much time.

I still remember the trauma from the last time I tried to ftp from a stock Windows machine. Its probably better now, but I still decided that I didn’t want to try that route. Besides, I just got my automated deployment scripts working on the Mac.

So Monday morning, I drove 60 miles to go to pick up a USB Modem at Best Buy. Now here is the problem with owning a Mac. Best Buy has two models in stock. Neither has OS X drivers. I bought one anyway in case it might “just work.” It doesn’t. So I thought I was stuck until the USB modem I ordered from online arrives.

But then I realized that I had enough ethernet stuff in the basement to hookup a network between the PC and the Mac. I have never done this before because I simply don’t use the windows machine enough to care. Hooking up the network was a breeze. A couple wizards, a few property dialogs and a half hours worth of reading was all it took to set up internet connection sharing on the PC side. The Mac recognized the new network immediately and without configuration. Sweet!

So, I am once again connected and now just waiting for my Mac compatible USB modem to come in the mail.

There is an added benefit. Over the last year or so, I have been gradually switching from table based layout for my web pages to a CSS based layout. I’ve quite a bit of trouble maintaining the same layout of older pages in CSS due to browser variances. Some of my table based layout components are somewhat ambitious for CSS. I never used to do much testing on Win IE because I was pretty familiar with how the table based layouts would look. Win IE is very stable on these types of layouts and they almost always looked exactly on IE how I had developed them on the Mac. Additionally, I had long ago worked out the cross browser kinks and was pretty much recycling the same debugged layout components.

This is definitely not the case for CSS. I don’t yet have a full library of debugged layout components and I have to say my understanding of cross browser kinks is incomplete, although growing. If you browse around on this blog in IE and in Firefox, you can see that while not terrible, it doesn’t render some pages correctly on IE.

Testing under IE was a pain for me. Editing CSS files on Windows kept bringing up FrontPage instead of a plain text editor, which is what I wanted. Now that the machines are networked, I can now just point windows to the test environment that is already running on my Mac and preview right from there. I also have occasional access to a Windows Laptop, which will make this type of testing a lot easier.

I’m too far behind this week, but maybe next week I will finally figure out what is wrong with the style sheet for this blog under Win IE.

MySQL, PHP 4 and PHP 5 as described here. Also, phpMyAdmin. I use a personal version of squid using AdZapper because I have more storage than bandwidth.

Photoshop, Dreamweaver, BBEdit and TextWrangler.

Browsers: Camino, Firefox, iCab, Mozilla, OmniWeb, and Opera. I have a couple different versions of some of these for testing purposes. I use safari for my personal browsing and FireFox for web development.

IM: Adium, ChitChat X, Colloquy, Fire, MSN Messenger, Proteus, and Yahoo Messenger. I think Adium is the best of the bunch, but it doesn’t do everything, so I end up switching between different programs occasionally or running more than one at once.

NetNewsWire. I have 184 subscriptions now. Eagerly awaiting 2.0.

RealPlayer and Windows Media Player, as well as VLC.

Games: Burning Monkey Mahjong, and Snood.

You can find all these and more by searching on Version Tracker.

The best macintosh forum is Macintoshian Achaia at Ars Technica.

I just want to point out that the Mac mini comes with Apache and PHP pre-installed.

If you want, compiling a new version of PHP on the Mac is pretty easy if you have ever compiled anything on unix. If you have trouble compiling PHP extensions on OS X its probably due to this bug, which has an easy work around. You can also download an OS X PHP binary.

Compiling MySQL is also easy, or you can download a binary. If your flavor is postgresSQL, then compile or download that, too.

Bare Bones just released a free version of TextWrangler. TextWrangler and its paid version, BBEdit, are superb text editors for PHP. The diff and grep (multi file) capabilities are very good. Open via FTP/SFTP is handy and it knows what to do with unix permissions. It does does syntax highlighting, is fast, and it stays out of the way.

The following shell command will cause TextWrangler to use php.net for the find in reference command:

defaults write com.barebones.textwrangler Services:ADCReferenceSearchTemplate "http://www.php.net/search.php?show=quickref&pattern=%@"

I understand you can also use PHP with Apple’s Dev Tools (XCode), but I don’t. XCode is free with OS X, but not installed by default.

OS X comes with CVS, too. Unfortunately, text wrangler doesn’t integrate with it as BBEdit and XCode do.

The Mac is a great PHP development platform.

I will end this evangelizing post with a pure marketing quote from the Apple site for the Mac mini:

Perfect for Programmers
Set a space-saving Mac mini atop your workstation PC and add a KVM switch to share keyboard, monitor and mouse. Mac OS X includes free developer tools for Mac, UNIX and Java. Test out a Mac version of your latest creation, instantly. Pretty soon you’ll be using the Mac full-time, with that PC relegated to the testbed.