Ask HN: I Just Got A Used MacBook Pro. What To Install?

20 points by tronium 12 years ago | 28 comments

I just got a late 2011, 15-inch MacBook Pro from my older brother. I enjoy programming/developing a lot, so what apps should I get/install on the new system for developing and productivity?

jevinskie 12 years ago |

Divvy lets you easily resize windows to a grid pattern. There may be similar free utilities but I found that it was worth the $14.

https://mizage.com/divvy/

If you are interested in binary objects/executables, check out MachOView. Think of it as an excellent GUI version of nm/readelf (for MachO, obviously) with search.

https://github.com/gdbinit/MachOView

tsm 12 years ago | |

People at work use SizeUp, which is free and beautiful: https://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

I use Slate, which is free and powerful: https://github.com/jigish/slate

kovrik 12 years ago | | |

+1 for Slate

saddestcatever 12 years ago | |

I second Divvy. I felt silly spending $14 on something that should be packaged into OSX, but it's a feature you need regardless

hashtag 12 years ago | |

I tried them in the past and the custom key bindings never worked. This was a dealbreaker for me. Did they ever fix this?

jevinskie 12 years ago | | |

I've never had an issue using number keys for the shortcuts.

lui8906 12 years ago | |

I tried divvy but was already using Moom and find Moom to be a little simpler and more intuitive.

It's here: http://manytricks.com/moom/ And costs $10.

kibibu 12 years ago | |

For window management, BetterTouchTool lets you do Win7 style window snapping.

arzugula 12 years ago | |

I like Cinch for this... It doesn't give you the grid option, but side-by-side is all I need... And it's only $7.

http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/cinch/

karangoeluw 12 years ago |

Some apps I use every day:

--------------------------

Homebrew - http://brew.sh/

Growl - http://growl.info/

Alfred - http://www.alfredapp.com/

Sublime Text - https://www.sublimetext.com

Transmission - http://www.transmissionbt.com/

Transmit - http://panic.com/transmit/

Evernote - http://www.evernote.com/

BetterTouchTool - http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=1722

Dash - http://kapeli.com/dash

F.lux- https://justgetflux.com/

arzugula 12 years ago | |

I thought Growl was kind of dead since Apple introduced Notification Center?

vincentbarr 12 years ago |

These are my 'must-haves', or very close to it, and most of them are free or offer a free version.

Alfred 2 (search and a lot more)

aText (text expansion)

Adium (Chat)

Adapter (audio/video filetype conversion)

Caffeine (prevent display from dimming or sleeping)

Chrome (browser)

Colloquy (IRC client)

Dash (documentation and snippet browser)

Dashlane (password management)

Doubleplane (window resizing)

Dropbox (cloud storage)

Evernote (notes, bulky)

Firefox (browser)

F.lux (smart display brightness)

Handbrake (video transcoder)

Hazel (file/folder automation)

iTerm (terminal replacement)

Jumpcut (store and recall clipboard history)

MailMate (email)

Mou (markdown editor with live preview) Readkit (RSS reader)

Screenmailer (free, easy screencast creation and sharing)

Simplenote (notes, lean) Skype (calls)

Spark (hotkey)

Sublime Text Editor 3 (text editor)

TicToc (time tracking)

VLC (media player)

hansy 12 years ago |

For the people who use Alfred (http://www.alfredapp.com/), I'm curious to know Alfred's advantages over the native Spotlight (which IMO works fairly well) or other similar apps like Found (https://www.foundapp.com/) or Quicksilver (http://qsapp.com/download.php)?

Oh and to add my two cents to the OP's question:

HyperDock (http://hyperdock.bahoom.com/): Windows 7 functionality to preview individual windows

Croaky 12 years ago |

https://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop will install Homebrew, Tmux, Silver Searcher, Postgres, Redis, a few programming languages, and other items.

https://github.com/thoughtbot/dotfiles sets up a bunch of slick aliases and plugins for Vim and ZSH to make development productive.

shawnreilly 12 years ago |

Lately I've become a fan of isolating multiple environments. This way I can run different IDE environments on the same machine without conflicts or dependency problems. There are quite a few ways you could do this, ranging from entire VM's (something like virtualbox), to VM containers (something like docker), to language specific isolated environments (something like virtualenv for python or rvm for ruby), to prebuilt environments (something like bitnami). Each one has different pro's and con's (too heavy, too complex, etc) but the general idea is the same; Having the ability to build multiple isolated environments makes it easier for me to maintain those environments. It also gives me the flexibility to test different environment variables with some sort of fallback if something goes wrong. So it's something I would recommend, but YMMV. Another recommendation I would make (not software, but still a must IMO) is to install an SSD and max out the RAM. Feels like a whole new machine! Good luck and have fun.

ken_laun 12 years ago |

You have a good older brother.

I recommend these apps.

    iTerm2

    Firefox

    Sublime Text

    Cyberduck

    Xcode

    Gimp(Image)

    Skitch(Image)

    Evernote

    Dropbox

    Alfred

    Memory Clean

    1Password

jmagnusson 12 years ago |

Alfred App is an absolute essential in my book (especially custom web searches) http://www.sequelpro.com/

Sublime Text. Makes u feel like a magician. http://www.sublimetext.com/

Sequel Pro. Best db manager out there. Wish they just supported more than MySQL. http://www.sequelpro.com/

iTerm2. The built in terminal in OS X kind of sucks. http://www.iterm2.com/

Homebrew. The missing package manager for OS X. http://brew.sh/

surreal 12 years ago | |

( Typo, Sequel Pro's URL has been put for Alfred App. For convenience it's http://www.alfredapp.com )

marmarlade 12 years ago |

Some great submissions here already (second/third the usual suspects Divvy, Alfred, VLC, Sublime Text et al.)

Depending on what you use for productivity, you might find a Pomodoro Timer useful. There are loads, and I quite like this one: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/pomodoro-timer-focus-on-your... (or just use the Chrome app http://tomato-timer.com/)

And for writing creatively, I can highly recommend OmmWriter. http://www.ommwriter.com/

rgawdzik 12 years ago |

The other recommendations are awesome.

For me, I like using a lot of desktop window management, however the Mission Control transitions are too slow for me, with the fact that are bulky and uncustomizable.

There is TotalSpaces2, which basically is similar to Ubuntu/etc spaces, but you can customize the transitions, hotkeys, locations, etc. Even though I don't have any transitions (so my switching is instant), you can have cube transitions, etc, very similar to Gnome. Downside to the program: $18, with a trial. If you miss proper desktop management, do it. Combined with Spectacle (A tiling window manager), I have functionality similar to XMonad, so I can use my mac effectively.

BillyParadise 12 years ago |

Lets see... I recently went Mac for the first time, and what do I have on there?

For "serious" work-related things, I have Sublime Edit and MacPorts. That's everything. I picked up Omnigraffle but it's just not all that useful to me with a small screen. I'll look at using it again when I replace my desktop with a mac (or when I get an external monitor for the MBA)

Oh, and I have MSDN access, so I put Office on there. But honestly, I never use it.

(Disclaimer, I'm an old school "only have 1 page of apps on my iPhone" kind of guy)

celias 12 years ago |

SourceTree from Altassian git and mercurial client, free

http://www.sourcetreeapp.com

CodeRunner from Nikolai Krill for easily running/testing code snippets in any language, $9.99 on the App Store

http://krillapps.com/coderunner/

british_geek 12 years ago |

Guardian Angel is pretty cool, it locks your Mac when you walk away so you don't need a password to lock / unlock it. Definitely worth checking out for $4 - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/guardian-angel/id657241260?m...

collyw 12 years ago |

Windows

adamconroy 12 years ago | |

Ditto

xauronx 12 years ago |

I'm a fan of Sip, it lets you grab colors off the screen and generates code for you.

itazula 12 years ago |

Notational Velocity

2close4comfort 12 years ago |

Quicksilver