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

by tronium on 6/11/14, 3:57 AM with 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?

  • by jevinskie on 6/11/14, 4:02 AM

    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

  • by karangoeluw on 6/11/14, 4:14 AM

  • by vincentbarr on 6/11/14, 4:20 AM

    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)

  • by hansy on 6/11/14, 6:31 PM

    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

  • by Croaky on 6/11/14, 5:51 AM

    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.

  • by shawnreilly on 6/11/14, 7:38 AM

    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.

  • by ken_laun on 6/12/14, 2:29 PM

    You have a good older brother.

    I recommend these apps.

    <Developing>

        iTerm2

    Firefox

    Sublime Text

    Cyberduck

    Xcode

    Gimp(Image)

    Skitch(Image)
    <Productivity>

        Evernote

    Dropbox

    Alfred

    Memory Clean

    1Password

  • by jmagnusson on 6/11/14, 6:57 AM

    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/

  • by marmarlade on 6/12/14, 12:35 PM

    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/

  • by rgawdzik on 6/11/14, 6:03 AM

    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.

  • by BillyParadise on 6/12/14, 2:32 AM

    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)

  • by celias on 6/15/14, 1:17 AM

    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/

  • by british_geek on 6/11/14, 7:36 AM

    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...

  • by collyw on 6/11/14, 8:45 AM

    Windows

  • by xauronx on 6/11/14, 4:18 AM

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

  • by itazula on 6/12/14, 1:45 PM

    Notational Velocity

  • by 2close4comfort on 6/12/14, 1:59 PM

    Quicksilver