Real World Computing
Open up to Mac software
What we particularly like about this program is its user interface, which is Mac-like and feels amazingly professional. Far too many open-source programs feel thrown together and amateurish, but Miro is as polished as any commercial program I've seen. (There are versions available for Windows and Linux, too.) Its left-hand panel displays "channels" as well as providing access to your library of downloaded videos and to a search function. You can ask Miro to scan your hard disk for videos you already have, which it will then add to your library. Videos play in the larger, right-hand area, or will play full-screen just by double-clicking on them.
Miro is a great example of an open-source project that can directly compete with any commercial program out there in terms of both features and polish: the folks at the Participatory Culture Foundation, which is a non-profit organisation (that is, a charity) based in the USA, have done an amazing job.
Adium
Although we're not great users of instant messaging, I especially find it useful from time to time when communicating with remote developers: it's useful to be able to discuss a piece of code, easily swap files and so on. Adium is perfect for this purpose, since not everyone uses the same IM system. With Adium, you can set up multiple accounts and it supports just about every IM protocol you can imagine, including AOL (of course), Jabber (which means you can converse with people using Google Talk), MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. It has tabbed chats, so you can swap between sessions without needing to keep a zillion windows open, and it supports "OTR Encryption", a scheme that encrypts and digitally signs your messages before they're transmitted so you can be sure your conversation is secure, and those who you're IMing are who they say they are.
Adium keeps a transcript of all conversations, and third-party plug-ins and icons allow you to customise the appearance of the application to your heart's content, as well as adding features to it. The downside of Adium is that it doesn't currently support audio or video chat - the team is working on that, but there's no concrete timeline available as of now. This may be a showstopper for some people, but for developers and the like, audio and video are just distractions. If you simply want a solid, very multiprotocol instant messenger client, Adium's the one for you.
MacFUSE
FUSE stands for File System in USer space, and what this means in its most basic terms is that it enables developers to write code that gains access to all sorts of different filesystems that the Mac doesn't natively support (and to do so much more easily than would otherwise be the case). There are FUSE implementations available for many operating systems. MacFUSE was developed by Amit Singh, a Google engineer, during his "spare time" (that infamous portion of time Google allows its developers to spend working on their own projects).
Once you've installed MacFUSE, you then install the filesystems that you want to work with. Installation is straightforward, and several people have made disk images with installers available for the more popular filesystems. Two I've used with great success are NTFS-3G and SSHFS. The former allows you to mount NTFS-formatted disks on the Mac, something that can be extremely useful if you're trying to recover files from a crashed PC. NTFS is the filesystem used by default under Windows 2000, XP and Vista, and although the Mac has no native NTFS drivers the NTFS-3G FUSE driver works extremely well and has saved data for me on at least a couple of occasions.
