What’s in my Dock?

Eric Ulken on March 23, 2005

My Dock (for non-Mac users, this is where the most frequently used applications are kept) is literally overflowing with cool stuff. I must share…

  • Mail — The nerve center of my online life. Who says e-mail is dead?
  • Address Book — Helps me keep tabs on my 205 contacts — a few of whom I actually contact on occasion.
  • iCal — Shows me what I’m doing tomorrow (dean’s forum at noon, studying all afternoon, comprehensive exam at 6 p.m.).
  • Safari — Still trails the Mac version of Internet Explorer slightly in features and usability, but it’s much faster and more reliable, so I have to use it.
  • iChat — An elegant IM client with impressive videoconferencing capability that’s fairly useless because nobody else has it.

  • NetNewsWire Lite — Trusty RSS reader.
  • iTunes — Where I keep all my music.
  • iPhoto — Where I keep all my digital photos.
  • iMovie — OK, I hardly ever use it, but I think it’s cool, so it stays on my dock.
  • iDVD — Ditto.

  • GarageBand — Love it! I just bought the new Symphony Orchestra Jam Pack, which sports an absolutely stellar Steinway grand piano sample.
  • QuickTime Player — When you need to play something — video, audio, Flash, etc. — there is almost nothing QuickTime can’t handle.
  • Microsoft Word — This program is the epitome of bloatware, but everyone uses it.
  • Interarchy — My fav Mac FTP program.
  • BBEdit — The. Greatest. Text. Editor. Ever! I sometimes find myself writing papers in BBEdit and pasting them into Word.

  • Art Directors Toolkit — Remarkably handy little program for measuring things on the screen, converting units, picking colors and other things that web designers do all the time.
  • Adobe Photoshop — The de-facto standard for photo editing and bitmap image design.
  • Macromedia Dreamweaver MX — Actually this doesn’t work at the moment. All my Macromedia Studio MX programs just quit working all of a sudden, and reinstalling didn’t help. That’s OK, since I prefer to code HTML by hand anyway.
  • EyeTV — I do everything else on my Mac, so why not watch TV as well?
  • Calculator — Because I can’t add.

  • iSync — Lets me replicate my calendar and contact info on my iPod and my cell phone. So, “I couldn’t call you because I left your number at home” is no longer a plausible excuse.
  • Network Utility — Every now and then I get the urge to ping somebody.
  • Cisco VPN Client — So I can get to all the cool campus resources (library databases, etc.) without ever leaving my comfy poof chair.
  • Virtual PC — Once in a while I am forced to descend from computing Nirvana into the wasteland that is Windows.
  • CocoaMySQL — I’ve been working on a couple of database projects, and this is a handy little tool for dealing with MySQL databases.
  • VNCThing — This lets me drive my home theater/server Mac from my laptop.