It’s been a year since I have written an article, on the Mac software I consider as essential for my daily work. A lot of new software has been released in the last year and I have changed some of my workflows, thus it’s time for an update. The following list presents a choice of my [...]

I have just released version 0.1.0 of wkpdf, my command line HTML to PDF conversion application for Mac OS X. Since the initial announcement the usability of the application has been improved quite a lot.

There are plenty of browsers available for Mac OS X, but I could not find a command-line tool that allows for downloading a website and storing the rendered website as PDF. In this article I introduce my open-source application wkpdf, which solves this problem.

Omni Group has just released a first screencast that demonstrates a number of features of their upcoming Getting things done (GTD) application OmniFocus. There has been a lot of interest in OmniFocus since Omni announced it last year, also since Omni has chosen to feed the hype and occasionally blog about OmniFocus without revealing anything relevant. Thus, my expectations are pretty high and this first public presentation of OmniFocus leaves me with ambivalent feelings.

This article shows how to set up a LaTeX editing and processing environment on Mac OS X. The suggested environment bases on the TextMate editor and uses PDFview for viewing the resulting PDF files.

Java applications with a command-line interface (CLI) are typically started with a shell script wrapper. In this article I present a boilerplate for a wrapper shell script for Java applications that allows for installing the application in an arbitrary directory. The application can be started by either executing the wrapper directly, or by executing a symbolic link to the wrapper. Further, the script allows for customizing variables used in the wrapper with system-specific and user-specific configuration files and via environment variables.

The Mac market seems to provide a good ecosystem for innovative software vendors and open-source developers. This article lists my favorite MAC applications.