Intro
ET OSX is a list of useful tools for the MacOS X, most of which live in the Applications folder on my startup drive. It started as a 'what's on my Mac' page on my personal site but quickly evolved into a blog of its own. I'm trying to focus most on of the tiny but useful utilities that sometimes save you lots of trouble and effort, and to omit for the most part the list of big guns, that one normally uses on a daily basis. The list serves two purposes, lets me easily answer 'how do I do this on the Mac' questions asked by other users, and helps me remember answers to the same questions myself.
RBrowser (www.rbrowser.com) - afaik a unique remote GUI-enabled file system browser for the MacOS X. Supports various protocols, such as sftp-ssh, ssl/tls-enabled ftp, plain old ftp. The gui is very similar to MacOS X's column view, so new users feel at home, and can perform sophisticated tasks as remote-to-remote folder synchronization by simply dragging and dropping between two Finder-like windows. Very useful for web site maintainers, allowing them to work on a local copy of the web site contents and easily auto-sync all between local and remote no matter what the protocol needed. Also useful for backups. Comes completely free (ftp and sftp) or you can purchase a license for $35 allowing you to work with all protocols. I think RBroser has been around since the OpenStep days.
Update: The good folks over at Microsoft's mac mojo blog have just posted info that a beta version of RDC v.2 is available for download from MS's Mactopia site. New in this version is support for Microsoft's (!?) Remote Desktop Protocol v.6 (whatever that is), support for multiple simultaneous sessions (say hell-yeah!), Universal Binary, user interface tweaks, etc. I only had a brief moment in private with RDC v.2 and I'm very pleased to say that one of my last non-universal (as in PowerPC-only) applications is going away. One thing I don't like is I still don't have an easy way to chose a previously saved host (complete with address, username and password) upon application launch, and I need this app to connect to multiple hosts using different usernames and passwords. You have the option to save a host files in ~/Documents/RDC Connections, but double-clicking on one of those still doesn't log you into your server, you have to enter username and password manually. Well, maybe this is a security feature. Although there is this weird 'use Keychain.app' prefference in the UI...
Remote Desktop Connection (www.microsoft.com/mac/otherproducts) - if I had to choose only one piece of software from Microsoft this would probably be it.(Frankly speaking, it is the only piece of software by Microsoft that I'm using) Remote Desktop Connection allows you to remotely control Windows-based computers from the safety of your MacOS X machine, which is nice. Advanced features such as remote resource sharing, drag-and-drop copying make it very useful when you have to support a windows server or two. Best of all it comes to you for free! My only gripe about it would be that it is still a PowerPC only application, but turns out both I and the Mac Development unit at Redmond can live with that.
Remote Desktop, or ARD(www.apple.com/remotedesktop) - the must have remote management tool for MacOS X system/network administrators. You can think of it as VNC on steroids, crack, whtatever. If you have a bunch of macs to manage you can effortlessly copy items to them, install packages remotely, run unix commands on multiple machines and many more. Client machines can be organized in lists or dynamic (or smart) lists using different criteria such as network range, os version, amount of ram, etc. Administrators can send messages to remote clients and clients can request assistance from administrators. Apple charges around $300 for this one, but I can't stress enough how useful it is.
Chicken of the VNC(cotvnc.sourceforge.net) - best VNC client for the Mac I can think of. VNC clients allow you to connect to the screen of a remote computer running a VNC server, and somehow have become the network lazy network admin's tool of choice. Very slick interface, support Bonjour and keeps a list of all my servers with usernames and passwords. Universal application. Licensed under the GNU GPL.
