Me And My Macbook

If you remember the “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” commercials (if not go here and watch them now!), you know that a PC is dull and boring and a Mac is funny and cool. That probably is the reason why there are tools like CyberDuck, Chicken of the VNC, Smultron (named after a strawberry) and Seashore.

But forget about the funny icons for a second and download and install them, because you’ll need them. At least I did.

CyberDuck + Smultron
I need to be able to connect to my FTP server to upload files, screencasts, podcasts etc.
CyberDuck does just that. It support sFTP so that you’re not sending stuff like username and password in clear text over the Internet. To edit (text-)files directly from within the FTP folder view, you need to add an external editor. I choose Smultron, a free editor that works fine.
With those two combined I just click on a PHP file in CyberDuck, select to edit it and CyberDuck downloads the file, opens the editor and re-uploads it afterwards.

Chicken of the VNC
As you might expected from the name, Chicken of the VNC is a VNC client. I use VNC a lot to connect to my servers at home. Those are stowed away in a closet without screen.
Chicken of the VNC works, but not as fast as the TightVNC viewer on my XP box does. Biggest difference I think is that in TightVNC viewer I’ve got the option Track remote cursor locally. In Chicken of the VNC the server mouse lags behind often and can’t keep up with my mouse movements.

Seashore
It took me a long time to find an image editor that I found actually useful. The major requirement was that it had to be able to blur out parts of an image. I needed that to be able to create screenshots like above for CyberDuck. Seashore does all that. But it is strange that a lot of the others that I tested (including Image Well which was recommended to me) either not provide that option or hide it too well for me to find.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 7:50 pm and is filed under Software, Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.