Internet

Things to browse, download or communicate over the internet.

Browsers

Firefox Browser

My main firefox section covers the pluggins, but for multiple Firefox profiles on OSX, the page on Firefox command line arguments is probably the way to do it. I may write it up later.

Browser - Safari

OSX’s quick and simple browser, it seems less extensible (and therefore developer friendly) than Firefox. Jon Hicks showed the best Safari development additions, and there are a few things that you can tweak under the hood, for example:

Debug menu

Turning on the Debug menu:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu YES

This menu includes a number of rough debugging tools that we created mainly for browser testing, but you may find some of them handy for web development.

Open target links in a new tab

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool true

Also check out how to run the Safari nightlies.

Email

I’ve given up and moved to Apple’s Mail.app, although there are a couple of settings to make use of, thanks to Roger Johanson to force it to use text whenever possible, put this into the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

And to set a minimum font size:

defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 13

FTP - Transmit

I first tried Trasmit, but Cyberduck (!) got the thumbs up from a friend: It is free, supports apple scripting, much nicer integration with Finder and seems to do everything you would need to with out unnecessary bloat.
I”m sticking with version 2.5 for now, as 2.6 doesn’t seem to work with SFTP & pub/pri keys.

Also see expandrive, which can easily mount an external SFTP server as a drive.

VPN

I need VPN (Virtual Private Networking) to access work stuff, and although the help files talk about IPsec VPN being built in, the setting doesn’t appear to be there. Untried so far, but IPSecuritas seems to fill that hole. A commercial product is VPN tracker.

VNC

There don’t seem to be any decent VNC servers for OS X, perhaps because if you were going to do that you’d use Xwindows? However, there is a reasonable VNC client, so if you install RealVNC on a PC you can then use Chicken of the VNC to connect.

Instant Messaging - AdiumX

On recommendation I’m using AdiumX, which seems fine, a good equivelent of Trillium on Windows.

Usenet

Not really thought of this before, but the company that make the FTP client above also do a usenet client: Unison.