May Contain Nuts

So now that I finally have a replacement for my dead external media drive and things seem to be on their way toward stabilizing on the bug front, I’m looking at getting a copy of Snow Leopard to install on my iMac at home. I’m seriously considering doing for SL what I did for Leopard, which is to wipe the drive and do a fresh installation of the OS to get rid of any cruft that’s accumulated in the intervening 2 years (and there’s been quite a bit of that, to be sure).

I’m also going over all of the applications I use/have/installed-but-never-touch with an eye toward upgrading or replacing some of them as needed, keeping the ones I really like, and dumping the rest. Most of the “plugins” I use in Safari are already Snow Leopard-compatible, and I’ve found a possible replacement for the one that isn’t so that I can run the browser in 64-bit mode. I’m taking a long, hard look at Photoshop and contemplating whether I’m going to even bother re-installing it again once I upgrade. I have a couple of applications I’m eyeing as possible replacements, like DrawIt, which, in addition to Pixelmator, covers pretty much everything I ever seem to use Photoshop for in the first place, at 1/6th the price (plus hopefully a considerable boost to productivity that comes from not fighting with Adobe’s POS software).

The other application I’m eyeing for retirement is Fetch. It’s served me pretty well throughout my time on the Mac, and is one of the first apps I actually bought after CyberDuck started behaving poorly on my G5, but its interface seems dated, and if I’m going to have to shell out for a fully-Snow Leopard-compatible update anyway, I might as well play the field and see what I can find that might work a bit better. The alternative I’m currently looking at most favorably is Flow. I especially like the column view support it boasts (I live in column view now, and hate that Windows has nothing comparable), as well as the general look and feel of the application as a whole. Added bonus: Flow doesn’t seem to try and replace my cursor with a running dog which, since upgrading to Leopard, has been a spasm of flickering cursor icon fighting.

Sadly there doesn’t seem to be a downloadable version of DrawIt that doesn’t already require Snow Leopard, so I can’t really play with that app until after I take the plunge, but I do intend to fiddle with Flow tonight, and if nothing else I’ll suffer the indignity of Adobe’s absurdly bloated and unstable crapware until I can find something better if DrawIt and Pixelmator don’t measure up enough. I just have to get a couple of lingering things done in Photoshop first before upgrading to Snow Leopard so I can carry on without it and not lose anything in terms of time or effort.

I’m also hoping to pick up a copy of Versions, but it’s kinda pricey and I don’t have a lot of funding to lay out for stuff like that right now. Maybe in a while, and until then I can use something else for SVN, like svnX (don’t tell me to use the command line. I frankly hate doing things by command line; it’s just not how my brain works).