These are some of the tools that I use.

• Editors
• LaTeX
• Other Text Processing
• Version Control
• File Transfer
• Launcher
• PIM
• Blog

Editors

• TextMate—‘The Missing Editor.’ Sophisticated text editor for OS X from MacroMates: ‘by bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds.’ Supports LaTeX, subversion, ruby, and much, much more. My current GUI text editor. Accept no substitute.

LaTeX

• MacTeX—‘MacTeX is a complete TeX system for Mac OS X, supporting TeX, LaTeX, AMSTeX, ConTeXt, XeTeX and many other packages.’
• BibDesk—‘BibDesk is a bibliographic reference manager for Mac OS X.’
• Skim—‘Skim is a PDF reader and note-taker for OS X. It is designed to help you read and annotate scientific papers in PDF, but is also great for viewing any PDF file.’

Other Text Processing

• Markdown—John Gruber’s open source text to XHTML conversion tool. Markdown ‘is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.’ Minimal and elegant markup: ‘The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.’
• SmartyPants—Another open source text processing tool from John Gruber. SmartyPants ‘translates plain ASCII punctuation characters into “smart” typographic punctuation HTML entities.’ Makes it easier to be typographically correct.
• HumaneText.service—Make Markdown available from the services menu of OS X. Also converts XHTML to ASCII in Markdown markup. ‘The Asciinator.’
• MultiMarkdown—Fletcher Penny’s open source extension of John Gruber’s Markdown. Whereas Markdown generates XHTML snippets, MultiMarkdown optionally generates XHTML documents. MultiMarkdown also adds support for footnotes, metadata, tables, and more. Currently at the center of my workflow.
• pandoc—‘An implementation of markdown (and much more) in Haskell. Converts markdown to HTML, LaTeX, rich text format, reStructuredText, or an S5 HTML slide show. Also converts HTML, LaTeX, and reStructuredText to markdown’ by John MacFarlane
• PHP Markdown Extra—‘PHP Markdown Extra is a special version of PHP Markdown implementing some features currently not available with the plain Markdown syntax’, by Michel Fortrin.

Version Control

• Subversion—An open source version control system from Tigris.org.
• svnX—‘SvnX is an open source GUI for most features of the svn client binary’, by La Chose Interactive.
• Git—‘Git is a popular version control system designed to handle very large projects with speed and efficiency; it is used mainly for various open source projects, most notably the Linux kernel.’
• GitHub—‘Secure Git hosting and collaborative development.’

File Transfer

• Cyberduck—An open source SFTP and FTP browser developed by David V. Kocher.

Launcher

• Quicksilver—An ‘evolving framework for accessing and manipulating many forms of personal data’ from Blacktree, Inc. It will change the way you use your mac.

PIM

• Remind—An open source sophisticated calendar and alarm program developed by David Skoll and maintained by Roaring Penguin Software. ‘Remind ships with three back-ends: rem2ps generates PostScript calendars; rem2html generates HTML ones, and tkremind provides an X Window GUI for Remind.’
• Wyrd—An open source curses front-end for Remind by Paul Pelz.

Blog

• Wordpress—‘WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful.’ Easily deployable as a content management system.
• Extended Live Archives—‘Implements a dynamic archive, inspired by Binary Bonsai and the original Super Archives by Jonas Rabbe.’ By Arnaud Froment.
• Brian’s Latest Comments—‘This shows an overview of the recently active articles and the last people to comment on them.’ By Brian Meidell.
• PHP Markdown Extra—Michael Fortrin’s PHP implementation of Markdown.
• Wordpress Database Backup—‘On-demand backup of your WordPress database. By Scott Merrill.’
• FireStats—‘FireStats is a web statistics system.’
• PHP SmartyPants Typographer—‘PHP SmartyPants is a port to PHP of the original SmartyPants written in Perl by John Gruber.’
• WP-Print 2.20—‘Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.’
• Akismet—‘Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.’