John's Software Reviews

Welcome to John's Software Reviews, the best place to find out just how good the software you might want to install is. I'll do my best to look at as many applications as I can but if you have any specific requests then do get in touch and let me know. I don't have the resources to provide downloads for these but you shouldn't have a problem with this, just go to any download website like this and you should be able to find it.

Mac Apps

Mac OS X is an operating system that is largely ignored by most software review sites but this time we're going to do our best to talk about some of the ones you should install anyway.

Coda 2: If you're a web developer then this is an app that really is essential. Writing code needs to be done an environment built for the task - some people tend to just stick to TextEdit which will do the job but doesn't offer any support tools for you. This one includes support for many different protocols to transfer files as well as editing them, for example connecting to your FTP account and editing them on-the-fly. It can be used to code any programming language you want and it also includes regular updates, the only problem is that it is quite expensive. Never the less, it's a really important tool for these users.

VLC: This is an app that you'll find for both Mac and Windows and is used as a media player. It can play music as well as movies, even live streams from the internet if you want to do that. It provides a lot of great functionality that you won't be able to get from default tools such as Quicktime or Windows Media Player. It has an organised library system which will help you to keep track of all of your media, meaning you don't have to worry about where each of your songs or videos have been stored on your hard drive. You could probably find media to use in this from software such as ARES.

iWork: Everyone these days knows about office suites such as Microsoft Office which can really help with your level of productivity. For example, you could write documents, manage your financial information and even create a presentation that you can give to peers. If you're running on Mac, you have the option of MS Office, OpenOffice.org or Apple's own program called iWork. This includes three separate tools that can all be downloaded from the App Store. I'm a really big fan of this software package because it's much cheaper than a lot of the alternatives available and it also works seamlessly in the operating system. This is one we'd definitely have to recommend.

Google Chrome: There are many different internet browsers you can install, which gives you a lot of different choices. By default Apple will give you their own tool called Safari which works well but isn't the quickest one available. We think that the best one in this regard is Google Chrome, which is also available for Windows. It has a few really helpful features, such as the ability to sync all of your bookmarks, browsing history and credit card details. It stores them all on Google servers. It's also the quickest browser on the market at the moment, a massive improvement over all of the others. It's also free of charge to use, too.