Allow me to recommend latex-diff and latexbatchdiff

I do almost all of my technical writing in LaTeX, and I do revision control on everything with git. Unfortunately, tracking changes in revisions is very difficult in LaTeX. Maybe I make a change to a single word in a paragraph: a naive diff on the .tex file shows the entire line as being changed, and, even worse, then I just have the diff as plaintext, not something I could show a non-LaTeX user.

latexdiff is able to overcome this, automatically generating indications of changes, like Word’s change tracking system: new words show up as blue and underlined, deleted text is red and crossed-out. (How the changes are indicated is configurable, with several default styles to try.) latexdiff has two shortcomings, though. First, if I’m using version control to manage revisions, I have to manually save old .tex files off to the side so that latexdiff can find them. Second, latexdiff only works on single-file LaTeX documents. I like to put each section in its own file.

latexbatchdiff fixes both of these things. I just typed,

latexdiff-git 1ca0 head.tex abstract.tex acknowledgments.tex\
    introduction.tex methods.tex results.tex conclusion.tex

and it generated a marked-up PDF. (1ca0 is the start of a SHA for a previous revision.) It’s fantastic.

Allow me to recommend AUCTeX, preview-latex, and Vincent Goulet's Emacs for OS X Modified

I am wanting to start typesetting my articles in LaTeX rather than using Pages+Endnote+Mathtype or, worse, Word. I don't like the LaTeX writing process of write, run LaTeX, run LaTeX again a couple of times to get the equation numbering correct, convert the dvi to a pdf, open the pdf, find a typo in an equation, cry, go to the bathroom, make a cup of tea, write some more. AUCTeX is a package for Emacs that makes it easier to write LaTeX with handy keyboard shortcuts and syntax highlighting, for example. Most notably, AUCTeX comes bundled with a tool, preview-latex, which presents rendered math equations in-line.

This requires a GUI-enabled Emacs. On the Mac, Cocoa Emacs is the most current. Vincent Goulet has prepared a special build of Cocoa Emacs, Emacs for OS X Modified, which includes AUCTeX as well as ESS and psvn if you're interested in those, too.

I don't know if this is a common problem, but for my installation, preview-latex didn't work properly until I disabled TeX-PDF-mode by C-c C-t C-p or adding (TeX-PDF-mode nil) to my .emacs file. I got the idea from this mailing list discussion.

Allow me to recommend Cyberduck

Price: Free

Cyberduck is a reliable, easy-to-use FTP, SFTP, S3, etc. browser for OSX. And you get a cute rubber duckie in your dock! I used to use Fugu, and I find Cyberduck to be much more pleasant.

Allow me to recommend TextExpander and Dropbox

I'm fond of TextExpander; some people rave about it. I think it's handy, I can type "ttel" and TextExpander turns that into my phone number; I have other snippets for my websites, email addresses, and I've imported some libraries with HTML tags and autocorrections for common typos. It's handy.

I have a byzantine, quintuple-redundant backup system, with a Time Machine backup in my lab, a clone of my hard drive at home, two daily Flash stick backups, and a Dropbox backup. Dropbox gives me 2 GB of storage for free; there are paid plans for more space, but I don't worry about that, I just use Dropbox to back up my most important files and settings. Dropbox is an application you can install on all of the computers you use, and it will sync a folder across the cloud, so you have access to all of your stuff everywhere. I just use it as an extra backup.

Anyway, today, I noticed that my TextExpander snippets had disappeared, I don't know what happened. I went to dropbox.com, found my TextExpander settings, clicked Previous Versions, picked a working copy of my settings from a couple of days ago, clicked Restore, and immediately TextExpander was working again. TextExpander is a handy program that gets bonus points for having an open way of storing its settings, so that it's easy to back up and throw around. I'm shocked by how well Dropbox's version control worked.