Which OS X Applications do you find indispensable?There are many applications already listed. In all likelihood, this includes the one you are thinking of. Please check the existing answers to avoid duplicates, and the resulting cleanup it necessitates.
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Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they'll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you've installed Dropbox on.
[1] http://www.dropbox.com/Terminal.app opens a UNIX terminal and allows you to access many power-user tools and features, just as you would on a machine running Linux or BSD.
[1] http://www.apple.com/osx/apps/all.html#terminalA lot of people (especially newcomers) completely overlook what the humble built-in Preview app can do. Apart from handling PDFs (including printing them in various layouts etc), you can join PDF files together with it (open the sidebar and start dragging pdf files into it, rearrange pages etc).
You can crop & resize images, adjust colour & saturation (etc), save as different image format and even add text & simple diagrammatical annotations to pictures.
Like a lot of the built-in software, there's an awful lot of flexibility that you simply don't appreciate at first because it's hidden in the GUI - as opposed to huge nested menus of functions, you have to try things with the mouse - often things just work!
[1] http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/apps-and-utilities.html#previewGrowl is a well-known 'notification' system for the Mac; many different programs support Growl and will pass notifications to it. You have a surprising degree of control over how the notifications appear, how they group themselves together, how they are dismissed from the screen etc. This can be configured universally or on an app-by-app basis, so it's very flexible.
One of the most useful features for me has been the way you can configure it to send notifications to selected other Macs on the network - I can leave one of my Macs doing something (such as downloading a large file) while I'm using my other Mac, and when the first Mac has finished doing its stuff the notification will pop-up on the Mac I'm in front of.
Growl is free, though you can donate to the cause!
Programs that can use Growl include Coda, Dropbox, Firefox, Handbrake, NetNewsWire, SuperDuper!, Transmit, and also Mail & Safari (via helper plugins).
[1] http://growl.info/Google Chrome is a lightweight, minimalistic web browser based off the open source project, Chromium [2].
[1] https://www.google.com/chrome/"The missing package manager for OS X". Like MacPorts and Fink, but simpler to use and easy to contribute to.
[1] https://brew.sh/A good IDE for cocoa developers. Xcode 5 is now available on the Mac App Store.
[1] http://developer.apple.com/tools/xcode/At its simplest, it's a video player that'll play nearly anything. File extensions supported include: mov, mkv, flv, wmv.
It's actually considerably more powerful than that in terms of streaming and converting, but even as a straight up video player, it's impressive.
[1] http://www.videolan.org/vlc/1Password can create strong, unique passwords for you, remember them, and restore them, all directly in your web browser.
[1] http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1PasswordTextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.
If you’re looking for a good editor, Sublime Text 2 is quite good too by now!
[1] http://macromates.com/Alfred is a productivity application for Mac OS X, which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web. Whether it's maps, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, you can feed your web addiction quicker than ever before.
It's a wonderful piece because it enables you to:
HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder.
[1] http://handbrake.fr/Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more. It provides enhanced security by supporting the OTR messaging protocol out of the box.
[1] http://adium.imPerian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats.
[1] http://perian.org/Transmission is a cross-platform BitTorrent client that is: Free and Community-Driven. Easy. Lean. Native. Powerful.
[1] http://www.transmissionbt.com/The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for "BOMArchiveHelper.app", the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder. It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems.
Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, RAR, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more and less obscure formats.
[1] http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.htmlurar that uses the same compression library, so you can extract all those obscure formats from a script. - ocodo
Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ^-click) the icon to show the menu.
[1] http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/for Upload, Download and Sync of FTP, SFTP, WebDav, iCloud, S3, ...
[1] http://cyberduck.ch/With skype, you can make
The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system. To that end we provide the command-line driven MacPorts software package under a BSD License, and through it easy access to thousands of ports that greatly simplify the task of compiling and installing open-source software on your Mac.
[1] http://www.macports.org/A very good port of Vim. I used both Emacs and TextMate for quite some time, but finally became a Vim user. I think I'll have a look at TextMate 2, if it will actually be released some time…
[1] http://code.google.com/p/macvim/More then just an application launcher, Quicksilver is an intuitive, self learning, application launcher and system manipulator.
It can also assign global hotkeys to actions, store clipboard history, show the current iTunes song and much more.
[1] http://qsapp.com/Pages is both a streamlined word processor and an easy-to-use page layout tool. It allows you to be a writer one minute and a designer the next, always with a perfect document in the works.
With great-looking templates, easy-to-create formulas, and dynamic tables and charts, spreadsheets suddenly make perfect sense.
Create your presentation in Keynote, and you’ll be a hard act to follow. Powerful yet easy-to-use tools and dazzling effects put the show in slideshow.
I use iWork constantly. Both on my Mac and iPad. It's just great :D
[1] http://www.apple.com/iwork/VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
[1] http://www.virtualbox.org/Evernote is an app for note taking that features online syncing, much like Dropbox. Install Evernote on your desktop, laptop, iPhone and iPad and have access to all your notes, and if you've left all them all at home, access them on the web.
[1] http://www.evernote.comWhile I adore Chrome, but Chrome on Mac is not on the same level as Chrome on Windows yet.
[1] http://www.apple.com/safari/Firefox is an open-source web browser from Mozilla, based off Netscape.
With a few OS X specific tweaks [2] it can be made to behave like a OS X browser should, including font rendering, Keychain Access and Retina display support.
[1] http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.htmlThe only diagramming application worth using.
[1] http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnigraffle/Yet another virtual machine product. I have tried Parallels and am using VirtualBox on and off, but VMware's Fusion is what I find to be most efficient and feature-full. Unity view is quite efficient when you want to run something side-by-side, while full screen or windowed modes are good for when you need a focus or are just testing out something.
[1] http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/iTerm2 is a full featured terminal emulation program written for OS X using Cocoa. We are aiming at providing users with best command line experience under OS X. The letter i represents a native apple look and feel of the program interface, and an emphasis on complete international support.
Note: iTerm2 is based on the old iTerm and is supported by the original author.
[1] http://www.iterm2.com/
A gorgeous RSS reader based on the iOS app.
Sequel Pro is a fast, easy-to-use Mac database management application for working with MySQL databases.
Sequel Pro gives you direct access to your MySQL databases on local and remote servers.
Whether you are a Mac Web Developer, Programmer or Software Developer your workflow will be streamlined with a native Mac OS X application!
[1] http://www.sequelpro.comTask management tool with an that UI strikes a nice balance between simplicity and functionality. Can be synced with iPhone and iPad versions.
It's a commercial app, and not even very cheap (40€ / $53 currently), but I've come to rely on it a lot.
[1] http://culturedcode.com/things/Take your Magic Mouse and add some more magic to it. Lets you do tons more gestures than OS X alone.
Works for the new trackpad and the multitouch trackpads in laptops too. It's still a bit buggy, but really, really cool.
[1] http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=1722-- TeXLive distribution and assorted goodies for the Mac.
[1] http://www.tug.org/mactex/2009/Sublime Text has grown to become my favorite GUI code editor. It feels like a spiritual successor to TextMate (even allowing support for some TextMate bundles like snippets and themes), and has many original+natural features like fully independent text cursors, a very nice search feature, and a rapidly-growing plugin API and surrounding community.
I liked it so much I wrote an inline lint [2] plugin.
Skitch allows you to take screenshots on your Mac, edit them and share them with others. It makes the sharing process seamless by making it a natural workflow to send the image (with edited arrows and other highlights helpful to your client) to them via email or automatic website uploads. It is especially popular with the designer community, as they show their clients rough drafts of their work in a nearly automated process. It makes it simple to work remotely with someone and pass on work revisions and get feedback quickly. Other uses include:
Coda is the only web-language-text-editor I like. It does everything you really need for web applications. It remember some common part of code in clips that you can load just by typing their tag name, it completes your html tags, it shows you the list of functions with related variables and autocomplete, it has the powerful Transmit ftp engine built in, it has a great visual CSS editor, it allows you to personalize the text colors and it has HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP doumentation maulaus available from within the application.
Never seen all these features in just one application!
From the developer's website:
So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with Transmit open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, adjusting SQL in a Terminal, using a CSS editor and reading references on the web. “This could be easier,” we declared. “And much cooler.”
LaunchBar is a smart and powerful, keyboard driven productivity utility that lets you access and control every aspect of your digital life. Whatever you want to get done on your Mac – with LaunchBar it’s only a few keystrokes away.
Indespensible as a keyboard utility to launch applications, open websites, search the web and a million other things.
[1] http://obdev.at/products/launchbarf.lux makes your computer screen look like the room you're in, all the time. When the sun sets, it makes your computer look like your indoor lights. In the morning, it makes things look like sunlight again.
Tell f.lux what kind of lighting you have, and where you live. Then forget about it. F.lux will do the rest, automatically.
[1] http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/Improves the finder by adding a tabbed view, as well as other less interesting features. I didn't realize how addicted to this I was until I got a new Mac and couldn't figure out why I couldn't open another finder tab. :-)
[1] http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/
What a fantastic little App... it makes easy to share allmost any file instantly and when you create a screenshot it automatically uploads it to the web and you have the short URL ready to be pasted anywhere.
a simple Cmd + SHIFT + 4 and ... Paste the url :)
...and you have RainDrops to share other content as photos from iPhoto directly and more
TextWrangler is the (free) powerful general purpose text editor, and Unix and server administrator’s tool. It is a powerful and richly featured tool for composing, modifying, and transforming text stored in plain-text files.
Among other things, it can open files from (and save them) to remote FTP and SFTP servers, offers a powerful grep engine, supports multi-byte and non-Roman text files, can perform Find Differences on pairs of files or folders, and can be invoked from the Unix command line.
[1] http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/quote from Thilo:
[1] http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/itunes.htmlI absolutely hate this app, but at the same time I (or rather my iPods) cannot live without it.
Please, Steve, make iTunes optional for iPods and iPads.
Displays customizable system monitoring information like CPU, memory and network usage and hardware temperatures in the menu bar. So like MenuMeters but a bit nicer in my opinion.
is an application that stores and retrieves notes.
It is an attempt to loosen the mental blockages to recording information and to scrape away the tartar of convention that handicaps its retrieval. The solution is by nature nonconformist.
[1] http://notational.net/Hands down the best plain-text editor I've ever used.
[1] http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/Sparrow's hallmark is a simplified user interface reminiscent of Twitter clients such as Tweetie or iOS apps, as opposed to a more traditional e-mail style such as Apple's Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird.
Sparrow currently supports all IMAP email accounts. It also includes features such as drag-and-drop attachments, Growl support, and keyboard shortcuts, as well as threaded replies and easy switching between Gmail accounts.
[1] http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/Office for Mac 2011 is the best option for Mac users who share documents at home, work, or at school.
It comes packed with powerful features for creating artful documents, dynamic spreadsheets, and effective presentations. Plus it’s compatible. You can be confident that your documents will open correctly on Mac or PC.
Gives almost(!) seamless Windows OS and apps integration.
[1] http://www.parallels.com/eu/products/desktop/For listening to music off the internet. This definitely has become one of the pieces of software I would first install (on a Mac or any other computer).
Note: Spotify is available only in some countries; currently:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The
Wikipedia article
[2] has
details
[3].
Clone, synchronize, backup.
CCC 3 features an interface designed to make the cloning and backup procedure very intuitive. In addition to general backup, CCC can also clone one hard drive to another, copying every single block or file to create an exact replica of your source hard drive. CCC's block-level copy offers the absolute fastest performance and highest fidelity in the industry!
[1] http://www.bombich.com/I have Photoshop, but Acorn is an amazing, lightweight and cheap alternative I go to way, way more often.
[1] http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/This great little tool was originally by Blacktree, who made Quicksilver.
[1] http://totalterminal.binaryage.com/OmniFocus is designed to quickly capture your thoughts and allow you to store, manage, and process them into actionable to-do items. Perfect for the Getting Things Done® system, but flexible enough for any task management style, OmniFocus helps you work smarter by giving you powerful tools for staying on top of all the things you need to do.
[1] http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnifocus/Brilliant.
HyperDock adds long awaited features to your Dock: Select single application windows just by moving the mouse on a dock item, use mouse clicks to quickly open new windows and many more.
Control iTunes. Hover the mouse over the iTunes dock item to view information about the current song, You can pause or skip songs and even adjust volume just by scrolling on the itunes icon.
And many more...
[1] http://hyperdock.bahoom.de/I literally couldn't stand to use the Mac without this software. When I want to full screen an app I just drag the app's title bar to the menu bar and it "cinches" itself to full screen. A must have for Mac.
Edit: Cinch also allows making a window fill the left/right/upper/lower half of your screen (similar to Windows Snap). Very useful for copy-pasting and comparing.
DaisyDisk scans your disks and presents their content as interactive maps where you can easily spot unusually large files and remove them to get more free space. The map gives you an overview of your data, so you always know what your hard disks are filled with.
[1] http://www.daisydiskapp.com/Awesome, open source, well-featured IDE primarily for Java, but also supports C++, PHP, and Python, among others. Also has a wealth of third-party plugins.
[1] http://eclipse.orgGUI Subversion client. From their website:
Versions provides a pleasant way to work with Subversion on your Mac. Whether you're a hardcore Subversion user or new to version control systems, Versions will help streamline your workflow.
I will say up front that it doesn't inherently support all of Subversion's features, but it does make managing source code and important document for solo developers and small groups much, much easier than dealing with the command line. It's one of the three apps that gets opened with my "AM" script.
[1] http://versionsapp.com/[1] http://calibre-ebook.com/calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. It has a cornucopia of features divided into the following main categories:
- Library Management
- E-book conversion
- Syncing to e-book reader devices
- Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form
- Comprehensive e-book viewer
- Content server for online access to your book collection
Yet another password manager (actually, probably the first one online, I believe prior to 1pass) that integrates well with every browser (well, at least Safari, Chrome and Firefox). You have even an option to use yubikeys with it. I use it for long time and it's just amazing. It does everything I would expect and little more. It monitors when you change password, have a KB of websites and really gets almost all of them, while allow you to configure whenever field with login and password you want. And it's multiplatform.
Back in 2010 it bought Xmarks and must integrate with that as well.
It's completely free to use but it does offer a premium subscription for extra (and unnecessary) features. I personally paid for it as a donation, since I really never use the features.
[1] http://lastpass.com/I know a lot of people use Adium, and I did too for a long time. But iChat just does what I want and does it slightly more elegantly, so I switched.
I personally can't live without:
I also use it for MSN via a Jabber transport [2], which basically lets me connect to MSN through a jabber server [3], integrating the two seamlessly. Since there are a lot of transport-enabled servers [4] – for ICQ and AIM (which, by the way, are also supported natively in iChat), IRC, Gadu-Gadu, QQ and of course MSN – you can benefit from iChat's simple interface with whatever IM service you use [5].
[1] http://www.apple.com/macosx/what-is-macosx/ichat.htmlApplication for moving and resizing windows using a "grid" approach.
[1] http://www.mizage.com/divvy/It's small and powerful tool for remove/ uninstalling your applications on OS X.
I use it frequently, it even helps you to remove Cache created the the application from your Mac.
[1] http://www.freemacsoft.net/AppCleaner/A task manager, a utility for performing different tasks to a computer processes, in the Mac OS X operating system. Some of its functions include:
Simply the best. Save keystroke even if you just use it to write your email address.
[1] http://smilesoftware.com/TextExpander/Allows you to set keyboard shortcuts for moving windows to certain halves and quarters of the desktop, as well as between desktops when using multiple monitors.
[1] http://irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/Minimalist Clipboard Buffering for OS X
Jumpcut is an application that provides "clipboard buffering" — that is, access to text that you've cut or copied, even if you've subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut's interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard's history.
[1] http://jumpcut.sourceforge.net/Easy-to-use RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader (but it doesn't have to). I think my favorite part is that the UI can be completely and logically navigated with the arrow keys even the action of opening a feed entry in your default browser.
[1] http://netnewswireapp.com/Path Finder = Finder + Automatic viewer + Shell + Screen Capture + Almost everything you need
[1] http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/The best Twitter client there is. In perfect sync with the web app itself.
[1] http://itunes.apple.com/tr/app/twitter/id409789998?mt=12
Associate to an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, through their 2.99 App [2] this is the best solution to see all your downloaded movies in your devices.
There is a Windows version as well.
Added
Since iOS 4.3, iTunes Home Sharing is now available for all iDevices, and there is no need of having Air Video, though, you wil need to import all your movies into iTunes in order to be accessible cross network.
For me, I will still stick with Air Video for a long time :o)
[1] http://www.inmethod.com/air-video/On the whole, still the best email app I know for any platform.
[1] http://www.mozillamessaging.com/thunderbird/gfxCardStatus is an open-source menu bar application that keeps track of which graphics card your dual-GPU MacBook Pro is using at any given time, and allows you to switch between them on demand. (free, donationware)
If you have a dual-GPU MBP, you absolutely NEED this program! Did you know that some common applications such as Skype enable your high-powered Nvidia graphics card the entire time they're running? I use it to force my MBP to switch to the power-saving Intel graphics chip when I'm on battery. It adds an extra hour or so of battery life which would otherwise be wasted just because I keep Skype online for chatting.
[1] http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus/also see: Hands Off! [2]
No matter what OS, Filezilla had been everywhere I go, and when you start to use it, you can never really get rid off it.
The interface is simple and intuitive, with bookmarks, tree sync, multiple connections on tabs, etc.
[1] http://filezilla-project.org/MacFUSE allows you to extend Mac OS X's native file handling capabilities via 3rd-party file systems. It is used as a software building block by dozens of products.
[1] http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/This project is no longer being maintained. - Kendall Hopkins
A terminal window for every application. Press a hotkey (I have mine set to Cmd-Opt-Space), and a floating command line pops up over your current window, initialized to the current directory of that window.
Another hotkey allows you to easily paste the name of your current document or Finder selection.
[1] http://www.decimus.net/dterm.phpI have a hard time using a Mac without it these days. How does anyone -- especially a programmer -- work without having the pulse of their Mac at their fingertips? How else do you tell when your browser is stuck or is really downloading something, if you can't see the network traffic? When the computer pauses, and you want to know if it's working, just look at the menu to see that the CPU gauges are pegged at 100% -- and much of that is in the kernel. At a glance, I can instantly see that memory consumption has rocketed up, and with a click I can see that I'm heavily into swap space. It's just so useful.
[1] http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/(MAMP = Mac Apache MySQL PHP)
Apache Webserver, MySQL Database and PHP in one Package. Easy installation and easy to use for local development of Websites/Webapps.
[1] http://www.mamp.info/The best movie player for Mac OS X based on QuickTime & FFmpeg. Opens all types of video files and loads quicker than any other app for movies I've ever used.
Features I like:
This program is, in some ways, the embarrassing bastard child of the audio world. It's an underpowered, feature-crippled version of Logic, one of the best-regarded multitracking applications in the recording world.
Nonetheless, Gagareband is very powerful, and does what I need it to do. While I'd appreciate more flexibility (tempo matching would be nice, and the ability to change time signatures within a project), and the program doesn't handle multiple layers of effects as well as I'd like, it performs brilliantly at what it does do, and it's insanely easy to learn.
Garageband is one of the main reasons I haven't ditched my G5 Mac for a Windows or Linux machine I took so long to replace my G5 mac. (Now I use GB and Logic on a Macbook Pro.)
I'm amazed it hasn't been mentioned as an answer already. It's saved my data on more than one occasion from catastrophic hard drive failure.
From its website: SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper's built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically. It's the perfect complement to Time Machine under Leopard and Snow Leopard, allowing you to store a bootable backup alongside your Time Machine volume—and it runs beautifully on both Intel and Power PC Macs!
[1] http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.htmlPicasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great.
[1] http://picasa.google.com/mac/It is a media player. I like it more than VLC player.
[1] http://mplayerosx.sttz.ch/A free software, cross-platform digital audio editor and recording application (from Wikipedia).
If you want to record plain old audio onto your computer, Audacity is a pretty easy way to do it.
(Apple's optical drives from the past several years have implemented region lockout DRM [2] in firmware, rather than simply software, so I can't play back DVDs from multiple regions on my Mac. It's a laptop, so "just buy a second DVD drive" isn't really feasible, and I'm not brave enough to try flashing it with a third-party firmware. Plugging in my DVD player to my Mac is quick and easy, though!)
[1] http://audacity.sourceforge.net/Xee is a lightweight, fast and convenient image viewer and browser. It is designed to be a serious tool for image viewing and management, with a sleek and powerful interface. Xee is useful as a more powerful replacement for Preview, or most any other image viewer available on Mac OS X.
[1] http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/xee.htmlOnyX is a (free) multifunction utility for Mac OS X which allows you to verify the Startup Disk and the structure of its System files, to run misc tasks of system maintenance, to configure some hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, QuickTime, Safari, Mail, iTunes, Login window, Spotlight and many Apple’s applications, to delete caches, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome and more.
I've seen this utility majorly improve the performance of Mac OS X. I run it about once a month to automate maintenance scripts and it's helped identify problems like the need to repair a disk several times. A very useful and effective tool.
[1] http://www.titanium.free.fr/index.phpUnbeatable note-taking app, featuring online syncing with the plain text notes web service, Simplenote, and the simplenote apps for iPhone and iPad.
nvAlt is a fork of the existing application, Notational Velocity [2].
[1] http://brettterpstra.com/project/nvalt/Amazing background app for quickly accessing and adding events to your mac's calendar. Supports Caldev Sync to keep your mac's calendar always up to date, as well as natural writing event creation.
Bring up fantastical with a keyboard shortcut, and then type out your new event. Hit return and it's in. Quickly view all the upcoming events for the next month and beyond. Next time you open iCal, all of your data will remain intact as Fantastical works with your software in the background.
[1] http://flexibits.com/fantastical(Uses the same principles as SizeUp [2], but free)
This application will let you resize and move your windows without having to using a mouse. Here are some of things you can do with Shift It:
Shift It is a great tool that lets you organize your windows. Now you can read documents side-by-side without having the pain of manually resizing the windows.
[1] http://code.google.com/p/shiftit/[1] http://code.google.com/p/cdto/Fast mini application that opens a Terminal.app window cd'd to the front most finder window. This app is designed (including it's icon) to placed in the finder window's toolbar.
Augments the Open Folder and Save Folder dialogs from any application to allow you to immediately jump to any folder currently open by Finder. (Also works for folders open with Path Finder).
Once you start using this app, it's really hard to live without it.
[1] http://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/Play any audio across your network to a whole host of devices, all in sync! Airfoil sends audio to remote speakers including iOS devices, other computers, and hardware devices like the Apple TV and AirPort Express. Airfoil for Mac gives you any audio, everywhere.
Basically, what previously only iTunes could do (send audio to an AirPort Express) you can now do with all applications.
[1] http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/Geektool allows you to put a tail of your syslog on the desktop, or the output of some command, or some graphic/chart/picture.
It's a bit like a more single-minded Dashboard for your desktop. You can make awesome clocks, or beautiful server monitoring, or just a fortune cookie (if you install fortune with HomeBrew).
It's not perfect (it would need sticky borders, continuous command output and sane multi-monitor behavior for that) but it's a lot of fun, using little resources.
[1] http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/[1] http://code.google.com/p/tunnelblick/Tunnelblick is a free, open source Graphic User Interface (GUI) for OpenVPN [2] on Mac OS X. It provides easy control of OpenVPN client and/or server connections.
Notify is an awesome email notifier for Mac OS X. It fits seamlessly into your menubar, only vying for your attention when you have new mail. Notify supports mutliple accounts, including Gmail, MobileMe, and Rackspace Email.
[1] http://www.notifyapp.comA really simple, intuitive twitter client. This is the one that got me to switch from Tweetie.
[1] http://www.echofon.com/X Lossless Decoder(XLD) is a tool for Mac OS X that is able to decode/convert/play various 'lossless' audio files. Supported audio files can be split into tracks with a cue sheet when decoding. It works on Mac OS X 10.3 and later.
XLD is Universal Binary, so it runs natively on both Intel Macs and PPC Macs.
[1] http://tmkk.pv.land.to/xld/index_e.htmlThis is a command line utility to unpack the .rar files on Mac OSX. You can't unpack the .rar files natively on OSX, where this small util is useful.
[1] http://download.cnet.com/unRAR/3000-2072_4-26159.htmlAperture is a fine app for photo management and editing for professionals and advanced amateur photographers alike. It supports many file-formats and raw image file formats.
For a complete feature list see the link above.
One of my favorite features is having a full screen view while still having image control for editing via a HUD.
Isolator is a small menu bar application that helps you concentrate. When you're working on a document, and don't want to be distracted, turn on Isolator. It will cover up your desktop and all the icons on it, as well as the windows of all your other applications, so you can concentrate on the task in hand.
It's a small utility, but one that I find pretty indispensable. One of the first apps I install on new Mac.
[1] http://willmore.eu/software/isolator/A Better Finder Rename has long been the file renamer of choice for tens of thousands of professionals, businesses and hobbyists across the world.
If I need to choose only one software to install on my Mac, I would install Mathematica by Wolfram.
[1] http://www.wolfram.comXBMC is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. XBMC is available for Linux, OSX, Windows, and the original Xbox.
[1] http://xbmc.org/iMovie is the best amateur video editing software out there. It has a very small learning curve, which makes it great for doing quick projects. I used iMovie for the longest time, then switched to FCE. I still use it for minor projects.
[1] http://www.apple.com/ilife/imovie/MusicBrainz is an audio file metadata (or "tag") editor. It has options for both automatic and manual modification of audio metadata.
It's cross-platform (Linux/Mac OS X/Windows) and written in Python and is the official MusicBrainz tagger.
Picard supports the majority of audio file formats, is capable of using audio fingerprints (PUIDs, similar to other fingerprinting apps like Shazam and SoundHound), performing CD lookups and disc ID submissions, and it has excellent Unicode support. Additionally, there are several plugins available that extend Picard's features.
[1] http://musicbrainz.org/doc/PicardDownloadThe world's easiest-to-use maintenance solution. This all-in-one tool includes everything you need to keep your Mac clean and healthy.
[1] http://macpaw.com/Because it's still my favourite browser. After having used it on Windows for eight years, I took it with me when I "switched" four years ago.
Browsers are always subjective, but I like Opera because I rely on its single-key shortcuts, used its mouse gestures a lot before I moved over to a glass trackpad, I have dozens of tabs open at any time, it has session handling, bookmark syncing, and dozens of other neat, small things. And everything is built in and just works.
I could probably get Firefox to do everything Opera does for me, but it would be a hassle, and it would be even slower than it already is without any extensions. I could never get Safari to do everything I need.
[1] http://www.opera.comWe still need to learn how to play nice with windows systems (and filesystems). I use this to access my NTFS drives.
NTFS-3G is a stable, read/write NTFS driver for Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, QNX, Haiku, and other operating systems. It provides safe handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 NTFS file systems. A high-performance driver is available commercially for embedded devices.
[1] http://www.tuxera.com/community/ntfs-3g-download/A very powerful backup application that allows you to backup to external drives, other computers, and/or their own cloud at a very reasonable price. It has an impressive compression rate and allows you to create multiple backup sets to backup different data to different locations. It has a well-designed interface and allows you to specify scheduled or continuous backups. It offers versioning and 448-bit encryption. For a home user the software is free to use if you choose not to backup to their cloud.
[1] http://www.crashplan.comDisplays iTunes’ current song’s rating in your menu bar. Click to change rating. Supports keyboard shortcuts. Has a configurable sound to remind you to rate an unrated song. Disappears when nothing’s playing.
[1] http://www.potionfactory.com/blog/2008/05/15/i-love-starsPomodoro Desktop is a desktop application for Time Management on your Mac OSX. It is a simple but effective way to manage your (coding) time, and it's based on the Pomodoro technique you can find here [2].
[1] http://pomodoro.ugolandini.com/Technically this is both an iOS and Mac OS X application. What it does is let you use your iPad as a second monitor with your Mac. When I am using my Mac my iPad isn't usually in use (unless a family member stole it) so I use Air Display to make it useful while I am using my Mac. You get a 1024x768 or 768x1024 display that rotates and flips automatically - like you would expect.
The Mac portion is free, but you buy the iPad App. Runs with Windows too. Operates over WiFi, but you can always create a private network if one does not exist or it is too slow!
[1] http://avatron.com/apps/air-display/OmniDiskSweeper scans your hard drive telling you where your largest files are, making it easy to delete cruft. It's intelligent in how it presents this information hierarchically.
[1] http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnidisksweeper/For web developers who develop websites locally on their Mac. VirtualHostX manages your Apache Virtual Hosts and enable the use of domain names that point to your local machine (even non-routable domain names.) VirtualHostX does this by managing your Mac's hosts file and your Apache httpd.conf and httpd-vhosts.conf config files. It even supports MAMP (although I don't use MAMP.)
It's one of my top 5 favorite apps and one I'd hate to do without. I use it every time I start a new project!
iChm is an ebook reader for CHM (Microsoft Compiled HTML Help) files.
[1] http://www.robinlu.com/blog/ichmSABnzbd is an Open Source Binary Newsreader written in Python. It's totally free, incredibly easy to use, and works practically everywhere. SABnzbd makes Usenet as simple and streamlined as possible by automating everything we can. All you have to do is add an .nzb. SABnzbd takes over from there, where it will be automatically downloaded, verified, repaired, extracted and filed away with zero human interaction.
[1] http://sabnzbd.org/KeePassX is a cross platform secure password saver. Like Keychain, but you can use it on your mobile phone and windows computers.
[1] http://www.keepassx.org/Postbox 2 is first class email software that puts you in the driver’s seat. Stay on task, find information quickly and act, not react.
Unified Account Groups
Focus Pane
Quick Reply
Exist both free and paid versions
[1] http://www.postbox-inc.com/a programmers' editor for OS X
An open source project that is slowly replacing TextMate for me.
[1] http://kodapp.com/Designed for scientists, Papers manages PDFs of journal articles. Articles imported to Papers can easily have their metadata applied from journal databases. Articles can then easily be sorted by author or journal, and labeled with different categories. Papers has an associated iOS app that it syncs with.
[1] http://mekentosj.com/papers/SizeUp allows you to quickly position a window to fill exactly half the screen (splitscreen), a quarter of the screen (quadrant), full screen, or centered via the menu bar or configurable system-wide shortcuts (hotkeys). Similar to "tiled windows" functionality available on other operating systems.
[1] http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/Plex bridges the gap between your Mac and your home theater, doing so with a visually appealing user interface that provides instant access to your media. Plex can play a wide range of video, audio and photo formats as well as online streaming audio and video. The real power of Plex is found in its library features: Organize your media into versatile libraries, automatically retrieve metadata from the Internet, and display your libraries using one of the visually stunning skins.
Plex has all but replaced VLC as my primary media application.
[1] http://www.plexapp.com/about.phpA Finder replacement. Two panes file management program. Not as cutomizable as Total Commander but has a lot of features builtin.
[1] http://www.binarynights.com/If you're finding your laptop screen too bright at night even on the minimum brightness, Shady's the right guy for you. Basically, it puts a transparent overlay over your entire screen, dimming it anywhere between 0% and 90% of normal.
[1] http://mattgemmell.com/2009/11/02/shady-for-tired-eyesmuCommander is a lightweight, cross-platform file manager with a dual-pane interface. It runs on any operating system with Java support (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, *BSD, Solaris...).
Here's a non-exhaustive list of what you'll find:
[1] http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/VoodooPad is a place to write down your notes and thoughts. Ideas, images, lists, passwords, your mom's apple pie recipe. Anything you need to keep track of and organize. VoodooPad will grow with you without getting in the way. Drag and drop folders, PDFs, applications, or URLs into VoodooPad, and they will link up just like on the web. And with powerful search, nothing will be lost or out of reach.
The absolute KING of creative tools. Sure, the price is a bit up there, although there really isn't anything that can touch the versatility of having seventeen applications at your disposal. I've used some of these tools since their very existence (Illustrator, Photoshop) and I honestly can't imagine working without them. It would be difficult to describe what they all do; infinite possibilities.
Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat X Pro, Flash Professional, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Contribute, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, OnLocation, Encore, Bridge, Device Central, Media Encoder, Media Encoder
◆ I'm a bit shocked this is just now making it's debut here.
[1] http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/mastercollection.htmlAudio Hijack allows you to record any sound from your Mac or input device. You can also mute certain applications. This is my go-to-application for any audio recording.
[1] http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijackpro/It's Apple's program for taking notes. Very minimalistic and fast.
Your notes can be:
An amazing calculator that does it all with a nice text-based interface.
Just type your problem as you'd write it on paper. You see your answer instantly. No setting up formulas, no equals button. If you make a mistake, you don't have to start all over again, you just hit delete.
[1] http://www.acqualia.com/soulverHiss is an OSX app that forwards notifications from Growl enabled apps to Notification Center in Mountain Lion.
Currently in beta, but it does an awesome job of piping all your Growl notifications into the Notification Center of OS X Mountain Lion. The only real downside to it is that it flags all notifications with the Growl icon.
[1] http://collect3.com.au/hiss/Disables sleep mode, so you can shut your lid without the system hibernating.
[1] http://semaja2.net/insomniaxinfoAn application launcher, like Quicksilver. Having tried both, I found Quick Search Box's UI to be cleaner and the overall application to be faster.
[1] http://code.google.com/p/qsb-mac/This handy tool allows you to customize OSX in various ways so that it is more efficient for you uses and allows you to access settings that you normally couldn't
[1] http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.htmlThis is an awesome calculator that I have been using for at least 10 years. For basic arithmetic and quick calculations this app can't be beat.
It is also available from the Mac App store [2].
[1] http://www.pcalc.com/Fraise is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.6 which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to neither confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced users.
General-purpose text editor with extensive syntax highlighting support. Can be downloaded via MacUpdate [2].
[1] https://www.assembla.com/spaces/fraise/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions_%28FAQ%29Smultron, which was abandonned, is now developed again (and available on the App Store). So Fraise developer said there would be no other update to Fraise. - Loïc Wolff
a free, native OS X hex editor based on the Cocoa framework.
For all those low-light situations, Nocturne is a tool for inverting colors, changing screen tint etc. So I can make the screen dimmer while keeping it readable, when the dimmest backlight setting is too bright.
I especially like the Invert hue option, which can be used to keep colors the same while inverting black/white.
[1] http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-nocturne/Overflow is an application designed to quickly launch applications, open documents, or access folders while reducing the number of items needed in your Dock.
[1] http://stuntsoftware.com/overflow/Base is an awesome tool for managing SQLite databases. It has an intuitive interface and allows you to easily create or alter tables. I especially like that the transcript shows you exactly what queries Base is executing against your database.
[1] http://menial.co.uk/software/base/A simple notes app that syncs with Simplenote [2]--my favorite notes app for iOS.
[1] http://selfcoded.com/justnotes/AppFresh helps you to keep all applications, widgets, preference panes and application plugins installed on your Mac up to date.
All from one place, easy to use and fully integrated into Mac OS X. AppFresh works by checking the excellent osx.iusethis.com [2] for new versions and lets you download and install available updates easily.
[1] http://metaquark.de/appfresh/QuickCursor lets you use your favorite editor to edit text in any Mac app that has a text input field. It's particularly useful for editing textboxes on web pages.
[1] http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/products/quickcursorWhen you move a .app to the Trash, AppTrap notices this and offers to remove all associated library and preference files.
[1] http://onnati.net/apptrap/A timer that detects when you're using the computer and tells you to take breaks if you've been at it too long. I like it because it has two timers running concurrently, one for small, frequent breaks, the other for long, rarer breaks. It's intelligent, configurable, and can show the timers on the dock icon.
[1] http://tech.inhelsinki.nl/antirsi/TinyUmbrella is a great app for anyone who has an iOS device they want to downgrade to a previous firmware for one reason or other. It backs up and saves the SHSH blobs or "Keys" required to complete the restore.
[1] http://thefirmwareumbrella.blogspot.com/Bowtie (free) is a little app for controlling iTunes and Last FM. It comes with several features, and it's really well done. Here's a brief description from its webpage.
Bowtie is a free application that allows you to control iTunes and your iPhone (requires 99¢ companion app) with customizable shortcuts, submits your songs to Last.fm with support for Loving and Banning, and sports a very simple, yet very powerful, HTML5 + CSS + JavaScript theming system.
It's got some pretty cool "Bowlets", or little controllers/information displayers that can sit on the screen. There are plenty to choose from (these are just a few I have downloaded from the theme browser):
This is one of my favourite (PaperRift by creeze):
Download on App Store [2].
[1] http://bowtieapp.com/Easily configure ports [2], assuming you have a UPnP router.
[1] http://www.codingmonkeys.de/portmap/Practically every editor, including text editors, lie about the contents of files. Even programming languages change or omit certain characters. In general this is intended to help you see what they think you are looking for, but sometimes you just want to see things how they really are
Note: The original hexeditor I linked to is no longer on offer, so I have updated the link with the suggestion from neoneye
[1] http://ridiculousfish.com/hexfiend/0xED in this list. - CyberSkull
A free, open-source Integrated Development Environment for software developers. All the tools needed to create professional desktop, enterprise, web, and mobile applications with the Java platform, as well as with C/C++, PHP, JavaScript and Groovy.
[1] http://netbeans.org/LibreOffice is the FLOSS [2] office suite. It's comparable to Microsoft Office while available for free.
[1] http://www.libreoffice.org/
Moom is a very configurable window management tool. Some useful features include convenient and fast window placement and resizing using grids, saving window layout profiles, configurable hot keys, and much more.
[1] http://manytricks.com/moom/It’s my favorite dummy text / lorem ipsum generator for OS X (free). What it makes so special is the selection mechanism from the menu bar (words… sentences… paragraphs):
From their site:
Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Bark intelligently brings
notifications from Growl into Notification Center under OS X Mountain Lion.
Much like Hiss [2], Bark forwards your Growl notifications to Notification Center in Mountain Lion. The catch though is it forwards them not as "Growl Notifications", but as notifications from the actual app that sent them, making the experience totally seamless.
Screenshots might make it more clear. I reckon Bowtie and Coda 2 don't support Notification Center natively, but with Bark this is what you get:
And on notification center they look like this:
Correct icons, correct grouping, the plugin is completely free and works with the newer versions of Growl (App Store versions)... definitely worth checking out!
PS: Coda 2.0.3 I think now supports Notification Center natively, but you get the idea...
[1] http://barkplug.in/Secrets is a PrefPane that lets users access hidden settings in many Mac OS X applications. It is also open source [2] and user driven, any user can submit a secret and have it immediately available in the Secrets for anyone to use.
from the webpage:
[1] http://www.omnidea.it/rulers/"Rulers" allows you to create rulers on the entire screen area like most common graphic editors allow on their working areas only. The guide lines enable you to measure and position objects with precision. Rulers is incredibly useful in many fields, such as computer graphics, desktop publishing and web design. Rulers can also be used to select a screen area and take a screenshot that is automatically saved to your desktop or copied to system clipboard.
Rip is an application for accurate CD audio extraction.
It uses a smart combination of the AccurateRip database and CD Paranoia to ensure that the CD will be ripped accurately through the fastest means available.
[1] http://sbooth.org/Rip/Spirited Away checks each running application's activity, and if an application isn't active for a certain fixed time, Spirited Away hides the application automatically. It is, in effect, Spirited Away :-)
This is a great productivity app, keep your workspace clean and focussed, by hiding all the apps you are not using. No more distractions in the background!
[1] http://drikin.com/Pull out your headphones, and iTunes pauses. Plug it back in, and it starts again. A simple application that makes your life that much easier.
[1] http://mutablecode.com/apps/breakawayThis tool provides a ton of enhancements to the contextual menu. It allows you to select move,copy,alias a selected item (icon) to pretty much any folder via pop-up hierarchical folder lists. Built-in preview stuff, and more.
[1] http://www.finderpop.com/Textual is a lightweight IRC client created specifically for Mac OS X. It was designed with simplicity in mind. Textual has taken the best of IRC and built it into a single client. Its easy-to-use functionality combined with scripting support makes it an ideal IRC client for novice to advanced users.
I tried Colloquy; I tried MacIrssi; I tried X-Chat Aqua [2]; but for a GUI client, I have happily stuck to using Textual.
[1] http://www.codeux.com/textual/Vox is a little and simple music player for Mac OS X with support for many file types, including FLAC, MP3, AAC, Musepack, Monkey's Audio, OGG Vorbis, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV, IT, MOD, XM, Games Music and many others. Includes numerous effects like Equalizer, Reverb, Time Stretch, Pitch Shift, Echo. Moreover, all supported files can be exported to AAC+, Apple Lossless, WAV and other formats with enabled effects.
This is one truly awesome little app which is sadly not well-known. I'd even say Vox was one of the reasons I switched to Mac. Nothing but the essentials for a music player. Besides, it offers some nice audio features (e. g. resampling with antialiasing) as well as built-in Last.fm integration and nifty controls in menubar.
I prefer to organize my music in folders by artists and albums and not bother with music libraries used in most modern audio players, so Vox's ability to play all files in a folder is the single most important feature to me.
If you feel that iTunes has grown far too big for a music player or just don't like messing with audio libraries you should really give Vox a try.
[1] http://voxapp.didgeroo.com/Pianopub is a free Pandora internet radio player for OS X. It is a port of Pianobar [2], so please support the original developers. It is for use with your account from the Pandora.com internet radio service.
By far the best Pandora client ever — in form of a native Mac OS X app.
[1] http://dev.kunugiken.com/Pianopub/THL is a to-do list/GTD organizer that supports tagging, contexts, tabs, unlimited nesting, alarms, cloud syncing, keyboard shortcuts, and a ton of other features. It's a great piece of software, and comes from a developer with impeccable attention to detail. There's a companion iPhone app as well.
[1] http://www.potionfactory.com/thehitlist/Prism allows you to turn any webpage into an application. I've used this numerous times.
[1] http://prism.mozillalabs.com/OCR software for OS X.
[1] http://www.irislink.com/c2-1584-189/Readiris-12---OCR-Software-------Convert-your-Paper-Documents-into-Editable-Text-.aspxReadiris 12 family quickly converts your paper documents into editable text or PDF files you can edit, share and store!
I know what you are thinking: "This isn't an application!", but wait a second, it actually is! I made Grooveshark into a standalone application with hotkeys. I love it and use it all the time! Information about turning Grooveshark into a standalone application here [2].
[1] http://www.grooveshark.comSloth is a graphical frontend for the console tool lsof. If don't know what that is, it doesn't matter!
Sloth makes it easy to find out which applications are using which files.
Sloth displays a list of all open files and sockets in use by all the applications your user account is running on the system. This list is presented along with the names of applications using the file and their process IDs. Includes support for regex list filtering, process killing, sorting and more.
[1] http://sveinbjorn.org/slothControlPlane supports multiple contexts where a context is defined as a location or activity you are performing. Using evidence sources you can create a set of rules that tell ControlPlane what context to apply to your environment. When ControlPlane enters or leaves a context a set of Actions are performed.
In other words: it will turn off screen saver protection when You arrive home and turn it back when You leave. And so much more.
[1] http://www.controlplaneapp.com/Just hold the ⌘ a bit longer to get a list of all active short cuts of the current application. It's as simple as that.
[1] http://www.cheatsheetapp.com/CheatSheet/[1] http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/With ScreenFlow you can record the contents of your entire monitor while also capturing your video camera, microphone and your computer audio. The easy-to-use editing interface lets you creatively edit your video, and add additional images, text, music and transitions for a truly professional-looking video. The finished result is a QuickTime or Windows Media movie, ready for publishing to your Web site or blog or directly to YouTube or Vimeo.
These are the best IDEs for Web development I found so far. The features go way beyond what simple editors offer. Intellisense, refactorings, debugging, source control integration are my favorite.
[1] http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/XtraFinder add Tabs and features to Mac Finder.
• Tabs.
• Dual Panel & Dual Window.
• Cut & Paste.
• Colorful icons in Sidebar.
[1] http://www.trankynam.com/xtrafinder/This is an open source replacement for VisualHub. It's free and lets you do all kinds of mass video conversions as well as auto-tagging your video with tv show / movie metadata.
[1] http://videomonkey.orgSet names and separate background pictures for different spaces. Really helps me focus on one specific project at a time and helps me avoid tangents.
[1] https://hyperspacesapp.comZooom/2 is a Mac desktop utility that redefines how you can resize, move and align your application windows - making you faster and more productive.
On many X-based desktops (such as KDE and Gnome) you can resize windows from any side, move windows by clicking anywhere on the window, and switch windows simply by pointing your mouse. Zooom/2 brings the same functionality to Mac, and I can no longer live without it. For example, in my configuration I hold Shift-⌘ and click anywhere in a window to move it. No more hunting for the menu bar or the resize corner!
[1] http://coderage-software.com/zooom/Quick and easy to use timer. It's programmable, so you can do (10+2)*5 or the Pomodoro technique on repeating intervals.
The App is localized into English, but the linked webpage is French. The MacUpdate [2] page is in English.
[1] http://www.phg-home.com/index_mac.htmlFrom the website:
[1] http://www.ksuther.com/warp/Warp is a preference pane that allows you to use the mouse to switch between Spaces rather than using the keyboard.
Warp offers the ability to display a live preview of a space when you move the mouse to the edge of the screen, allowing you to see what you have on another space before actually switching to it. Clicking the preview will then warp you to that space.
[1] http://www.mediaatelier.com/Alarms/Alarms app is the reminder system you never knew your Mac was missing. Just drag the items you want to be reminded of to the Alarms menu and place them on the time line.
Pow is a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X. Have it serving your apps locally in under a minute.
Simple to use and indispensable if you are doing any kind of Rails/Sinatra/Rack development
[1] http://pow.cxFinal Cut Express, [1] a discontinued video-editing software made by Apple. [2] Final Cut Express is one step above iMovie, [3] with up to 99 video tracks, 99 audio tracks, and 12 compositing modes. My favorite features of FCE are Chroma Key [4], Color Correction, and Livetype [5], which comes with Final Cut Express.
[1] http://www.apple.com/support/finalcutexpress/is a utility that provides an alternative to the Dock. It is tremendously flexible and customizable in letting you design your own way to organize application launchers.
Let me be frank; I've been using a Mac every day since 1987. I cannot live without DragThing because I could never get used to using the Dock, which appeared with the first Mac OS X circa 2000 (and I was using developer builds of Mac OS X before the first version went public). While you can configure DragThing to perform many functions, what I use it for is to provide an application menu and an application launcher that behave the same way they did in Apple Macintosh System 7 through Mac OS 9. That's the way I want it.
[1] http://www.dragthing.com/english/about.htmlI am so amazed no one has mentioned this!
The best video editor for the price. Unfortunately Apple has abandoned FCE to go on to FCPX. I couldn't live without FCE!
SecondBar adds a second menu bar to your secondary monitor. Although there are a few bugs, it's a great little application.
[1] http://blog.boastr.net/?page_id=79An indispensable macro tool. Trigger a macro based on a hotkey (overriding the frontmost app if appropriate), typed strings (a la TextExpander, the status of an app, the system waking or your logging in, at certain times or dates, etc.
A macro can do pretty much anything you can do manually -- manage apps, choose menu items, click on windows or dialog boxes or whatever, display text or Growl or other notifications, etc. -- including running scripts. Macros can also include flow control (if, while, etc.) for less straightforward tasks (e.g. in Photoshop CmdDelete deletes the current layer if a layer is selected or the current group of layers if a group is selected).
One great use is unifying commands across apps, e.g. have Cmd- zoom out and Cmd= zoom in for every app that supports the concept rather than having to remember how, say, OmniGraffle does it vs Photoshop vs Numbers.
[1] http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/Keyboard Maestro enables you to create or record custom macro shortcuts that you can activate at any time. For example, your macros could help you navigate runnings applications or work with an unlimited number of clipboards. Best of all, every macro you create is available using simple keystrokes you choose.
Find out when a hardware status changes on the Mac.
Notifications for incoming mail.
MarcoPolo brings context-aware computing to your Mac! It allows your computer to determine its context through gathering evidence from your environment (evidence sources), using flexible rule-based fuzzy matching to make an educated guess (rules), and then performing arbitrary actions upon changing context (actions).
I use MarcoPolo to run scripts (actions) when I arrive at work, as determined by WiFi hotspots detected or IP addresses assigned (context).
[1] http://www.symonds.id.au/marcopolo/Okay, did a search of all eight pages posted to date, and didn't see "teleport" listed.
This little free System Preference gets installed on two computers, and then you can move your cursor off the screen of one, onto the screen of the other.
I run a dedicated Mac Mini server, but my main computer is a Mac Pro. I have the server screen above the pro screen, and I can simply move my cursor up to the server, like you'd do with multiple monitors on the same computer. BRILLIANT!
This is so much simpler and easier than using Screen Sharing or other such tools.
It also copies the clipboard of one computer to the other. This can cause a significant delay if you have something huge on the clipboard.
[1] http://abyssoft.com/software/teleport/Simple Comic is the most intuitive comic reader on the Mac. Its clean interface gives you full control of your viewing experience without getting in the way. Reading comics on a computer has never been easier.
A great program for looking any any set of archived images.
Simple Comic viewer window http://dancingtortoise.com/simplecomic/images/screens/two_page.png [2]
[1] http://dancingtortoise.com/simplecomic/Though relatively new. Tweetbot for Mac is bringing the same innovation to the Mac platform that it's had established on iOS for a while now.
[1] http://tapbots.com/tweetbot_mac/From website:
EVE helps you to learn shortcuts, in order to increase your productivity with MAC OS X. Every time you execute an action using the mouse, EVE will show you the matching shortcut.
Great application! I use it with Cheatsheet [2].
[1] http://hotkeyeve.github.com/eve/SparkleShare allows you to create your own DropBox. In this way you don't have to pay for more space, if you have your own server, and you don't have to share data with no one else (service provided) except the people you decide.
How does it work?
SparkleShare creates a special folder on your computer in which projects are kept. All projects are automatically synced to their respective hosts (you can have multiple projects connected to different hosts) and to your team's SparkleShare folders when someone adds, removes or edits a file.
Why SparkleShare?
[1] http://sparkleshare.org/The idea of SparkleShare sprouted at the GNOME Usability Hackfest in London, where a couple of designers came to the conclusion that they didn't have a good (Open Source) collaboration tool to share their work (for more background, read “The one where the designers ask for a pony”). They didn't like how the good collaboration tools were proprietary, and that using them meant having to give up privacy, control and other rights. What they needed was something that they could run and control themselves, without having to depend on other companies.
Viennna is a free open source RSS/Atom reader. Very flexible and version 3 will have Google Reader support.
I never really enjoyed using Skitch, even before Evernote bought them. Not too long ago I heard about Glui and have fallen in love ever since.
It's quick, provides some useful annotating tools, uploads to Dropbox and the automatically copies the share url to your clipboard.
Really has improved my workflow as a programmer. Makes it super easy to share screens when working with others.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/glui/id601359958?mt=12Monosnap is a free screenshot program for Mac OS X and Windows. The program allows users to create screenshots, annotate them and upload them to the cloud.
Very promising successor of The Hit List.
Description:
A HTML5 compliant productivity application
From the author:
Hub List tries to strike a balance between simplicity and customization. If you’ve every managed a software project then you’ve probably spent more time then you care to admit inside an ugly bug tracking application that a bunch of developers convinced you would make them more productive. You probably use another app to manage your business projects and then something else to help you remember all those pesky personal todos like getting your mom a card for mother’s day. Rather than try to replace all those tools Hub List strives to provide real-time two-way integration with all of them so you can be more productive using the tools you already have.
Website:
hublistapp.com [2]
[1] http://hublistapp.com/In Mac OS 10.6 disk and file sizes are measured in base 10 (one kilobyte is defined as 1000 bytes, one megabyte is defined as 1000 kilobytes, etc.) in Finder and Disk Utility. Unfortunately this has created a lot of inconsistency even when working with Apple’s own programs since most of them still define file sizes in binary units (one kilobyte is defined as 1024 bytes, one megabyte is defined as 1024 kilobytes, etc.). This utility will switch the measurement of disk and file sizes in both Finder and Disk Utility back to binary units (or if the measurement has already been switched to binary units it will restore the system back to using base 10 units).
After the switch in Snow Leopard I never could get used to read file sizes in Finder with base-10. This application patches the Foundation framework in order to get back base-2 units. I can now again compare disk space and file sizes with other operating systems or output from shell tools.
[1] http://web.me.com/brkirch/brkirchs_Software/Mac_OS_X_Software.htmlI recently referred to the app in this thread [2]. If you own both a Mac and an iPhone or iPod, this application is a must-have.
Podworks works around iTunes to allow transfer of media to/from Mac and iOS devices.
[1] http://www.scifihifi.com/podworks/I use it mostly to rate songs and get Growl to display the currently playing song. From the website:
[1] http://www.mkdsoftware.com/imote/iMote is a simple, elegant, and lightweight program for controlling iTunes from just about any application. Play/pause, change tracks, select playlists, adjust volume, rate tracks, and more using fully customizable hot-keys or a universal menu bar item. iMote includes a beautiful iPod-esque floating window, indicating current track information, and Growl support if you want an even more streamlined experience with your other Growl-enabled applications. Written using Cocoa, iMote is lean and mean, consuming minimal system memory and CPU time. iMote is the original iTunes controller.
One of the few RSS readers that doesn't try to imitate an e-mail application, News Anchor converts inanimate text in news feeds into lively television-like news broadcasts. With News Anchor you can now "read" news feeds while eating or doing other things.
A great utility to make a web search (Google, Wikipedia, any other search engine) just a keystroke away regardless of what application I'm in.
[1] http://wafflesoftware.net/monocle/Livetype is an awesome title generator that came with FCE. It does have a rather steep learning curve if you aren't used to keyframing, but it generates professional-looking titles at a great price.
[1] http://www.apple.com/support/livetype/Spark is a powerful, and easy Shortcuts manager. With Spark you can create Hot Keys to launch applications and documents, execute AppleScript, control iTunes, and more... You can also export and import your Hot Keys library, or save it in HTML format to print it. Spark is free, so use it without moderation!
I use this all the time and love it!
[1] http://www.shadowlab.org/Software/spark.phpApp Bar displays a quick list of all your applications. This is the quickest way possible to find and open any application launched from your Status Bar or Dock. All apps are listed alphabetical and the scroll list is well laid out and always just a click away.
[1] http://itunes.apple.com/in/app/app-bar/id464303501?mt=12JiTouch is similar to BetterTouchTool, but with many, many more options. The one thing it doesn't have is Windows 7 snapping, so keep BetterTouchTool around for that. I would highly recommend this application, though it's a paid application.
[1] http://www.jitouch.com/Receive notifications via Growl. Assign network locations and wireless networks to profiles.
Free commercial AV software.
Scrawl is nifty little note taking app for the Mac that I made with iCloud support.
[1] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scrawl/id480126603?ls=1&mt=12iProcrastinate is the ideal task manager for anyone who doesn't want their todo list to get in the way of actually getting things done! Great for anyone who is looking for a mobile, easy-to-use task manager. (Not just for students!) Add birthdays, soccer practice and conference calls, all without missing a beat.
Uses iCloud to sync between Mac and iOS. Couldn't do my homework without it.
[1] http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iprocrastinate/id413662017?mt=12From JetBrains, the makers of IntelliJ. Has a lot more refactoring support than XCode and a more powerful editor. Especially useful to anyone coming to iOS development from the Java world.
[1] http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/Best text editor ever...Supports VIM bindings plus has org-mode and can run a shell, edit directories, view images, etc. Make sure to use the built-in package manager to load add-ons. Solarized-dark is an excellent color scheme.
[1] http://emacsformacosx.comAllow notification plugin for Mail.app. In ML you have notification center, but with Herald you also get the full message body which I really like.
[1] http://erikhinterbichler.com/software/herald/One of best cleaning utility.
CCleaner is the no. 1 cleaning utility for Windows PC. In Mac it does the same function, cleaning temp files, cookies, cache etc. for making more space available. The tools section provides utilities to uninstall an application, change startup option, erase free space and manage permissions.
[1] http://www.piriform.com/mac/ccleanerSafeWallet is a very useful and complete password manager, which allows you to safely keep you passwords, credit card pins, notes, and many more stored on your Mac.
It also provides functionality for sharing your wallet with the iOS App (SafeWallet for iPhone). In this way your wallet is always with you and always synced.
[1] http://www.sbsh.net/password-manager-safewalletThis application can trigger a wide range on actions based on different events, its mainly use being to start/stop application based on your context.
For example when you bring your laptop to work it can start Outlook. You can detect that you are at work based on the network IP, presence of a wireless network, or many other options.
[1] http://www.controlplaneapp.com/Debookee is a network traffic analyzer that allows you to see your traffic by protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, DHCP, DNS, SIP etc ...
It can also scan all the devices present on your network, and intercept the traffic of any of them, perfect to see what your iPhone or tablet is sending over the network.
[1] http://www.iwaxx.com/debookeeThere's a software version as well as the hardware box that creates a cloud server. The software version allows me to set a folder or drive on my Mac and link to it so I can let others access. I know there are other ways to do this, but for me the $20 ($30 now, I think) was well spent as the software is simple and no glitches.
If you have a good friend and you both agree to leave your computers running, you can use the other's extra drive to store your backup with no monthly fee, just install a decent size drive at the friend's house.
[1] http://pogoplug.com/softwareAfter last year Sparrow acquisition from Google and development freeze, Airmail is new, actively developed mail client. It does not hide it's Sparrow roots, but exceeds it and new features are constantly added.
[1] http://airmailapp.infodEntropy Logo http://bit.ly/16BItjE [2]
I use it as my daily productivity booster since it moves all files I haven't touched within the last week from my Desktop into my archive. It has many more features you may find interesting. Here is a trailer [3].
Disclaimer: I'm the creator. Ask me anything. ;)
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dentropy/id655858295?mt=12Main features:
Very powerful and free and open source image editor, inspired by PhotoShop. Has layers, RGB and indexed modes, and more tools and filters than you can shake a stick at.
Since version 2.8 Gimp is OS X native.
Screenshots [2] - Features [3]
[1] http://www.gimp.org/"Often you don't need the exact time in hours, minutes and seconds. A more human readable style like "five past ten" makes more sense. For that, you can now use FuzzyClock. FuzzyClock is a menubar clock which displays the current time in a "fuzzy" style." I use the handwriting font. (Alfred, Cloudapp and Growl have been said).
##(because it was the most commonly used in the existing answers. Moved links so that they were within the app names. Removed some first-person descriptors. - Robert S Ciaccioinquestion:thisin the search field. - Robert S Ciaccioinquestion:thissearch is case sensitive. for example try this,inquestion:this iterm, you won't get any results, but if you tryinquestion:this iTermyou will find one entry. Is this expected behavior or can I create a Bug/ Feature req on Meta ? - garikapati