Recommended OS X Applications And Utilities

So, my friend Guy just upgraded to OS X after bag­ging him­self a beau­ti­ful Power­book. Through jeal­ously grit­ted teeth, I sup­pose I can just about bring myself to list some of the appli­ca­tions and util­i­ties I think he should install right away, with the empha­sis on little thing to make life easier, rather than full-​blown apps for spe­cific tasks.

• Jump­cut A wildly handy clip­board enhancer, that gives you access to the last 20-odd items you copied. Free.

• Path Finder Alter­na­tive to the Finder, with many more fea­tures at your fin­ger­tips, includ­ing an incred­i­bly useful ‘stack’ for moving files around and easy access to run­ning appli­ca­tions. Essen­tial. $39 Share­ware with a 21 day trial.

• Quick­sil­ver is an appli­ca­tion launcher and file manip­u­la­tor that essen­tially allows you to access and manip­u­late every­thing on your com­puter by whack­ing Command+space and typing the name of what you’re look­ing for, whether it’s an appli­ca­tion, file, Address Book con­tact or song in iTunes. My cur­rent fave fea­tures are the abil­ity to set system-​wide com­mand key ‘triggers’ for open­ing appli­ca­tions, and the abil­ity to pre- or append text to a file, or rename it, from within the QS inter­face. It’s great for moving files around, too (even if you have no idea where they’re kept). Abso-​fucking-​lutely essen­tial - I can’t even use a com­puter with­out this any­more. Free.

• Saft: Unbe­liev­ably cool plugin/patch for Safari, that adds a ridicu­lous number of extra fea­tures, like saving open tabs on quit or crash, a cus­tomised Search field that lets you per­form var­i­ous Google, Dic​tio​nary.com and IMDB searches, plus type-​ahead search. Essen­tial. $10 Shareware.

• Side­track: This is a replace­ment driver for the Track­pad, which lets you use the edges for scrolling ver­ti­cally and hor­i­zon­tally, set a finger-​tap in each corner to emu­late a mouse button, or any com­mand key com­bi­na­tion you can think of. (I have the top cor­ners mapped to Command+Shift+right/left arrow, so I can tab around Safari with a flick of the thumb, and the bottom left corner pre­tend­ing to be a right click on a mouse, so I can access con­tex­tual menus easily). Essen­tial. $10 Shareware.

• Sound­Source lets you switch your audio input and output sources with a single click. Free.

• Spam­Sieve: In my expe­ri­ence, Mail’s spam fil­ter­ing sucks bad. This adds Bayesian fil­ter­ing to most pop­u­lar email clients, and will catch every­thing, with next to no false pos­i­tives. Maybe not essen­tial, but, depend­ing on how much spam you get, a mas­sive time-​saver. $25 Share­ware with a free 30-day trial.

• Ser­vices: There’s lots of useful things you can add to the Ser­vices menu, which pro­vides a sort of system-​wide set of handy things for use in most applic­tions, often acces­si­ble via quick com­mand key com­bi­na­tions. I find the fol­low­ing essential:

  • Humane­Text: Mark­down is a syntax for mark­ing up text in a nice human-​readable way, and this Ser­vice lets you easily con­vert Mark­down doc­u­ments to HTML and vice versa. (That mightn’t sound awfully useful, but it is, honest.) Free.
  • Word­Ser­vice makes it easy to do a lot of text for­mat­ting stuff quickly, but I mainly use it as a word counter (because I tend to write in SubEthaEdit or Smul­tron, rather than a fully-​fledged word proces­sor). Free.

• White­out removes the brushed metal look from most Apple appli­ca­tions, replac­ing it with a pin­stripe look that is much easier on the eye. Free.

Enjoy!

And then click the ‘Related Linking’ links below for a ridicu­lous number of point­ers to more appli­ca­tions, util­i­ties, tips and tricks.

Posted at 1pm on 25/11/04 by Jack Mottram to the mac category.
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Tags: applications, mac, osx