On this page I have a list of applications that I believe to be helpful when it comes to productivity, organization, and maintaining ones own Mac OS X operating system.
Productivity
Quicksilver – An amazing application that lets you do just about anything on your Mac with the help of plugins, but most will use it just as an application and folder launcher. Some of the other uses for this application are creating your own custom hotkeys for other applications, navigating through your file system, even setting a timer to play an iTunes playlist at a specific time of day.
Overflow – A window based application launcher that is brought up with a single hotkey making your apps quickly available to you. Another solution to Quicksilver if you are just looking for an application or folder launcher that has quicker access to any application you need and a visual representation of it. Think of it as an extension of your dock.
BackDrop – Ever find yourself needing to take a screenshot of anything on your computer but have to change your desktop wallpaper just for that purpose? Well here is the solution for you. Backdrop puts any color or image you want for a temporary background while you take your screen captures.
Organization
Delicious Library – Have a lot of movies, cds, games, and books? Well with this application, you can catalog all your media so you know exactly what you have of each media type. This is a great application for organization purposes and just keeping track of every book, movie, cd, and game that you have. A cool feature of Delicious Library is you can uses a webcam to “scan” the barcode of a product and it will search Amazon.com for that item and if it finds it, bam its in your Library.
iPhoto Library Manager – Do you take a lot of photos? If you do and you use iPhoto, you may have noticed how it can become difficult to manage all the photos that iPhoto can store. With this app, you can have separate libraries to better manage your photos.
Yep – Yep is like iPhoto for your PDF’s. It gives you easy access to all your PDF files and even lets you tag them based on the content. This is a perfect application if you collect a lot of PDF’s and want to be able to easily scan through them all to find the specific document/quote/tutorial/etc that you are looking for.
System Utilities
AppZapper – Not very many applications have uninstallers on the Mac and when you want to get rid of them, for the most part you can just drag them into your Trash and delete. But there are still remnants of those applications on your system. AppZapper finds all the files associated with the application you want to delete and puts them in the Trash for you.
Onyx – This is a great application that lets you configure a lot of system settings, clean up your OS to make it run faster, enable certain developer mode features, and more. I use it all the time just to keep my OS running as efficiently as possible and to make sure there are no problems with the OS.
Pathfinder 5 – I can’t speak for other Mac OS X users, but to me the Finder is rather lacking in features this day and age. Leopards Finder is a little bit better, but at the moment it is still a bit weak on features. Pathfinder is the solution to those that feel the way. It gives you tabbed browsing so that you no longer have to have multiple Finder windows open. There are many more features that you can read about on the website or watch their video tutorial.
Xslimmer – With the introduction of the Intel Mac’s, there are now three types of applications: PowerPC, Intel, and Universal. The PowerPC application type is for the older Mac systems like a G5, G4, etc. Intel applications are intended just for the newer systems with the intel chips like the MacBook Pro. Finally we have Universal applications that will work for either system. Because of this ability to work with both, there is a lot of extra code residing in the app that increases file size and can potentially cause a slight slow-down in performance. Xslimmer removes all that unnecessary code from the Universal app and makes into an Intel or PowerPC for your specific machine. As their slogan says, it’s the friendly way to right-size your apps without losing functionality.
CocoaThumbX – CocoThumbX is a freeware thumbnail creator for Mac OS X. It is capable of creating and removing thumbnails from the common image file formats as BMP, TIFF, TARGA, GIF (animated), PNG, JPG, PICT, PDF, EPS, ICNS, JP2, SGI … text files such as DOC, RTF, RTFD, HTML, CSS, TXT and QuickTime supported Movies. CocoThumbX creates a thumbnail from your image and add the thumbnail as icon to your image file. There is also the Apple application Icon Composer that comes with the Apple developer tools, but it requires a bit of a work around for making icons for folders. This applications purpose is intended for application icon creation.
AppFresh – 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 for new versions and lets you download and install available updates easily.
