This is an update to my “switchers” post, a guide to cool software for your Mac if you just switched from another platform or are just generally new to the game.
Here we go, still in absolutely no particular order …
iStat Menus
Displays data about available disk space, fan speeds, internal temperatures, network activity, and a nice replacement for the default clock. Adds a calendar drop-down to the clock.
http://www.islayer.com/index.php?op=item&id=28
Price: Free
Tweet Deck
(Not useful unless you are using Twitter.) Hopefully you’ll start using Twitter at some point, though. Tweet Deck’s cool feature is that tweets are grouped by columns and it allows you to search through the maze of Twitter traffic out there. Give it a try, otherwise try Twhirl.
http://www.tweetdeck.com
http://www.twhirl.org
Price: Free
Adium
Adium is an instant message client. Supports lots of clients including Jabber (Google Talk), AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, and many others.
http://www.adiumx.com/
Price: Free
Skype
Not just for Mac, but I like Skype so I’m going to plug it. Skype lets you send and receive VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) calls on your computer. Go ahead and install this even if you don’t think you’ll use it much; then you’ll be able to respond in the affirmative when your long-lost buddy from Japan asks if you can Skype. Set it up and Skype me at ‘dvanderwall’.
http://www.skype.com/
Price: Free
Note: For about $30 per year you can sign up to call regular phone numbers from your Skype account, and for another $30 you can get an incoming number where people can call your computer from a regular phone. They also offer “Skype To Go”, which gives you a special number you can call from your cell phone to get better rates on international calls.
SoundSource
A handy menu bar icon to change the audio input and output sources on your computer. Check out the LineIn app as well.
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/freebies/
Price: Free(bies)
Skim
Skim is a PDF viewer. Much better than the default Preview app, Skim allows you to bookmark your spot in a PDF file as well as annotate the document. This is a great app for reading the PDF versions of the manuals that come with most applications these days. I’m usually pissed off at work on my Windows machine when I’m reading PDF files, wishing there was a version of Skim for Windows, which there is not.
http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/
Price: Free
Flickr Uploadr
The Uploadr tool from Flickr is a great way to import photos to your Flickr account without having to use the web interface. Recommended if you are going to post photos to Flickr.
http://www.flickr.com/help/tools/
Price: Free
Google Earth
What can I say? This one is just fun. I bet you’ve used it, just know that there is also a version for your Mac.
http://earth.google.com/
Price: Free
KisMAC and iStumbler
(Only useful for laptops.) Tools to search for a WiFi signal. Shows you signal strength, whether or not it is an open network, etc.
http://www.istumbler.net/
http://kismac.macpirate.ch/
I prefer KisMAC.
Price: Free
Nocturne
Nocturne is a very simple tool that just changes your entire display to a dark, monochromatic mode. You can also use a red tint. This is for viewing your Mac at night when all the lights are out. Pictures look a little funny, but text is very easy to read under low-light conditions.
http://docs.blacktree.com/nocturne/nocturne?DokuWiki=41f3b94c84707e7000ecff1a295b5ceb
Price: Free
TextWrangler
TextWrangler is a basic text editor. Text as in plain text. No fancy formatting, no tricks, just text. Even though you may not use this very much, it’s a good idea to have it around in case you ever need it. I prefer it over the default TextEdit app that is bundled with every Mac.
http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/
Price: Free
Unplugged
(Only useful for laptops.) Another single-purpose program. It tells you if your computer becomes unplugged while you are using it. This may not seem important, but with the MagSafe power cords these days, it’s actually quite easy to accidentally jar the power coupler loose and not notice it until your battery runs out. Unplugged works best with Growl. It should prompt you to download and install Growl, and you should definitely do that. (I think Adium recommends Growl as well.)
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/29478
Price: Free
Slim Battery Monitor
(Only useful for laptops.) This is a replacement for the built-in battery monitor. I like it better because it takes up less space in the menu bar and offers a few more features than the default monitor.
http://www.orange-carb.org/SBM/
Price: Free
Pixelmator
Pixelmator is a sort of Photoshop app, but not as powerful. It is written in pure Cocoa (the latest development framework for OSX) and takes advantage of all the Core Graphics features in OSX. If you want to do light image manipulation, Pixelmator is a good choice. Note that if you only want to do red eye reduction, adjust levels, crop, etc., you can do all of that in iPhoto. You can demo Pixelmator to make sure it is right for you.
http://www.pixelmator.com/
Price: $59
SuperDuper!
Get this. Period. It is the best backup software out there in my opinion. There is a free version, but the free version doesn’t let you do incremental backups, and you will want to do those. Personally, I would skip Time Machine (the built in backup software), but you can use both Time Machine and SuperDuper! in conjunction with one another. Time Machine is incredibly painful and silly if you want to restore your entire system. Get SuperDuper! and make sure you are doing backups.
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
Price: $27.95
1Password
This is another one that I feel no Mac user should be without. It is a password manager, so it will remember all of your passwords for various sites, and will also keep track of credit card information and auto-populate it into a web page for you. One of the best ways to protect your online identity is to make sure you use secure passwords and never use the same password twice! 1Password will automatically generate passwords for you and then store them for future reference. When the time comes to log in to YouTube, you just click the Restore button in your browser and select the identity you wish to use. This is especially handy for sites where you may have multiple accounts, such as MySpace. The first thing I did after I got 1Password was went and changed every single password to something unique. If one site gets hacked and the password gets out, it isn’t useful to the attacker because that password isn’t used anywhere else. Pretty nice!
http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password
Price: $34.95
Flip4Mac
This is pretty much required. You need it to play WMV (Windows) video files in your Quicktime player. The web will be a very annoying place if you don’t have this.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx
Price: Free
VLC
An alternative video player. If Quicktime and Flip4Mac won’t play it, then VLC might. I don’t use this unless I have to, but I have it around in case I need it.
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Price: Free
iWork ’09
The iWork suite from Apple includes Pages (word processing), Numbers (spreadsheet), and KeyNote (presentation software). It’s a solid app and I very much prefer it to Microsoft Office. If you need to do anything like a résumé, Pages is going to be the place to do it. Numbers blows the doors off of Excel in almost every way for which people use a modern spreadsheet (which, interestingly, isn’t necessarily number-crunching).
http://www.apple.com/iwork/
Price: $79
Evernote
I can’t believe I left this off when I wrote the original article. A note-taking application, Evernote also supports Windows, which means you can take notes on your Mac at home and have them sync up to your Windows computer at work (provided both computers are running the Evernote app, of course). The notes are stored “in the cloud” (read: on someone else’s server) so be sure you back up and are not using it for confidential information. I am not a lawyer; some restrictions apply; your mileage may vary.
Note: Evernote also has an iPhone app! I don’t even bother to take pen and paper to meetings these days.
http://evernote.com/
Price: Free (with some limitations), $45 per year for premium service
Quicksilver
I can’t imagine using a Mac without QuickSilver. It is mostly a task launcher — a way to launch programs from the keyboard without having to use the mouse. For example, I type ⌘ + Spacebar and it brings up a little menu in the middle of the screen. I start typing “Di”, press enter, and the Dictionary application is displayed. So I’ve basically launched Dictionary.app with 4 keystrokes, instead of having to go to the Finder, go to Applications, scroll down, then double-click Dictionary.app. Very much a timesaver if you like using keyboard shortcuts. Quicksilver will also do a lot more (and I mean a lot more!), but mostly I use it for launching programs.
http://www.blacktree.com/
Price: Free
SpanningSync
SpanningSync will synchronize your iCal and gCal (Google) calendars. Why is this useful? Because gCal is really a superior calendar application in almost every way, but it is nice to be able to edit appointments locally and take advantage of the iCal application integration built in to OSX. I believe there is a free trial available. Obviously this is not useful for people who don’t use Google’s calendar.
http://spanningsync.com/
Price: $25 per year or $65 for a lifetime subscription
(Note: I used to use SpanningSync in conjunction with Google’s Outlook synchronizer application to achieve a Zen-like state of calendar bliss between my work and home computers. The idea was to edit an appointment anywhere and it would show up on all of my calendars. However, Google really got it wrong on this one and it just ended up messing up my Outlook calendar. You may have better luck, but I’m back to double calendar entry when necessary. Google’s sync app is free.)
EyeTV
OK, this is a piece of hardware, but I’m going to mention it anyway — Watch and record TV on your Mac. ‘Nuff said. Comes in either a dongle form factor (EyeTV Hybrid) or a little box about the size of two decks of cards (EyeTV 250 Plus). The ’09 version of the Hybrid can receive FM radio, while the 250 Plus features hardware encoding for analog signals (easier on your CPU). Both come with very nice software to watch and record TV.
Price: $149.95 for Hybrid and $199.95 for 250 Plus
Or! $199.95 for the Hybrid, the Turbo.264 and a gadget bag. The Turbo.264 is a USB dongle that does consumer-level H.264 video encoding. The faster your computer is the less you need this little dongle, because at a certain point it just won’t make any difference. You also don’t need the Turbo.264 unless you are going to encode your recorded programs for viewing on another device such as an iPhone or Apple TV. Good rule: If you don’t understand what I just wrote, skip the Turbo.264. If you do understand, and are marginal on the CPU deal, then the Turbo.264 will free up your CPU for other things. Got it?
.Me (.Mac)
Sigh … OK, one more. This one is really not necessary at all, but it may be useful for some people. This is a service from Apple that gets you 20GB of online storage with 200GB of monthly transfers, syncing features, services like Back to My Mac (a remote access solution I do not use, that I hear is fraught with configuration problems), and an email address. Note that your 20GB of space needs to be split up between email storage and other online file storage. It is advertised as a place where you can keep the contents of your home directory, for example, but my home directory is 176GB right now, so obviously that doesn’t quite work for me. The only thing I really like about this service is that it makes publishing photos and web pages from iPhoto and iWeb incredibly easy. It should probably be a lot cheaper than it is. A 60-day trial is available.
http://www.apple.com/mobileme/
Price: Starts at $99.95 per year (Yikes!)
Others?
There are of course many, many other applications out there, but most of those are specialty apps that you have to really want or need (Aperture, Photomatix Pro, OmniFocus, OmniOutliner Pro, Hazel, Scrivener, VisualHub, Transmit, Coda, CandyBar, Audio Hijack Pro, Times … just to name a few!). I also didn’t mention Firefox, because I assume you already know about that, and Safari 4 is a decent browser.
Disagree? Have an Opinion?
Great! I’d love to hear it. Email me, dave AT vander — wall DOT org (minus the dash) and let me know, or just post a comment here.
Enjoy your Mac!
