Recommended Mac Apps

Dr.Sanchez

Just wanted to start a thread for people who would like to recommend some Mac apps to other Mac users out there.

I'll get the ball rolling...

I would recommend a little app called AppZapper... Heres just a little info about the app gotten from the website.

"Everybody loves the drag and drop nature of OS X. Drag an app into your applications folder, and it's installed. You'd think it would be that easy to delete an app — just a matter of dragging it to the trash. But it's not. Applications install preferences, caches, and other support files throughout your computer that take up space and generate clutter. Deleting these by hand every time you delete an app is a pain."

The app can be downloaded from the website: http://www.appzapper.com/

flanree

transtype osx for converting fonts to and from pc
easyfind for searching file contents of archived discs

440Hz

00Blaine00 please read the rules regarding warez and software piracy. Perhaps a short little ban from this forum will encourage you to our rules and stick to it.

ball ox

+1 for appzapper, great wee investment imo

would also recommend growl

Mena

SuperDuper! for drive cloning or backups. Fantastic little app.

jester77

I prefer CleanApp over AppZapper.

Some of my faves:
1Password one of the best apps you can get!
SpanningSync for keeping contacts/calendar in sync with google calendar/contacts
Bookdog for keeping safari, firefox, etc. in sync
OpenOffice for docs and spreadsheets
Quicksilver for launching apps quickly
MultiClutch for assigning multi touch commands in any app
Unrarx - self explanatory
Transmit - FTP client

ball ox

jester77 wrote: »

Unrarx - self explanatory

This is a great app, had been using stuffit expander for years untll I came up against some large archives which it kept telling me were corrupt. Unrarx did the job no problem and even shows a log of what its doing so that if there is a corrupt file you can pin point the problem.

Sad Professor

jester77 wrote: »

SpanningSync for keeping contacts/calendar in sync with google calendar/contacts

You know you can do that now without this app? Google now supports CalDAV which is built into iCal. Afaik you can sync address book as well.

jester77

Sad Professor wrote: »

You know you can do that now without this app? Google now supports CalDAV which is built into iCal. Afaik you can sync address book as well.

Yes, but there were issues with CalDAV, any calendars appointments that were synced to the iphone became read only. Although this is not a problem now with google calendars push service. Don't think CalDAV supports address book sync?

Hopefully neither of these will be needed when snow leopard is released with its exchange support built-in.

preilly79

I've got a few:

1. CSSEdit, for the web designers among us.
2. Disk Inventory X for seeing where all your hard drive space is disappearing!
3. CHMOX, for reading windows .chm help files.
4. FontXplorer. Font manager for those with thousands of fonts. Using application plugins it intercepts requests to the font cache and enables a font if it hasn't already been done (saves caching large numbers of fonts).
5. Handbrake, for making backups of your DVD's.
6. iShowU for capturing what's on your screen.
7. The OMNI applications are all extremely well-written and useful.

fbradyirl

Adium for GMail, yahoo, facebook etc IM
Gimp for image editing
filezilla for FTP
Skype
JSMS for sending webtexts
Perian for adding extra codecs support to Quicktime
MacTheRipper for ripping movies
most of the others I use are made by Apple. All the above are free.

kevteljeur

I've bought a few, I use plenty of free apps and I guess I take more than a few for granted but a few stand out (and I'm avoiding re-listing apps mentioned above):

DiskWarrior
If you don't have it, you should. At any price it's the best disk repair tool that there is (even though Disk Utility has improved a lot in recent years) and I'd feel uncomfortable if I knew I couldn't have it ready in an emergency or to run it at regular intervals.

iDefrag
It actually has a similar disk repair routine to DiskWarrior. But the jury is still out on whether the moder Mac OS actually requires disk defragging at all. I think it's like changing the oil on your car; a couple of times a year can't do any harm, and I guess it'll save power and help with performance on notebook hard drives. If you're going to do it, this app does that one thing well.

Doesn't appear to get updated too often.

Data Rescue II
If you've deleted something, maybe wiped a drive that you shouldn't have, then this is where it's at for file recovery. It has a number of modes from basic to detailed, and it certainly pulled me out of two sticky situations. If it is at all possible to recover a file then this will do it.

Thunderbird
Underrated email client. It is actually very good, if a little old-school. I use it for work emails, and it's solid and cross-platform.

Big Mean Folder Machine
I use it for organising photos. A bit over-priced and under-featured but still has very little competition for what it does, which it does very well. It organises files into sub-folders based on criteria which you set, including attributes from the files you're organising (such as date and time from photo EXIF data).

Irritatingly, you need to separately purchase 'A Better Finder Rename' (also from the same developer) to rename the files themselves, which adds up.

Colloquy
An IRC app which looks almost identical to Adium (well, it has similar skins which might be a better way to put it). A little unstable and unfinished (seems to be trapped in eternal beta) but I use it a lot, and it looks great.


Since I use the Mac for work (web development) I should maybe list some of my work tools too...

ratsam

Adium is a great instant messaging client... even accepts facebook friends
Carbon Copy Cloner... great backup/HD copying software... flawless

Rats

pleasant Co.

kevteljeur wrote: »

Irritatingly, you need to separately purchase 'A Better Finder Rename' (also from the same developer) to rename the files themselves, which adds up.

You could use Automater to rename the files? or Name Mangler....both are free dunno If I've helped, but there, I've dropped a few names

kevteljeur

Mactard wrote: »

You could use Automater to rename the files? or Name Mangler....both are free dunno If I've helped, but there, I've dropped a few names

I looked into Automater, but that looked like a lot of thankless work for less than impressive results for that task. It's a few years ago now since I set out to do the task, but I know that it was my first port of call. Problem was that it's only image-friendly once you use it with iPhoto... May have changed since then, that was with Tiger.

'Name Mangler' doesn't ring any bells - like I say, at the time I didn't see any good competition but if it helps anyone else out there to do the job for free now, then good call!

Dr.Sanchez

440Hz wrote: »

00Blaine00 please read the rules regarding warez and software piracy. Perhaps a short little ban from this forum will encourage you to our rules and stick to it.

Forgot you banned me from here, now I missed out on all the replies!