Essential Mac Apps - Part 3
September, 15 2006 05:34 PM Filed in: Software
The full list is available here.
iLife
I'm adding the iLife suite to this list because I consider it to be essential. I have the latest version and will likely continue updating with each new release because I use these apps all the time and because each yearly upgrade seems to be worth it in terms of new features. I won't go into iTunes because it is free and included on every new Mac. It's great and I use it many hours every day. Enough said.
iPhoto is another essential. I take a lot of photos and I'm always scanning in old photographs from one of the many shoe boxes of family photos. I keyword all photos at the time of import and for that I consider Keyword Assistant essential. It makes keywording even easier than the methods included in iPhoto. Another reason to use iPhoto is the tie-in to other apps: iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, RapidWeaver, Pages, and Keynote to name a few. It seems ever new application, Apple or third party, is taking advantage of the photos stored in iPhoto. Last but not least, I've now made two iPhoto books and will be making more for various gifts.
iMovie and iDVD. I love these apps. I've made numerous movies which were first put to VHS (2001) and for the past couple years, DVD. With a combination of still photos and new or even digitized archive footage I have assemble DVD and iPhoto book combination gift packages for birthdays and anniversaries.
GarageBand has various uses. I have used it for podcasting and for creating soundtracks for video projects. I wouldn't consider this one essential but it has been very useful, easy and fun to use.
Last and probably least is iWeb. I don't use it and don't consider it to be as useful as RapidWeaver. It has great potential and I'm certain that future versions will greatly improve it. My main reason for not using it is that I do not use .Mac. Yes, I know I can ftp iWeb sites but from my brief experimentation it seemed to be far more of a hassle than it should. For those with a subscription to .Mac I would certainly recommend giving iWeb a shot.
Maintenance
Want to save some hard drive space? Monolingual is your friend! I've saved at least 1 gig on each drive that I've used Monolingual on. It removes the various localizations from the applications on your Mac. On a small 40 gig PowerBook drive 1 gig is nothing to sneeze at! The most recent versions of Monolingual also have the option of removing the parts of Universal Binaries that are not needed. I'm on a G4 and a G5 so for me this would be the Intel code that is removed. I've not tested it on Intel machines to verify that it does the opposite for them and removes the PPC code.
OnyX is a great application for those that like to sleep their Macs at night to save energy. The various unix maintenance scripts that remove caches and logs run at night and will not do so if the computer is asleep. OnyX allows me to run them manually or set new times for them. I've set them to run during the day when I know my machines are on. It can also be used to repair permissions and set a variety of other options which cannot be set in the standard system prefs.
SuperDuper! I've tried numerous back-up utilities but ultimately chose SuperDuper! Easy to use and in my opinion the best option until Leopard's Time Machine. You do back-up.... don't you?
Preference Panes
Ah yes, preference panes. These are must haves. All of the Unsanity haxies are great though I currently only use Shapeshifter. As much as I love Mac OS X sometimes I like to mix it up and Shapeshifter seems the best way to do it. I've never had any problems with it. It eats up a bit of memory and may add just a fraction of start-up time for each application but I don't notice it. Lots of beautiful themes to choose from. The other Unsanity apps are also good though I don't always use them due to limited memory: FruitMenu and Xounds. I'm fairly certain than when I finally upgrade to a MacBook with 2 gigs of ram I'll use them all.
MenuMeters is essential. I want to see my current processor and network activity at a glance. Though I'm not using them MenuMeters also offers disk usage and memory usage. That's a total of 4 monitors that can reside in my menu, each one customizable in various ways.
Textpander was free is now shareware called TextExpander. It's a great way to create shortcuts that will expand out into all kinds of text. I use it to expand out into html tags, phone numbers, signatures, email addresses, urls, addresses, names, etc. A great timesaver and absolutely essential once you've gotten used to it.
iScroll2 enables the scrolling trackpad on older iBooks and PowerBooks. Also adds 2 finger control click. Sweet and essential for me. I rarely bother with the control click anymore.
Growl is a method of system notification that applications can use. As of now I use several of these such as Mail, iTunes, Safari and Vienna. As an example, when Vienna finds updated feeds it uses Growl to pop up a notification of the updates regardless of what application I'm using. I can customize various aspects of the display such as style, length of time that it is on my screen, as well as it's location on the screen.
ICeCoffee, listed simply as "Services" once installed in the user preferences, allows me to define a subset of the currently available application services to display in a contextual menu. No need to go to the Application>Services menu, with Services I can just control click/right click and the short list of services I have predefined is right there. A great way to really use a technology that most users never remember to use. Apple should have been doing this from the beginning.
FinderPop is one of several preference panes (the above mentioned FruitMenu also does this) that I can use to add new options to the standard contextual menu. With FinderPop I can add folders, currently running applications and more.
Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Mac Apps
iLife
I'm adding the iLife suite to this list because I consider it to be essential. I have the latest version and will likely continue updating with each new release because I use these apps all the time and because each yearly upgrade seems to be worth it in terms of new features. I won't go into iTunes because it is free and included on every new Mac. It's great and I use it many hours every day. Enough said.
iPhoto is another essential. I take a lot of photos and I'm always scanning in old photographs from one of the many shoe boxes of family photos. I keyword all photos at the time of import and for that I consider Keyword Assistant essential. It makes keywording even easier than the methods included in iPhoto. Another reason to use iPhoto is the tie-in to other apps: iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, RapidWeaver, Pages, and Keynote to name a few. It seems ever new application, Apple or third party, is taking advantage of the photos stored in iPhoto. Last but not least, I've now made two iPhoto books and will be making more for various gifts.
iMovie and iDVD. I love these apps. I've made numerous movies which were first put to VHS (2001) and for the past couple years, DVD. With a combination of still photos and new or even digitized archive footage I have assemble DVD and iPhoto book combination gift packages for birthdays and anniversaries.
GarageBand has various uses. I have used it for podcasting and for creating soundtracks for video projects. I wouldn't consider this one essential but it has been very useful, easy and fun to use.
Last and probably least is iWeb. I don't use it and don't consider it to be as useful as RapidWeaver. It has great potential and I'm certain that future versions will greatly improve it. My main reason for not using it is that I do not use .Mac. Yes, I know I can ftp iWeb sites but from my brief experimentation it seemed to be far more of a hassle than it should. For those with a subscription to .Mac I would certainly recommend giving iWeb a shot.
- iTunes
- iPhoto
- iMovie
- iDVD
- GarageBand
- iWeb
Maintenance
Want to save some hard drive space? Monolingual is your friend! I've saved at least 1 gig on each drive that I've used Monolingual on. It removes the various localizations from the applications on your Mac. On a small 40 gig PowerBook drive 1 gig is nothing to sneeze at! The most recent versions of Monolingual also have the option of removing the parts of Universal Binaries that are not needed. I'm on a G4 and a G5 so for me this would be the Intel code that is removed. I've not tested it on Intel machines to verify that it does the opposite for them and removes the PPC code.
OnyX is a great application for those that like to sleep their Macs at night to save energy. The various unix maintenance scripts that remove caches and logs run at night and will not do so if the computer is asleep. OnyX allows me to run them manually or set new times for them. I've set them to run during the day when I know my machines are on. It can also be used to repair permissions and set a variety of other options which cannot be set in the standard system prefs.
SuperDuper! I've tried numerous back-up utilities but ultimately chose SuperDuper! Easy to use and in my opinion the best option until Leopard's Time Machine. You do back-up.... don't you?
Preference Panes
Ah yes, preference panes. These are must haves. All of the Unsanity haxies are great though I currently only use Shapeshifter. As much as I love Mac OS X sometimes I like to mix it up and Shapeshifter seems the best way to do it. I've never had any problems with it. It eats up a bit of memory and may add just a fraction of start-up time for each application but I don't notice it. Lots of beautiful themes to choose from. The other Unsanity apps are also good though I don't always use them due to limited memory: FruitMenu and Xounds. I'm fairly certain than when I finally upgrade to a MacBook with 2 gigs of ram I'll use them all.
MenuMeters is essential. I want to see my current processor and network activity at a glance. Though I'm not using them MenuMeters also offers disk usage and memory usage. That's a total of 4 monitors that can reside in my menu, each one customizable in various ways.
Textpander was free is now shareware called TextExpander. It's a great way to create shortcuts that will expand out into all kinds of text. I use it to expand out into html tags, phone numbers, signatures, email addresses, urls, addresses, names, etc. A great timesaver and absolutely essential once you've gotten used to it.
iScroll2 enables the scrolling trackpad on older iBooks and PowerBooks. Also adds 2 finger control click. Sweet and essential for me. I rarely bother with the control click anymore.
Growl is a method of system notification that applications can use. As of now I use several of these such as Mail, iTunes, Safari and Vienna. As an example, when Vienna finds updated feeds it uses Growl to pop up a notification of the updates regardless of what application I'm using. I can customize various aspects of the display such as style, length of time that it is on my screen, as well as it's location on the screen.
ICeCoffee, listed simply as "Services" once installed in the user preferences, allows me to define a subset of the currently available application services to display in a contextual menu. No need to go to the Application>Services menu, with Services I can just control click/right click and the short list of services I have predefined is right there. A great way to really use a technology that most users never remember to use. Apple should have been doing this from the beginning.
FinderPop is one of several preference panes (the above mentioned FruitMenu also does this) that I can use to add new options to the standard contextual menu. With FinderPop I can add folders, currently running applications and more.
Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Mac Apps
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