Most wanted and useful applications - Mac Software Discussions on AppleInsider Forums (2024)

Most of it's there already on the Mac when you buy it but Office for Mac is pretty useful for obvious reasons and I'm a fan of Graphic Convertor as a slide show and conversion tool.

Use MacUpdate to search for anything else.

Adium is a must have.

Adium > iChat > AOL Instant Messanger

Quicksilver - Quicksilver is the single most useful app you will ever use... It's kind of a Spotlight couterpart. It launches apps, lets you set global hotkeys... The only real way to find out what it does is to use it. Personally, I use it mostly to skip songs in iTunes without ever going back to the app itself. But it has a ton of uses.

Adium X - Adium X is your general all purpose instant messenger. It connects to all the major clients, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, you name it. It's extremely customizable, so you can make it look like anything you want.

Handbrake - Handbrake is a DVD ripper. I use it to put my movies onto my iPod. It's also handy when going on those long business flights and the in-flight movie isn't very good. If the movie's on your hard drive it'll drain far less battery life than it would trying to read with the DVD drive itself.

iStat Pro - iStat Pro is a widget for Dashboard that I find very geeky and useful. It shows how much free RAM you have left, your computer's uptime, temperature (useful since the MacBooks run hot), and a bunch of other stats.

All of these are freeware.

SnapZPro (screen cvapture tool) http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

MacJanitor (runs regular maintanence jobs)

http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_...acjanitor.html

VooDooPad (the best notepad out there, period) http://www.flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/

VLC

it plays videos.

Sorry... I keep switching the U and the I in "Adium"...

Adium X

There's also Growl:

Growl - Growl alerts you to any system changes, like hardware being unpluged, IP address changes, and even iTunes track changes. It automatically gets the track album art from Amazon.com too.

i think iSquint is just a pretty interface for ffmpegx, nothing more. I like it (iSquint) though, simple, good interface.

Here's a thread with some useful software for Mac OS X on a forum that I visit. Take a look, pick what you like.

http://forum.lowyat.net/index.php?showtopic=202116

I've had a HD go bad and caught it early because I was going to do a Repair Disk Permissions and saw the warning. Found a small app called SMARTreporter (at http://homepage.mac.com/julianmayer/) that has a small disk on the menu bar - it's green if the HD is fine and goes to red if there is a problem. Very nice to have the warning in order to make a backup. Donations accepted.

I use Overflow to keep the dock to a minimum - there are about 30 apps in mine and it allows for very fast selecting of an app to open,

Bookpedia (bruji.com) is what I use to keep track of my book library (there are also versions for CDs and DVDs). I like the simplicity of this compared to Delicious Library and have set it up to download a copy of the library to my iPod so I can stop buying duplicate books - I tend to do that a bit now that I'm getting old . . .

Freemacware.com puts up a different free app each weekday and is an easy place to look at different free apps.

http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/ is a listing of 16,300+ OS X apps, ranging from freeware to full commercial packages. You can spend a lot of hours going through it and making a list of apps to look at when getting you Mac.

Handbrake is good but make sure you stop by here to pick up a replacement icon to get rid of that ghastly one. Apps that I can't now live without:

- Google Earth FREE! - well if you don't know what it is, you soon will.

- Google SketchUp FREE! - an excellent 3D modelling tool, excellent!!!

- Image Tricks the lite version is FREE! - a free and fun image-manipulation tool that makes use of Core Image filters

- Mactracker FREE! - if you're a Mac geek you'll love to keep a library of all the Macs ever made

- Flip4Mac FREE! - saves you having to download Windows Media Player for .WMA and .WMV files

- iAlertU FREE! - if you have an Apple Remote you can use it to secure your Mac with car alarm style defences

- iClip SHAREWARE ($19.95)- an indispensable utility that lets you have multiple clipboards

- Delicious Library SHAREWARE ($40.00)- an essential cataloguing tool

Just a few of my favourites. By the way, stop by here if you want some replacement icons for things like Firefox and the Desktop icon to make them more 'Mac-like'. He also offers a free download for QuickTime that updates the playing controls to a more Tiger-like style.

Max

free:

Quicksilver - launcher

Vim 7.0 - text editor (OS X has Vim 6 in the Terminal but you need to get the 7.0 package to get windowed Vim and important new features)

Transmission - BitTorrent client

Fugu - SFTP client

VLC Player - video

MPlayer - video

Growl - interfaces with other apps to deliver notifications to you; for instance Transmission and Acquisition support this

GrowlTunes - uses Growl to show what's playing on iTunes

AcidSearch - plugin for the Safari browser in OS X - adds "smart searches" like Firefox has

shareware:

OmniOutliner - create outlines - best single app on the Mac IMO

OmniGraffle - create graphs

Acquisition - multi P2P client

Of these, Vim, VLC and MPlayer are the same than on other platforms and not Mac specific, but hey... best tools for the job.

A list of the apps I use are at: http://osx.iusethis.com/user/akatsuki

This site is great for browsing people's choices.

Inquisitor - now FREE! http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/

NewsFire - RSS http://www.newsfirerss.com/

Overflow (launcher) - much better than the dock, IMHO. http://www.stuntsoftware.com/Overflow/

Here's a list of software that I am head over heels in love with:

FIREFOX - Safari, Apple's web browser, is really pretty great. But sometimes it doesn't translate pages as they are intended. Firefox is the answer. Plus, you can get plugin scripts for Firefox that allow it to do other cool things.

Toast Titanium 7 - the new version lets you drag and drop any format video files and creates DVDs from them that can be played on console DVD players

Fetch - the original FTP client and still the best

Senuti (iTunes backwards) - this app has an iTunes-like interface and allows you to copy songs off of your iPod to your desktop

UnRARx, Split&Concat, and Gumby - these 3 FREE utilities will decompress pretty much anything you throw at it. The days of Stuffit Expander are over. They can go Stuffit somewhere else...

VisualHub - this little app is a Godsend and should have been made years ago. It allows you to convert video files to and from most of the popular formats (IE. mpg, avi, wmv, mov, etc)

Yojimbo - this app will be your 2nd home if you're anal retentive about organization

MacTheRipper - will let you rip commercial DVDs on to your desktop for later viewing

Cinematize - for when you want to rip specific scenes from a DVD

DropDMG - If you put stuff in a folder and drag the folder onto this app icon, it will create a DMG archive file of that folder

LinoType Font Explorer - awesome free font utility. free because it omits all the useless bells and whistles of Suitcase that no one ever uses anyway and it's better than Apple's Font Book.

Little Snitch - this app will tell you when anyone at all is trying to connect to your computer from anywhere on a network or the internet and gives you the option of allowing or denying them

Pernian - this is a collection of Apple Quicktime Codecs that work for most videos you come across including Windows-based video formats

Snapz Pro - like taking a snapshot of your desktop... but video

Chax - If you use iChat but don't want to bother with Adium, Chax is a good utility that adds some other cool features to iChat. My favorite is having tabbed windows so 5 conversations in one iChat window...

DiskWarrior/Drive10/TechTool Pro - macs don't crash often. but when they do... they crash HARD. these three system repair tools are indispensable. they WILL save your a$$. they've saved mine more than once...

Onyx System Optimizer - great little utility for doing spring cleaning like emptying caches, repairing permissions, and running the maintenence scripts

Firefox is fine, has been my favorite browser on any platform for years. But version 2.0 is the slowest initial loading browser I've had since Mosaic in 1993.

Its now off my list of favorite programs because of this. On my super fast MacBook Pro, it takes 17 bounces, a spinning beach ball for 30 seconds, a blank page for 10 more for a total of 1.5 minutes to load. What a POS. And yes, I've installed and reinstalled it.

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