I’ve been meaning to do this for ages: a quick list of the applications that make my Mac world a better place. I’d be interested in your own nominations:
One of the things I miss from Windows is the Start button. TigerLaunch basically gives you a Mac equivalent: click on the icon in the menu bar and you can launch any app, anywhere on your Mac. Best of all you can customise the list to exclude things you rarely or never use. I’d rather chew off my own legs than lose this application.
A Swiss Army Knife for Safari. Code colouring, site alteration, animation killing… fantastic.
Run Dashboard widgets in Panther or get extra control over widgets in Tiger. On a related note: what drugs is Apple’s weather widget on? According to the widget, today’s forecast is 1 billion degrees centigrade.
Add HTML formatting for blog entries, board posts and so on with a couple of clicks. A tremendous time saver.
Utterly indispensable screen grabbing software. The latest version keeps all your grabs in a drawer for easy access.
Another indispensable tool for grabbing. Backdrop fills your screen with a white window, or the wallpaper of your choice, to hide open applications, folders, files and so on.
The best RSS reader I’ve ever used.
Not, as you might think, for copyright infringement; rather, it’s a boon for situations like I’m in at the moment – stuck at home, bored, with all my CDs packed away for the forthcoming house move. If someone invents a plugin for Safari that saves me from opening torrents in a separate program I’ll do a happy dance.
That’s probably enough time on the computer for today. I’m off to finish Project Snowblind…
Comments
0 responses to “Get your apps out”
Well, I really like Synergy: little remote control for iTunes that sits in the taskbar, and also flashes up album art and track info when a new song starts. (It finds the album art itself, which is cool).
There’s another, different Synergy that I keep meaning to install, so I can throw away my PC keyboard: it allows you to share a single mouse and keyboard across multiple computers, be they running whatever. The mouse pointer just pops over to the next computer’s display as if they were all one big desktop, and from that point the active app on that computer has keyboard focus.
I’ve used X-scope on occasion but haven’t paid the license fee: probably says something.
Can’t live without BBedit and Photoshop, of course. I used to use Salling Clicker a lot, when my desk and my Mac were in my lounge, but now they’re both in my room, it’s less useful. Still cool to get the incoming call notification onscreen.
And of course I spend far too much time playing BZFlag.
Thanks for your list, btw; several look like must-haves.
Regarding X-scope, I suppose I should add “says something about the usefulness of the app versus its fee”; it has quite a long unlicensed use period, though, so I haven’t been forced into the decision yet.
HALLO GARY!!111
I don’t have a Mac, so here are my three Windows picks!
Comet Cursor
You can make your cursor into flags and dogs and even Charlie Brown!
BargainBuddy
It shows you adverts for things to buy!
180 Search Assistant
It helps you search the inter-net and pops up fun windows!
Oops, gotta go, my PC is about to crash again!
kthxbye
>>Tigerlaunch
Is that not what the dock is for?
Nah, the dock gets wayyyyy too crowded very quickly. Particularly when you’ve got lots of apps open – in a typical work session I’ve got word, entourage, ical, multiple safaris, snapndrag and netnewswire open, so the dock looks like an icon warehouse.
What tigerlaunch is really handy for is the stuff you don’t use every day, such as utilities, music stuff or whatever.