10 Best Little Mac Apps
Taking a page from this guy’s blog, here are 10 Mac apps not on a regularly shipping Mac that rock my world. And this is freeware or shareware as well:
Transmit: FTP and file browser by Panic that looks as great as it works. One of the reasons I dropped Dreamweaver. I use it every day for this website and a lot of other things.
VLC: Will open what QuickTime won’t touch. It’s interface is a bit off, but it’s more flexible and coachable than Apple’s very own baby. And it’s cheaper. The $30 tag for every bleeding upgrade to QuickTime is one of the things I really hate about Apple.
Wire Tap Pro: Record audio from your Mac’s very own internal microphone, not the one you use to record your voice, but what a program is playing. Sweet. This is one of the apps that helps make things possible.
Taco HTML Edit: The other half of the web creation duo that enabled me to drop the once-lovely but now excessively bloated Dreamweaver.
QuickImage: Create thumbnails and crop and resize pictures right from the desktop without having to launch the behemoth that is Photoshop.
MacJournal: I use it to post to the blog as well. It’s gone to Mariner and you pay for it now, but I still use the freeware version. Worthy of the prizes Apple gave it.
Art Director’s Toolkit: It finds and keeps all color schemes for all websites and even some graphics. I have a feeling I have only scratched the surface of its usefulness.
CopyWrite: It’s made text-only projects easier to manage.
Capture: This free widget takes the pain out of keyboard shortcuts to take a screenshot and it outperforms Grab.
ASM: *blush* I admit it. I liked the application launcher in Mac OS 9 and this lets me keep it around. I like the Dock and the Cmd+Tab thing, but I still use this, even after 5 years of OS X. This was more painful to me than the loss of the Apple menu.
That’s it. Shareware and freeware are fabulous and I wish I could list everything I use, but that would be a long list. The only commercial program I use not part of iLife or iWork is Photoshop. That’s it. Mac programmers, I grovel before you.