5 Free Mac Apps You Can’t Live Without
If you’re new to the Mac platform, the sheer number of apps promising to make your life easier or more productive can be daunting. I’ve wasted lots of money on applications I rarely (or never) use. These five are real “keepers” and won’t cost you a dime.
I’ve owned my Mac for 18 months now and it’s hard to remember my computing life without it. Maybe I’m presumptuous, but I feel like a real OS X veteran now. I’ve tried a ton of applications as I’ve explored this new (to me) platform and it turns out there’s five of them I use every day and can’t imagine using my Mac without them. The cool part; THEY’RE ALL FREE! I’m not going to try and number these or assign them any relevant score because they serve such a variety of purposes. I find them all extremely useful and wouldn’t want to give a single one of them up. This post isn’t a review, just a list of free stuff that I think every noob should at least try.
Quicksilver Using this application is by far the fastest way to launch an app or find a file anywhere on your Mac. It has a skinnable UI and is capable of much more than launching apps and opening files, but if you’re like me and prefer to keep both hands on your keyboard, Quicksilver is perfect for finding and opening things with just a couple of keystrokes. In fact, just about anything you can do in Finder with a mouse, you can do in Quicksilver with the keyboard. Beyond that, there is a huge list of other applications that provide plugins to Quicksilver exposing their functionality. FTP and e-mail are the two I use most, but the list of possibilities seems endless. For searching, file manipulation and application launching, Quicksilver can shave tons of time off of every-day tasks.
Evernote Just as its’ name implies, Evernote is a virtual ubiquitous notebook that works on any computer with a browser and internet connection. I use it to record all my product keys, snatch web pages and code snippets and about a hundred other things. I add a note on my Mac, it syncs with the Evernote server and is available on my PC at work and my iPhone. One of the coolest features of Evernote is its OCR (optical character recognition) capability. When you paste any picture containing text into Evernote, that text becomes searchable like everything else. It even works on pics of hand-written notes. It’s not magic, the Evernote folks actually employ humans to decipher the pictures. There are Mac and Windows versions of the product, but I find the web-based app to be the most useful. I can log into evernote.com from any machine with an internet connection and get to all my notes and attached files. As a professional IT guy, this feature has saved my bacon more than once. Registration is free and the only restrictions are the amount of data you can transfer per month and the file types available for synchronization. I used the free version for several months without noticing any of the limits. I synced all sorts of picture and music files and any document I wanted to sync, I simply converted to PDF first. Evernote never complained about any of them. There are no nag screens either. I wound up buying a one year “premium” subscription ($45) out of guilt more than necessity. Being a software developer myself, I wanted to reward the Evernote Corporation for conceiving and producing such an extremely useful product. It has become an integral part of my daily workflow.
Dropox As Evernote is for managing notes and clips, Dropbox is for managing and sharing files. The best way to describe Dropbox is an internet-based file server. Installing Dropbox creates a folder on your Mac that allows you to move or copy files of any type into it and Dropbox synchronizes those files to your corresponding folder on their servers. You can access your files from any computer (Mac, Windows or Linux) with an internet connection using a web browser or the free client application. When you add a file to your Dropbox folder it is then automatically synchronized to every machine where you have Dropbox installed. This process happens quietly, in the background so, as a user you simply click on your dropbox folder to access your files without having to first download them. If there are files you’d like to share with others, Dropbox provides a public folder for each account. Files you place in this public folder can be shared with everyone or only those you choose. In Finder, when you right-click on a file in this public folder, a menu option allows you to copy a link to the clipboard and paste it anywhere you want, like in an e-mail or other document. Like an advanced file server, Dropbox maintains versions of all your files. If you make an editing mistake or accidentally delete something within a document, correcting your mistake is as simple as opening an earlier version of the file. This could come in particularly handy if multiple people are working on a project in one of your public folders. The free version provides 2 gigs of space. For $10 per month or $99 per year that increases to 50 gigs. I use the free version to keep several important files that I never want to be without and for sharing pictures and short videos with friends and family. It is amazing how much you can store with 2 gigs of space if you shy away from media, especially video. In fact, excluding media, my entire life’s work (since 1982) fits on about a gig and a half. When you have multiple machines and/or change computers as often as I do, the size of your personal data becomes a familiar number. Now, thanks to Dropbox I have it all available to me anywhere I go.
iStat Menus This application is an instrument cluster for monitoring all facets of your Mac. From physical conditions like fan speeds and temperatures to operating conditions like CPU and memory utilization, disk and network activity, iStat Menus provides a way to monitor them all in an efficient, unobtrusive way. I installed this app the first week after getting my Mac and I’ve used it every day since. iStat Menus installs as a preference pane in the System Preferences application. From there you configure which of the multitude of monitors you want to display on your menu bar. I keep the CPU, memory and temperature graphs on mine. Clicking one of these menu bar displays drops down detailed data about it. For instance, I keep a small CPU graph on my menu bar to see how busy my system is at a glance. If I want to know more, I click the graph and a drop-down menu shows me a detailed graph of each CPU core, a list of the top five processes by CPU usage and information about average load, system uptime and how many processes I have running. There’s also a link to launch the Activity Monitor if I need to know more. In addition to the CPU, you can configure menus for memory, disks, network, temperatures, fans and even how you display the date and time. Each is as complete and extensible as the CPU example I just described. I’m a geek, so I like all the bells and whistles, but even an every-day user will find something in iStat Menus to their liking.
Skitch I use this app for every picture on this blog and any time I need to capture any portion of my screen. The best thing about Skitch (aside from the price) is its intuitive interface and ease-of-use. Skitch is the easiest app I’ve tried for capturing, annotating and sharing screen and iSight snapshots. Images captured with Skitch can be automatically uploaded to .Me, flickr, facebook or to Skitch.com. Are there more extensive screen capture utilities? Yes, but none are easier to use or less obtrusive than Skitch. I own Snapz Pro X and use it for more intricate capture jobs but Skitch is the app that is always running and on my menu bar because of its’ simplicity. It does 90% of what I need in a capture utility, it’s small, easy and it’s free. I donated to the company because I like their product so much, but the Skitch application doesn’t nag you to do so or limit functionality in any way. It just works well and does almost everything I need it to.
Keep these applications in mind if you’re looking for the capabilities they provide. They’re all on every Mac I own. I only wish they’d been available or I had know about them before spending money on others that don’t work as well or I didn’t really need.
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