Marvel at the beauty of Apple's OS X via my SCREENSHOTS :) (rather outdated by now ...)
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OS X is a quickly evolving beast, so it's hard to keep up with all the changes and innovations. I want to provide useful pointers and links for people who want to get the most out of their computing experince. Some remain useful, while others become depricated over time, as Apple updates their OS. I'll try to mention which tools are still useful, and which apply mostly to older versions of OS X. Here's a list of OS X software that I use(d) daily and highly recommend to everyone who owns a Mac. This ismostly software designed by very nice folks to help the rest of us enjoy our Macs more. These are various extras - theming, menu extras, launchers, etc. Also, be sure to check out this site for 100 essential Mac apps. |
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- First of all, from Unsanity (Shareware) :
- ShapeShifter: Allows you to theme your Mac safely
- Silk: Allows you to change fonts (use with TinkerTool)
- MightyMouse: Change your mouse cursor appearance
- WindowShadeX: Shade windows, minimize in place, transparency
- CandyBar: Change your system icons safely with ease (Shareware)
- SetAlphaValue to play around with transparency in your windows (Free)
- Growl: A global notification system with customizable display - supported by many apps (Free)
- Quicksilver*: A multi-functional launcher with plug-in architecture (Free)
(Still exists for Tiger/Leopard, but I've found that Spotlight does most of the job for me) - MenuMeters: Add monitors to your menu: CPU, memory, network (Free)
- Google Notifier: Gmail/Calendar menubar status item (Free)
- RSS Menuº: RSS feed in the menubar (Free)
(Safari (and Shiira) now support RSS natively + there are many RSS Dashboard widgets) - FolderGlance: CM to give you access to the finder thru contextual menus (Free)
(This can be done with Stacks in Leopard) - GeekTool: Output shell commands, file contents, etc. to your desktop (Free)
- Contextual Menu Workshop: Various useful CMs for your root menu (Free)
- Big Cat Scripts: More useful scripts to add to your root menu (Free)
- DefaultApps: A preference pane to change your default applications (Free)
(not sure if this still works in Leopard ...) - SIMBL Plug-in interface that is needed for the following:
- SafariStand to give Safari many of the missing features that often make people switch to Firefox
- Forget-Me-Not to save Safari tabs and window size (now can be done in SafariStand as well)
- TinkerTool: Customize/optimize/repair - very useful tool (Free)
- OnyX: similar to TinkerTool, more functionality (Free - Tiger only for now)
- AdiumX: The best chat app for the Mac, replace iChat with it asap (Free)
- VLC player: The best open-source media (video/streaming) player out there (Free)
- Joost: Broadband TV on-demand (Free - Intel Macs only)
- Miro: If you have not seen this yet, go check it out now!!! Amazing broadband media player (Free)
- Hulu Desktop works with the Apple Remote (Free)
- Plex: An all-in-one media center solution for the Mac. Play videos, iTunes music, browse iPhoto pictures. Comes with many plugins to watch internet content from YouTube, Hulu, NBC, CNN, etc. Works great with the Apple Remote. (Free)
- Flip4Mac WMV: Internet plugins for WM content and playing QT movies within a browser (Free)
- JustLooking: A great image viewer replacement for Preview (Free)
(Not really needed in Leopard though) - Cyberduck: FTP for OS X - although you could just use the finder ... (Free)
- Fugu: A Mac OS X SFTP, SCP and SSH Frontend, simple and useful (Free)
- Taco HTML Edit: the best HTML editor for Mac! Simple and powerful (Free)
- NeoOffice: OpenOffice with Mac OS native support (Free)
- PDFLab to play around with your final-product PDF files (merge etc.)
- Skim: A nice and simple PDF viewer/editor with some of the annotation features found in Acrobat
- The last two are basically included in Preview in Leopard
- MacFUSE: Especially useful for SSHFS capability (mount remote filesystems via SSH) (Free)
- OpenAFS: brings the Andrew File System to Mac OS X (Free)
- Carbon Emacs - a very nice implementation of Emacs on OS X ... just wish it were Cocoa
- TeXShop to easily typeset your documents in TeX
- LaTeXiT to quickly typeset snippets of TeX (equations, text, etc)
- FeynMF+LaTeXiT to draw Feynman diagrams &mdash or just use JaxoDraw
- Octave: Free Matlab clone, includes precompiled OS X binary
- R has OS X native binaries that work great! And finally my own Presentation temlpate written in HTML
* = works with Growl (uses it for on-screen feedback, many styles availabe)
º = my menubar (pretty old ... much functionality has been taken over by Dashboard) :
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(ByteController, GMailStatus, Bee ... XMenu) |
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(MacBiff, Virtue, RSS Menu, HimmelBar ...) |