50 Mac Essentials - page 2

I need hardly explain this one. Love it or loathe it, Skype is found pretty much everywhere else, and millions of people are happy users of it on a wide range of computer platforms and mobile devices. Even if you don’t particularly like using it, it’s a good bet that some of your loved ones to – so it’s worth keeping around, just for those occasional video chats.

There are other benefits, too. Skype works on older Macs (even G4s) running older versions of OS X (right down to 10.3.9 with Skype 2.8), and will support a variety of external webcams, mics and headsets. If your hardware is modest, Skype’s still an option for effective videocalls (bandwidth permitting, of course).

Get yer normal Skype here; if you’re feeling brave, try the (rather different) Skype beta – here’s Lonnie’s review from last November.

(You’re reading the 25th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more.)

AppCleaner is a freeware utility for deleting software from your Mac.

Hazel is software genius. It’s one of those tools that looks so simple to start with, but after a while, you realise just how powerful and flexible it could be.

Remember that old Mac you had? That beautiful iMac. It was lovely. Still works, but these days it doesn’t get used much.

It was a G5. One of the 17 inch models. You think. Wait. Or was it 20 inch? Damn, have to get it out and measure it now. It had a 1.83GHz Intel. Or was it a 2.33GHz? Dammit. You really can’t be bothered to boot the thing up just to check. But now you want to know.

Don’t you hate it when you’re watching some streamed video in your web browser, and just when it’s getting interesting your screen dims, or the screensaver activates?

It happens because your computer doesn’t consider video playing in the browser to be “activity”. It doesn’t care what the browser is showing; if it thinks you’ve wandered off to make some coffee, it will do what you’ve told it to do in the Energy Saver preferences. Hence those mid-stream dimming moments.

Caffeine is a tiny utility that solves this problem in a single click. It sits in your Menu Bar, doing nothing until you need it. When you start watching some video and you want the screen to stay alive, you just click the Caffeine icon. Now your screen will stay bright no matter what, until you click Caffeine again to put things back to normal.

The aptly-named Caffeine gives your computer a temporary boost, keeping it alert enough so you can watch your video uninterrupted. It’s free, it’s great, and you should go get it now.

(You’re reading the 21st post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more.)

TextWrangler is a well-named application. It’s there to do a particular job, and that job is wrangling text.

The name might not be giving too much away, but Coconut Battery should be installed on everyone’s notebook Mac. If it were called “Free Battery Health App”, it would do exactly what it said on the tin.

It shows you, with numbers and helpful colored charts, exactly what condition your notebook battery is in. It shows in an instant the current charge, and how much more you can charge it if you try; and more usefully, it shows the original capacity of your battery, and its capacity right now.

If you click the little disclosure triangle at the top right, you can save the current data for future reference. Keep saving snapshots at regular intervals, and you’ll be able to see at a glance how your battery is slowly degrading. Because that’s what happens, folks: over time, everso slowly and gradually, the battery in your Air or your Pro or your plain old MacBook is going to decline. As time goes on, its capacity to hold charge will decrease until the time comes to replace it. This is inevitable, I’m afraid, just like the death of your hard disk. It’s one of those things you need to plan for; and Coconut Battery is one of those apps that helps with that.

(You’re reading the 19th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more.)

TextExpander turns short text snippets into longer ones, saving you a great deal of time if you spend a lot of time in front of a keyboard.

You define your own snippets, and the shortcuts you’ll use to trigger them. Every time you type the trigger, the snippet takes its place instantly.

Transmit is a veteran FTP application for the Mac. So veteran, you can still download a version of it for Mac OS 9 if you want to.

In a market so crammed with competitors, what makes this particular FTP app stand out from all others? Let me count the ways…

Spirited Away is useful for people who like to focus. It just does one simple job. You’ll either love it, or be completely baffled by it.

It runs in the background, and hides all applications other than the one you’re using. That’s it.

So, if you switch to Mail halfway through working on your spreadsheet, Spirited Away hides the spreadsheet – and your chat client, your browser, your Skype window, everything else that isn’t Mail. It all just disappears.

So why would you want this? Well, removing visual clutter on screen can be helpful for people. It means you can concentrate your mind on the task at hand, and not allow it to be distracted by other stuff. It’s probably not much use if you’re just messing about, but if you want to actually get some work done, it comes into its own.

And it’s flexible enough to bend its own rules, if that’s what you want from it. If you’d like all the other application windows hidden except your iChat window, or except iTunes – well, you can tell it to leave those apps alone.

You might hate the idea of Spirited Away. You might think it’s a long way from being essential. But it’s essential to some of us, and might be essential to some of you, too.

(You’re reading the 15th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more.)

Secrets is a preference pane rather than an app, so once you’ve installed it, you’ll find it inside System Preferences, not in your Applications folder.

What is it? Think of it as “System Preferences Plus”. Secrets gives you point-and-click access to hundreds of hidden preferences in OS X and many applications. Without Secrets, the only way of changing these settings is by using a Terminal window and typing stuff like “defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown -bool TRUE” (which is the secret setting for hiding the Ping drop-down menu in iTunes.)

So if you’d rather avoid having to mess around with geekery like that, Secrets is your friend. You can browse through all the hidden preferences on your system, or filter them by application. So if you want Mail to always display messages in plain text, or if you want Safari’s tab bar to stay in view even when there’s only one tab open, or if you want to change how often Time Machine does its backups – well, you can change all of those, and loads more, inside Secrets.

It’s free to download, and frequently updated with new items as and when Apple and third party developers push out updates to software packages.

We all like our eyes. What a shame we subject them to such an endless onslaught of photons from computer screens all day long.

F.lux is an app designed to make your eyes feel a little more comfortable while working on a computer.

DropCopy is a free (for personal use on three machines) utility for transferring files between computers.

Once installed, it puts an unobtrusive circular “black hole” on your desktop. To move files around, drag them on to the black hole and wait for a list of destinations to appear, then drop on the one you want to send to.

Like magic, your file will instantly be sent to that computer. DropCopy is great for any local network where files get moved around. At home, you might simply be moving music files between your laptop and desktop. In the office, you might want to share stuff with colleagues. Either way, DropCopy provides an easy alternative to shared folders and networked storage drives.

It does some really neat stuff, like allow you to grab the clipboard contents of another computer or device, then save that to your own. There’s also a built-in messaging feature.

These days there’s also a version for iPhone and iPod touch that allows you to do pretty much all the same tricks between mobile devices, no intermediary computer required.

Of course, you can share files and send messages for free using other means; particularly Dropbox. But if you’d rather keep your files away from the internet, DropCopy is a great alternative. It’s useful in all sorts of ways, and at just $25 for the non-personal version, a bargain for small business teams.

(You’re reading the 12th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more.)

Whole civilisations have risen and fallen while the Mac community has discussed notebook applications. Everyone has tried different notebooks, and everyone has their own preference.

It’s hard to pin down just one, because the best ones each offer something unique; as a result, there might be a few mentioned in this series. But the first to qualify is Evernote.

Apple might have overtaken Microsoft in terms of market cap, but Windows remains the world’s most popular operating system by a long way. That means there’s a lot of Windows-friendly stuff out there on the web that won’t necessarily play nicely with your Mac.

Not unless you have Flip4Mac WMV Player installed.

We all know what Steve Jobs thinks about Flash, and the steps he’s taken to keep it well away from his mobile devices.

But Flash is a fact of life on the web, and avoiding it on your desktop computer isn’t quite so easy. But not impossible.

If you like to power your way round the web, you’re probably in the habit of opening lots of links as background tabs to read later. If those tabs contain Flash content, things can quickly get annoying. Either stuff starts playing automatically and you can’t find the right tab to stop it, or too much stuff loads and your computer’s fans start whirring as if their lives depended on it.

Mail Act-On is a unique plug-in for Apple’s own Mail application. It won’t appeal to everyone, but it is an excellent tool for managing lots of email and keeping it all organized.

It serves the needs of two distinct sorts of person: those who live most of their working hours inside Mail, and those who want to minimize the time they spend in it. Either way, Mail Act-On is a godsend.

Passwords. Loathe them or detest them from the depths of your innermost soul, they are a fact of life on today’s internet. And so many people use the same one everywhere.

1Password is aptly named. Once you give it control of your passwords, you don’t ever have to worry about remembering passwords again. You’ll only have to remember one – the one that unlocks 1Password itself.

So you’re busy chugging away on your computer, downloading loads of video as you do, and suddenly there’s a problem. Your computer says it’s running out of disk space. WTF?

The sad truth is that as fast as hard disk capacity increases, we come up with new ways to fill up our hard disks with digital stuff. Video, in particular, swallows up huge amounts of disk in the blink of an eye. How do you keep track of the state of your hard disk? GrandPerspective is one way to do it.

Adium is an all-purpose instant messenger application for OS X, and a very useful app to have around.

Perian calls itself “the Swiss Army knife for QuickTime,” a description that’s pretty much spot-on.

Technically, Perian is a “QuickTime component” and it’s a preference pane rather than an application (which means that after installing, you’ll find it in System Preferences, not in your Applications folder).

Scrivener is quite simply an excellent tool for writers.

Packed with features but not overwhelming you with them, it is particularly well suited for writing long-form works: books, screenplays, academic papers, and any other text work that can be broken into chapter-sized chunks.

Scrivener was developed by a writer, so it works the way a writer’s brain works. It knows that long written works are likely to be written in these scattered chunks, not always in the order they will appear in the finished book, and not always published in the order they were written. Scrivener lets you write, then re-arrange your writing using smart outliner modes.

The chunks of writing are known as “Scrivenings”, and if you use the “Edit Scrivenings” command you can edit each chunk in context alongside its siblings. It’s a terrifically useful way of writing.

Scrivener is flexible. There are loads of features on offer, but you can switch off anything you don’t need. It handles big projects with many hundreds of text pages and associated research files, it saves everything automatically (you never need to hit Command+S), and it offers excellent value for money.

For basic writing, you have TextEdit which comes pre-installed on your Mac and is excellent for many tasks (I use it for writing articles every day). But for anything beyond basic writing, Scrivener is well worth considering – and is a great deal cheaper – than the likes of Microsoft Word. For long-form writing, it’s hard to beat.

(You’re reading the 3rd post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications. Read more.)

Do you still use a USB stick to move files between one computer and another?

You should be using Dropbox.

I Love Stars is one of those apps that does one thing and does it very well. It sits in your Menu Bar and lets you rate songs as they’re playing in iTunes.

Tomorrow on Cult of Mac, we’re starting a new series: the Top 50 Mac Essentials.

Inspired by our ongoing 100 Tips series, we wanted to put together a list of the desktop applications that newcomers to OS X ought to know about.

Each app has been chosen because it’s great value for money, or the best in its class, or does something useful that no other application does, or is too good to miss, or some combination of all of the above.

We’re still fine-tuning our list of 50, and of course your opinions matter too.

If there’s a desktop application you think should be included – something you’d recommend in a heartbeat to a friend who was just making the switch to OS X – please let us know in the comments.

We’re NOT including software that comes pre-installed with a Mac. But anything else, whether it’s made by Apple or a third party, whether it’s a full-featured suite or a simple one-task Menu Bar widget, is fair game.

(And yes, I know there aren’t 50 icons in the illustration above. That’s just there to, um, illustrate; it’s not intended to be a preview.)

(To see the entire list of 50 Essential Mac Applications: click here.)