Currently I’m using Snow Leopard 10.6 on my Mac mini, iMac and Mac Book Pro so all the following software works with that. Obviously I use other software but these would be the first I’d replace if I wanted to wipe my Mac.
Mac OS X Freeware / Donationware
Menu Meters displays memory usage, bandwidth activity, cpu % usage, disk usage in the menu bar. Prefer it to using Activity Monitor.
SmcFanControl (free) shows you tempetaure of CPU and fan rpms in the menu bar.
Namely type first letter or two letters to launch apps. I don’t need nor want bloated QuickSilver.
Hidden Files widget toggles showing hidden files such as .DS_Store .Trashes .Spotlight-V100.
Name Mangler advanced batch file renamer
GrandPerspective displays graphical map of hard drive and you can locate huge files you may have forgotten about.
VLC (VideoLan) to play xvid, divx, mkv h264 movies as QuickTime can’t do it.
Virtualbox by Sun Microsystems, run windows or linux in a virtual environment…no need to pay $80 for Parallels or VMWare Fusion.
ntfsmounter allows you to write to windows NTFS formatted external usb hard drives. This is a new feature of Snow Leopard. It mounts and umounts external USB drives.
Typist I don’t need this but if you can’t blind touch type you should get this freeware to do typing drill exercises. Have your kids learn a lifelong skill.
SABnzbd newsgroup client works on Mac, Linux, Windows. Totally automated process to download nzb files.
Cost $ Mac OS X software
Transmit $30 ftp client, dual pane interface and can choose multiple external editors within Transmit. Why does the freeware cyberduck have ability to throttle bandwidth but not transmit? sigh oh sigh.
Little Snitch $30 outgoing firewall. I actually bought a family license for this one. Worry about spyware? No, well then skip, but any advanced user should definitely check into this one you’d be shocked how many legit apps always want to E.T. phone home.
SizeRox $10 batch image resizer and file name renamer. Can watermark. Still no freeware like irfanview on windows so this is probably the best and most reasonably priced I could find.
Pixelmator $60 is probably best cheap Photoshop clone on Mac. If use a pen tablet to draw with check out ArtRage $25.
Only have a few tips.
- In Preview settings under PDF tab set initial document scale to 200%. Opening PDF displays full width of screen and can actually read it without having to zoom in every single time.
- Save power by disabling screensaver and instead if you need to leave your computer on to download stuff, process video etc. just turn off the screen(s). System Preferences | Expose | Active Screen Corners (top left, top right, bottom left, or bottom right) select Put Display to Sleep and move mouse top left of screen for instance to turn off / blank your monitor(s).
- Set background to all black in Safari by right clicking on little black image above and choosing Use Image as Desktop Picture.
Control + shift + eject key also puts display to sleep. But to be able to remotely login via RemoteTap (iphone app) and then put the displays to sleep I was hard pressed to find a solution. Solution is in Applications | Utilities | open Keychain Access App and in Preferences choose Show Status in Menu Bar. Now click the lock button and choose Lock Screen which puts displays to sleep and when one moves mouse to wake up the user’s password needs to be entered.
Safari
Block flash elements in Safari except when you wish to see them by installing clicktoflash.
Block all most all ads in Safari by downloading usercontent.css to username/Library/Safari and in Safari Preferences | Advanced selecting that file.
usercontent.css worked great but interfered in a few things so now instead I use free Safari AdBlocker which works in 64 bit mode with Safari.
