The Top Mac Utilities You Must Have

Macs are great computers no doubt and OS X is a superb OS for both new users and seasoned pros, but even this great a combination can benefit from some tools. Some of the ones listed are freeware or donationware, others are shareware or paid software. I wouldn’t recommend anything that I don’t use myself and as usual, I am not receiving any compensation for these reviews and recommendations. I hate top ten lists since it always sounds like one is better than another so for the purposes of this article, these are all excellent so I present them in alphabetical order.

Adium – FREE http://adium.im

Everyone likes IM. Or not. But the biggest pain with IM is the near endless list of IM clients. Adium is brilliant and brings them all together in one elegant place. It works with Google Talk, Jabber, MSN, AOL, Yahoo, GroupWise, Pidgin et. al. One simple duck does it all. Plus there are multiple themes and sound cards featuring the Tokyo Subway that so many of the Internet cognoscenti love.

Caffeine – FREE http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/

Have you ever stepped away from your computer for that minute too long and had it go to sleep or as has happened to me, been in the midst of a presentation, and stopping to take a question have your screensaver kick in? Of course you could muck with your power settings, but the odds are that you would then forget to set them back, running your battery down. To the rescue comes the brilliant applet called Caffeine. Click the coffee cup in the menu bar to fill it and sleep and screensaver are inhibited. Click again to empty the cup and normal power management is restored. It could not be simpler.

Chronosync – $40 – http://www.econtechnologies.com/pages/cs/chrono_overview.html
ChronoAgent – $10 http://www.econtechnologies.com/pages/ca/agent_overview.html

I often want to keep different folders in sync either locally or across my network. I do this with picture and music libraries because I want the files in native format not some odd blob created by otherwise great backup software. Chronosync and Chronosync Agent to the rescue. This fully schedulable product allows you to build automated synchronization events with full logging to create copies of files and folders, archives and even bootable backups of those things most critical to you. The UI is easy to understand, with superb conflict detection and resolution. The agent can be loaded on your other Macs so sync is even faster and has no user involvement required.

Cocktail – $14.95 – http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/buy.php

Remember the good old days of the PC and Norton Utilities when Peter Norton was more than a picture on the box? Useful utilities were key. Cocktail pulls together key utility functions into a powerful yet elegant tool. It brings together disk management, system management, file and cache management, network interface management and the ability to automate processes in a single launch application.

Drive Genius 2 – $99 – http://www.prosofteng.com/products/drive_genius.php

You know that when the effluent hits the rotor, it’s bad all over. When that disk starts to misbehave you need a hardened and reliable tool to try that last minute repair before the weeping starts. Heck you may even want to check and do minor corrections on your disks before things go horribly wrong. Pessimist? Moi? There are only two kinds of disk drive owners. Those who have experienced a catastrophic data event and those who have not experienced a catastrophic data event. Yet. There are some other good tools out there like Disk Warrior and Tech Tool Pro. I like Drive Genius for its simplicity and power and hope to never have to use it. Again. But like the smart guys say, “hope is not a strategy”

DropBox – FREE and Subscription – https://www.getdropbox.com/

DropBox is brilliant. You install your Dropbox on your Mac, and heck install one on Windows and Linux for that matter. Autostart the service and everything you put in your dropbox is transparently and automatically synced to their cloud server and then pushed to every other dropbox agent you have running. It does superb conflict resolution, doesn’t murder your machine with junk processes and is blindingly simple. Yes there are a bunch of other tools like this. You make your own choice but I chose DropBox.

Evernote – FREE and Subscription – http://www.evernote.com/

If you’ve ever wanted a simple app that you could use to take notes, to capture PDFs, to make video notes, to easily search and the like, then Evernote might be for you. Evernote keeps a local repository and also stores copies of your notes securely on the Evernote servers. If you install Evernote on other Macs, or Windows boxes and use a common account, those machines get the latest updated notes whenever they connect. Evernote also has a web clipper tool, a client for the iPhone and iPod Touch, a client for Windows Mobile, a client for the Palm Pre, a client for the Sony Ericsson XT and of course for the Blackberry. The iPhone app is very good. I’ve also tried the Blackberry app and like many reviewers think it inhales rapidly. Other than the BB app, I like everything about Evernote.

Handbrake – FREE – http://handbrake.fr/

If you’re like me and want to put your video content on your iPhone or your AppleTV or even your laptop for traveling, Handbrake is the tool for you. It runs on a number of platforms and does what it says it does, which is do multi-threaded video transcoding. It uses H.264 and a plethora of other codec libraries including Ogg Theora. Simple to use and to install and with VLC on your Mac you can even copy purchased DVD content to your hard drive as a backup.

Little Snitch – $29.95 – http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

This is the first thing that gets installed on a new Mac. While Macs have a decent firewall to protect you from external threats what about the information being phoned home by applications, scripts and other thieves? Sometimes you want this to happen such as when an app needs to check for updates, but a lot of the time you don’t as many apps send your information out without your knowledge. You may be ok with that, but these packages could get intercepted or redirected. Get some control on this with Little Snitch. You install it and turn it on. Then whenever something tries to send out onto the Internet you’ll get a dialog asking you to Allow, Always Allow or Deny. Little Snitch remembers your choice in its database. When you first install Little Snitch, you will get a lot of dialogs appearing if you use lots of apps, but in relatively short order it will work quietly in the background only appearing when a send is about to happen.

PDFPen – $49.95 – http://www.smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/index.html

The folks at SmileOnMyMac build useful tools. The first I recommend is PDFpen, particularly if you have to deal with a lot of PDFs as a reader or editor. Sure Adobe’s Acrobat is great but it is expensive and when you need more than basic services is not always intuitive. Your Mac can create PDFs directly from the print function so why the tool? You receive a document or contract or agreement in PDF form but instead of printing it, annotating it, scanning it and sending it, just open the file in PDFpen, do what you need and save it and move forward. If you deal with more than five PDFs a year, the time and hassle savings alone make the cost worthwhile.

SuperDuper – $27.95 – http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Time Machine may be the easiest way to back up your Mac, but it has a couple of limitations. I like to use Super Duper beside Time Machine for a couple of reasons. First unless something exists in three places it’s not really protected. Second Super Duper not only backs up, it creates a bootable image so if the horrible happens you can actually boot your Mac from your Backup disk. So I use two external drives, one for Time Machine and one for Super Duper. Time Machine makes it super easy to recover the odd lost file or correction for dumb fingers. Super Duper gives me the assurance that in a crisis I not only have two backups but that I can bring the system up fast.

Text Expander – $29.95 – http://www.smileonmymac.com/TextExpander/

$29.95 might seem like a lot of money for a utility that enters large blocks of text with a simple keystroke. Right, until you use it and become dependent on it. I’ve not created hundreds of entries but I have created shortcuts for product names using their popular acronyms, built signatures, contact blocks and intro paragraphs for emails and letters. Talk about time savings.

Things -$49.99 – http://culturedcode.com/things/

There are dozens of task managers and GTD apps on the Mac. OmniFocus is superb for those folks who need a lot of organizational power. I need something simpler and a bit faster and have chosen to maintain my action items using Things. It uses a simple list metaphor but provides enormous, grouping, tagging and associative power. It’s extraordinarily fast to get started with but provides plenty of room to grow. There is an excellent iPhone app as well that integrates cleanly.

Toast – $99.99 – http://www.roxio.com/enu/products/toast/titanium/overview.html

You can of course burn CDs and DVDs with the native OS X services but no application takes media management to the level of Toast. ISOs, DVDs, Video discs, data discs, Bluray, Toast does it all. Also in the package are labellers and folder management. The Pro version includes a number of audio manipulation applications.

Transmit – $29.95 – http://www.panic.com/transmit/

Everyone needs an FTP client at some point, whether to update a hosted web site, to download a file, or to do a secure copy. There are free FTP clients that work really well, but I’ve been a Transmit user for a long time and the folks at Panic Software keep the product evolving and have never created bogus upgrade charges for their excellent product. If cashflow is an issue or you think that your needs for FTP and SFTP will be really limited, do try Cyberduck at http://cyberduck.ch/ It’s donation ware and is quite easy to use.

VMware Fusion – $79.99 – http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/

Despite best efforts to be Mac centric, we may from time to time be in the position where we need Windows. There are decent deals and upgrades available for Windows 7 or you may already own the license for Windows XP or Vista. Apple offers Boot Camp as part of OS X but the idea of having to reboot to use alternate OSes makes my teeth hurt. Virtualization solves the problem in a much more elegant fashion. There are three solutions for virtualization on the Mac that you can look at seriously, VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop and Sun’s VirtualBox. VirtualBox is free and works well enough for basic use. Parallels and VMware Fusion leapfrog each other in feature delivery. I prefer VMware Fusion because it has been flawless through all the versions for me and because I also want to create Linux VMs, where this was a problem in the past with Parallels Desktop, although I have not tried the new version, mostly because Fusion just works. It’s fast, easy to use, has a very nice capability to make your Windows apps appear in your menus or the dock and is very CPU efficient. If you will be using Windows a fair bit on your Mac, want the Aero functionality in Windows 7 and don’t want the virtualization to take over your Mac, get VMware Fusion.

WhatSize – $12.99 – http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize/

Disk consumption gets out of control pretty darn fast and finding the space gulpers is challenging using the Finder. Omni offers Omni Disksweeper for free and it’s ok. The UI is very basic but the price is hard to beat. I prefer WhatSize. It offers a simple easy to use Finder-like UI to help you find the prime offenders and makes cleaning up the disk a breeze. I know that there are tools out there that create colourful disk maps that use colours and blocks to show you where the disk is getting eaten up. I’ve tried a few of them and quickly tired of the coloured graphic blobs and the lack of simplicity in cleaning up. WhatSize is simple and extremely fast. If you don’t need it right now, be sure that you will.

Now some of you are saying, “hey if I buy all of these, it’s going to get expensive”. Ok I hear your concern and so you should use your search engine of choice and create accounts with MacHeist and MacUpdate. From time to time these services will offer bundles of software at amazing prices. It’s true that some items in a bundle may not create a lot of value for you, but the return on investment is usually well worth it. One bundle included Parallels Desktop for the same price as buying Parallels on its own, and you got some pretty decent products in addition. Many of the items in the list came through a bundle purchase.

My wife says I look like a cop since I carry a little black flipover notebook, either one with a leather cover that’s refillable or a moleskine.

I finally have found a usable notepad application. Not a notebook, a notepad. I use Circus Ponies notebook for blog creation, and articles. A notepad is good for the things I see that I want to look into later or for jot notes like a shopping list. I tried Jott and it was cool until it became chargeable.

So here I am advocating this cool app called Evernote. It’s a perfectly functional free application but you can use on your Mac, on Windows, on your iPhone, on Windows Mobile and on Sandesk U3 devices. To create an account go to Evernote and signup. The basic service is free but you can buy a premium subscription that gives you more storage for rich media and encryption. $5/mth or $45/yr USD is a pretty low price if you really like the service.

What makes Evernote really useful is that you have a number of different methods to take a note. On the iPhone, you can create a text note, a snapshot note (using the iPhone camera – great for stuff you want to price before you buy), a saved photo note or a voice note. On the Mac you can create a note either as text or an iSight note. The program leverages what it’s running on. You can have multiple notebooks and search is really very good. A feature I use regularly now is Clip to Evernote that grabs a screenshot and fires it into Evernote. The Evernote servers also do character recognition! Yes, servers so all your Evernote installs are kept in sync.

The example above shows Evernote holding a screenshot of the active MarsEdit window.

And of course, you can see everything you have stored even if you don’t have your computer or mobile device.

If you travel, have more than one computer, use a smartphone (no Blackberry support yet), or like cloud services, and ever take notes, get Evernote.

Highly recommended.