Kid666 Blog

This is a Keynote talk I did at work as a fill-in for our Lightning Talk series. Marco asked me to publish it. It’s reasonably sparse but all these apps were chosen because I think they are useful in some meaningful way. They aren’t in any particular order and this is certainly not an exhaustive list of useful applications (I have 320+ apps installed, this is just 10).

Ukelele

Ukelele is an application that allows you to edit keyboard layouts. For example, I replaced the § key with # on my keyboard because I find opt+3 to be a hassle when I’m coding. Ukelele is free.

Menu-master

Menu-master is a preference pane. It allows you to add or delete keyboard shortcuts from menus. It’s a must have piece of software for me. It costs $10 but it’s very much worth it. Since it’s part of the unsanity framework it may or may not work in Leopard.

Nocturne

Nocturne is the new application from Quicksilver developer alcor. It allows you to change contrast options on your screen. I use it when I’m on the tube to keep my flagging battery alive with a very dim screen. Unlike other things which are just wrappers for ctl+opt+cmd+8 Nocturne adds features like tint and shadow removal to stop the glowing effect. Nocturne is free.

AppFresh

AppFresh is an application that scans your applications folder and finds updates for you. It will download the updates into a folder of your choosing (I don’t recommend Desktop if you have more than a couple of apps) but it doesn’t automagically install updates yet. AppFresh is free.

Disk Inventory X

DiskInventoryX scans you hard disk drive for where you use space. It shows usage by size on a map, with colour to indicate the type of file. It’s great to finding places you aren’t using you disk well (for example bloated logs). It has some nice features like folder zooming. I just like the look of the map it make than the one Grand Perspective makes. DiskInventoryX is free.

iBackUp

iBackUp is a backup solution. It is really a wrapper for two solid UNIX command line apps, ditto and rsync. It allows configuration of the exact command it uses as well as scheduling options. The major selling point is application profiles, though. These are downloadable, autoupdating files that describe where an application keeps its settings and configurations to allow iBackUp to intelligently copy them. This makes iBackUp one of the best backup solutions I’ve seen. iBackup is free for personal use.

R-Name

R-name is a simple app that lets you batch rename files. It has some basic regular expression support but without back references. You can select a number of files, match what you want to change, and what you want to change it to and preview the changes. A simple button click later and the file are all renamed. Not rocket science but quite convenient. R-name is free.

Spirited Away

Spirited Away is one of my all time favourite apps. For the chronically focus impaired, like myself, it hides all applications not being used after a certain amount of time. I use 300 seconds which is 5 minutes. You can set a list of applications not affected, such as video players and the like. It was recently updated to be a universal binary. Spirited Away is free.

Platypus

Platypus is an application that compiles scripts into actual applications. This is great if you wrote something neat you want to easily package and distribute. I noted some issues with it including the script distribution with each app, but I’ve been told that’s just me. Platypus is free.

phpfi

Phpfi is an offline reader for the php.net PHP manual. Since it is driven by a local copy of the manual searching is a lot faster than searching php.net, obviously it also works when you aren’t connected to the internet. You can download the comments from php.net with one click on a function call. Phpfi is nag-ware, although it doesn’t nag that much (possibly not at all if you don’t download comments).

Technorati Tags:
Mac, Productivity, osx, ukelele, menumaster, nocturne, appfresh, diskinventoryx, ibackup, rname, spiritedaway, platypus, phpfi

Bookmark on del.icio.us

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 26th, 2007 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.