Cool Apps

This area of my site has my recommendations for various software applications - many of which are graciously provided for free (where noted) by the authors.

iMac Mac Apps

In addition to the great apps that come with Mac OS X Snow Leopard (i.e., iTunes, Safari, and Mail), in alphabetical order:

  • app 1Password (wallet app): Best-of-breed wallet shareware for secure account info, notes, and much more. Awesome design: configurability, usability, stability, aesthetics, and fast performance (especially the iPhone app sync which is quick, effortless, and secure). Goes beyond all the rest by making full productive use of the secure data, including super-simplified web logins.
  • app Adobe Photoshop Elements (image editor): Awesome picture/image editing tool for under $100 (Note: this is a subset of the much more expensive Photoshop app). It allows seamless touch-ups/edits of high-resolution images, icons, and photos. I used it to edit most of the icons on this site - adding shadows, adding high-quality alpha transparency, merging images, seamlessly removing/replacing unwanted pieces of images, etc.
  • app AppCleaner (software uninstaller): Although Mac OS X apps do not really need much of an uninstaller since most of their files are in their application bundle (thus, just trashing the application bundle gets all the main stuff), there are still often preference files and other support files left behind, because they are not in the bundle. This free utility has a nice interface to better uninstall an app.
  • app Aquazone Blue Planet (virtual aquarium): Very realistic and cool-looking aquarium with lots of fish and features - and none of the hassle of cleaning the tank!
  • app Butler (application launcher and shortcut manager): This donationware is a powerful, customizable app allowing you to do everything so much faster on a Mac. I replaced iSeek (menu bar search), XMenu (menu bar shortcuts), and Spark (keyboard shortcuts) with this app, since it has better performance, usability, and memory usage than each of these great apps.
  • app Calc (calculator): This free app is compact and much more useful than the OS X calculator app, since it lets you clearly see the equations you type in (including allowing easy reuse of historical results).
  • app Dragon Dictate (voice-to-text app): If you are not a super-fast typist or you would just like to transcribe text at the speed that you speak, you will be marveled with this app providing close to 99% accuracy! It does require that you initially train it for about 5 minutes -and- then use the provided noise-cancelling microphone in a relatively noise-free environment, but it is well worth it for the obtained accuracy.
  • app Dropbox (remote backup/sync app): This is a free app (for the Mac, PC, and/or iPhone) that requires a free online service (for the basics). Keeps everything up-to-date and backed up in the background on all machines/devices without you having to worry about anything. While this app and SugarSync have both pros and cons, I found this app to be quicker, smoother, and less obtrusive to the Mac experience by constantly improving performance and resource usage.
  • app EasyFind (file search app): This is a free and fast search app that can find many more things (inside package contents, invisible files, etc.) than Mac OS X's Finder search or Spotlight search, and does not depend on indexing.
  • app Fluid (site specific browser): This is a free utility that lets you easily configure frequently visited websites (especially those that are essentially web applications) as fully functional Mac applications with their own windows. I use it to work in Facebook independent of my normal web browsing.
  • app Google Earth (graphical mapping app): Maybe even better than the excellent PC app, this free app lets you see satellite images, 3-D street views, and more - all with an easy-to-use interface.
  • app HandBrake (DVD ripper and video format converter): Originally just a free utility to rip your DVD’s onto your hard drive in a compressed format (e.g., mp4 with H.264 encoding), it has grown into a powerful, configurable video converter which will most likely replace all lower-end converters with its future releases.
  • app iDVD '09 (DVD creator): Slick DVD creator with easy-to-use, professional-looking features.
  • app iPhoto '09 (photo manager): Cool photo manager with great features like Faces, Places, and quick corrections (rotate, red-eye, auto-enhance, etc.). With Faces, the powerful facial recognition logic can help you assign the names to all the people in your photos fairly quickly. Then with Smart Albums, you can easily create photo albums with all photos of a certain person or combination of people - as well as limiting them to certain places, dates, etc.
  • app iStat menus (menu bar CPU/RAM/disk stats app): This inexpensive app provides customizable stats (displayed graphically and with color if desired) in your menu bar to see CPU usage, RAM usage, and disk usage at a glance (among many other stats).
  • app MacFamilyTree (family tree app): Slick shareware app that has everything you need to build a cool family tree ... including a very impressive 3-D virtual tree!
  • app Microsoft Office (office suite): I highly recommend the 2011 version with Outlook. It is so slick and even nicer than the 2010 Windows version!
  • app Microsoft Remote Desktop (remote desktop app): Just as good as the excellent PC app, this free app lets you work on a remote Windows PC from within a window (or full screen) on your Mac.
  • app Poser (3-D character modeling and animation tool): Awesome 3-D character modeling and animation tool for the hobbyist as well as the professional.
  • app RapidWeaver (website design app): This shareware app is an incredible template-based website builder which is light-years better than Apple’s simple iWeb. While you can do so much more with it than you can with iWeb (especially with the RapidWeaver add-ons), it is still just as easy to use! This site was created with this app in a very short amount of time.
  • app Safari Bookmark Sorter (Safari utility): This free little utility quickly re-sorts all of your Safari bookmarks/folders, since Safari strangely enough does not provide this basic feature.
  • app SleepLess (computer sleep inhibitor): This is an inexpensive little utility that sits in your menu bar and allows quick access to inhibit or re-activate sleeping (for security, power conservation, and monitor life preservation) when you want to watch a video or run a process that you do not want interrupted even if the mouse or keyboard are not used for some time. Even though Caffeine is a free great similar product, only SleepLess allows the option to not sleep the computer while still sleeping the display -- perfect for running jobs that take hours or days.
  • app TextWrangler (text editor): This is a free powerful text editor with multi-document support, syntax coloring, and other cool features. I use this in place of Mac OS X’s adequate TextEdit for all text-based files.
  • app Things (tasks/GTD app): This shareware app is well worth its price. It provides simple but extremely powerful task management that is very effective and integrates with its iPhone and iPad apps.
  • app VLC (universal video player): This free player makes up for QuickTime’s limitations, since it can play pretty much any video format (with maximum quality).
  • app Vue (3-D modeling and animation tool): Incredibly realistic 3-D modeling and animation tool for the hobbyist as well as the professional. The Esprit version is a great compromise between usability, advanced features, and price for the hobbyist.
  • app WhatSize (disk space analyzer): I tried most of the disk space analyzers out there with their interesting graphics and user interfaces, and this shareware app provides the best (and fastest) way to understand your disk space usage.
  • app Witch (application switcher): This cool little shareware utility provides detailed window switching (e.g., tab back to the last window accessed even if it is in the same application, immediately see a nicely organized list of all windows while holding tab to switch) in a slick usable way that should be part of the Mac OS X operating system.

PC PC Apps

In alphabetical order (before I migrated to Mac in late 2008):

  • app 7-Zip (compression utility): This free utility can zip/unzip almost any archive file, including the popular .7z format.
  • app ExamDiff (visual file comparer): This free utility visually compares the difference between any two text files. It is very smart in isolating the differences. I previously used it for comparing source file and page changes.
  • app FTPSync (FTP folder/file synchronizer): This free utility does a great job of quickly synchronizing your site with your local files. It is designed for the more technical user, since it works with an .ini file. I previously used it to synchronize this site's files.
  • app IrfanView (image viewer): This free image viewer is small, fast, and feature-rich (e.g., filters, great resizing, etc.). This great app has been offered for years as total freeware with constant upgrades.
  • app MediaMonkey (media player/manager): This is an awesome free music file manager and player for people who are serious about properly tagging and organizing their collection. Although the free version is exceptional, I eventually purchased the "Gold" version to enjoy its full power - it was well worth it.
  • app NoteTab Light (text editor): I used the free version of this text editor to edit all my source code and pages, instead of using the integrated editors in my compiler and design apps. It has great multi-tab features, powerful search-and-replace features (including direct searching from disk files), and a host of other features. Although the free version worked great for me for a long time, I eventually purchased the "Pro" version to get the "HTML highlighting" features.
  • app ShortKeys Lite (special key mapper): The free version of this utility let me assign special spanish-language letters and punctuation to special keystrokes.

links Links

Some quality app resource links:

  • iUseThis (app info): A nice site with a pretty large user base, showing the apps that people use most and those that people especially like. It has lots of nice features, including putting you in contact with people that have similar apps to you.
  • App Advice (device app info): A great site for iPhone/iPod/iPad apps - loaded with the latest news, accurate information, quality reviews, objective recommendations, and useful app comparisons.
  • iLounge (device app info): A good site for iPhone/iPod/iPad apps.