The day you get a new computer can be an awesome day. Everything smells like an Apple store, your computer's body is flawless, — even the keys are more click-y. But it's also a day where you find out how much your computer was customized and personalized, tailored to your use. We took a look at our current computers and decided which apps we couldn't live without it.
Paul
Things
Cultured Code
$49.99
Things isn't just an app—it's my memory. My whole life—work, family, and even "someday I'll do that" dreams—resides in this lean, simply designed to-do list software. There's no bloat here, just elegantly spare functionality that makes it become second nature to store everything from reminders to pack concert tickets right on down to the 13 assignments that were due yesterday. Gulp. You can also purchase the iPhone or iPad apps and sync your lists to them over Wi-Fi, and it's been a lifesaver more than once to have that info with me on the road.
A digital memory allows me to focus on the work at hand, and not the things I might be forgetting.
Blast Utility
Apparent Software
$9.99
Blast Utility can vastly decrease the time you spend looking for recent items.
Spotlight is simply too good at what it does. Apple's built-in wünderkind of search finds every speck of possible result on my Mac, but sometimes, what I want is a deeper, beefier version of the Recent Items list in the Apple menu—that's where Blast Utility comes in. Perched in the menu bar, it lets you open any file or app you've recently used. Its best feature, though, is the ability to one-click exclude file types or folders, which can hugely improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
Susie
WriteRoom
Hog Bay Software
$24.99
The preferences let you tweak tons, and the formatting options are stashed in their own window.
I picked up WriteRoom ($24.99, hogbaysoftware.com and in the Mac App Store) as part of a MacHeist bundle a while back, but it's a worthy purchase on its own—the only app from that bundle I still use on a daily basis. In windowed mode, it looks like TextEdit, only you can get a live word/character count and you don't have to look at that ugly bar of menus up top. It's also got a full-screen mode if you want to write without being distracted by email or chat apps, and that defaults to a cool green-text-on-black-background look so you can pretend you're Matthew Broderick in WarGames. My only (admittedly small) gripe is that I can't set a default save folder, but...look at me, I'm Matthew Broderick in WarGames!
The live character counts are awesome when your website only accepts 500-character photo captions, for example.
I Love Stars
Potion Factory
$.99
If you click I Love Stars in the menu bar it reminds you what's playing.
Since I own an iPad, an iPhone, a couple of older iPods, and 943 iOS apps and counting, I'll literally never be able to quit using iTunes. But even with all its shortcomings, there are some things about it I still love, like smart playlists. So I also love I Love Stars ($0.99 in the Mac App Store). It chills out in my menu bar and lets me adjust the star rating of the currently playing song. In a typical work day I can rate so many songs without having to keep stopping what I'm doing and popping over to iTunes—you can even set keyboard shortcuts and rate songs that way. The majority of my smart playlists take ratings into account (3-5-star R&B, for example), so I Love Stars is a huge help.
The preferences let you set shortcuts and even use half-stars.
Ray
Dropbox
Dropbox
Free
Unfortunately, iDisk never lived up to its potential. Transfers were slow, and incredibly unreliable. For quickly shuttling files back and forth between machines, I've come to rely on Dropbox. The transfers are quick, and all it takes is a simple drag-and-drop to move files into the cloud and onto my other Macs. Apple's moving in on Dropbox's territory with iCloud's Documents in the Cloud feature, but for speed, reliability, and ease-of-use, Dropbox is part of my everyday workflow—and I can't imagine (work) life without it.
Dropbox chugs along in the background, and the menubar icon gives you quick access to all your stuff.
Adium
Adium
Free
Even though all my coworkers sit within a 25-foot radius of my desk, we're all messaging each other constantly throughout the day. For most things, instant messages are quicker than email, and there's no extra cruft left in my already-overflowing email box. Everyone in the office uses an iChat account, but with freelancers spread across a multitude of other services, Adium lets me keep connected to all of them, whether they use AIM, Google Talk, Facebook, or practically any other chat platform. Adium's easy to use, and the deep configurability means it adapts to me, and not the other way around.
Adium connects to every chat network in the known universe, and offers an amazing level of customizability.
Roberto
Perian
Perian Project
Free
If you have to edit, or even view a multitude of video types on your Mac, the Perian QuickTime component is a must have. The free component, allows me to play, AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, and other video file format that sound funny when said aloud in QuickTime.
Perian resides in your System Preferences where it releases the awesome.
VLC
VideoLAN Organization
Free
VLC will play anything! Okay, almost anything. But there's a good chance if you have an audio or video file that won't play in QuickTime, VLC can handle it. It'll even play your DVDs and VCDs if you have any of those lying around.
It's the Sonic Screwdriver of media players.
Flo
Fluid
Todd Ditchendorf
Free version, or $4.99
I'm a big fan of music streaming sites like HypeMachine, Grooveshark and Pandora, but none of them have their own native application. So instead of keeping them in a browser tab to hog up my memory and slow down my work in Firefox, Fluid lets me create a separate application process out of any URL, which is then placed in my Applications folder as its own entity. You can also use Fluid for things like your Google RSS feed, having more than one account logged in to a web-based email account, or hosting a streaming site like Hulu. There's no reason your favorite site should keep crashing your unstable browser--give it the power to stand all on its own.
A simple app that turns any URL into its own app!
Open Office
Apache Software Foundation
Free
It's big, it's bold and you can't get it in the Mac App Store. But unlike Microsoft Office, Open Office is free and lets you open proprietary Office files, as well as free yourself from the shackles of corporate software. Down with the man! Or maybe you're not quite as militant and just want to support the open source community. That's totally okay, too. And justified.
Just as good as Microsoft Office – but it's totally gratis!
Open Office is a truly fabulous replacement for Office. It's got an application for everything: work processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and databases. There's even an open source Adobe Illustrator replacement called Open Office Draw. And since Open Office was once managed by Oracle and is now in the hands of the Apache Software Foundation, you can be sure the code is a stable build.
Nic
Caffeine
Lighthead Software
Free
Without a doubt, the first app I download on my Mac is Caffeine. Caffeine keeps my screen from dimming when it's on, and can be turned on and off in the menu bar with a simple click. Since I do a majority of my work on a laptop, this comes in handy any time I'm watching a YouTube video or wracking my brain trying to write that next sentence. It's free and weighs in at a measly .3 megabytes. Caffeine is absolutely irreplaceable.
Caffeine has plenty of preferences to keep the setting specialists satisfied.
LaunchBar 5.1
Objective Development
$35
LaunchBar is the quick-launch application that I can't get enough of. I use it to change songs in iTunes, open applications, or even do simple mathematical equations. Despite the fact that I use this to open almost everything (and that it puts Launchpad to shame) the little application is so full of features I'm sure I'm still not using it quite enough.
Launchbar is the Swiss-army knife of launch applications.
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