Cool MacOS Apps
Because my blogging has been light lately, and it’s the start of a long weekend, how about some cool OSX apps? And these are all free, of course.
- It’s hard to explain what Quicksilver is, but once you get used to it, it’s hard to go back. For instance, instead of going through my Applications list to find a program I want to run (that isn’t on my Dock), I just hit Ctrl-. and Quicksilver pops up. I begin to type the name of the app, and Quicksilver finishes it, and I hit
and I’m off and running. Of course, there’s more — if I want to email a link to someone, I copy that link, then hit Ctrl-. . I paste the URL in, then in the next field start typing “Email”. Quicksilver is smart enough to know what I want to do. In the third field I start typing the name of the recipient, and hit . iMail magically creates an email to that person with the link as the subject and in the body. Want more? This entry has a better explanation. - I’ve just downloaded XShelf, which is a temporary spot to place files and text that you are copying and pasting from one place to another. A similar shareware program is DropDrawers. One thing that I think XShelf has over DropDrawers is that XShelf has a program that lets you copy files into it from the command line. IOW, you type “XShelver
” and that file is copied to the “shelf”. I’m sure that DropDrawers has a lot more stuff that XShelf, but the command line interface is very important to me. - I’ve used MPEG Streamclip to convert video from one format to another and it works very, very well. Even where VLC has failed. Also, MPEG Streamclip is easier. That said, VLC is a great program in it’s own right.
- iTerm is a wonderful replacement for Terminal. You can have tabs open for multiple command lines in one window (because one command line for me is never enough). There is scripting support for iTerm as well, but I haven’t use it (yet).
Not officially on list above, because it’s not free, but Saft is a wonderful plugin to Safari. It remembers what sites and tabs you had open when you closed Safari, and will open them up again when you start it again. It also does good adblocking, let’s you drag the tabs around, etc.