Mac Productivity: Full List of Productivity Apps

This is the full list of all the productivity apps that I’ve mentioned in various postings over the last three weeks. It is given in alphabetical order with product ratings:

1Password – Passwords and Form Filling

I have 1Password primarily for one reason. At some time in the future the Mac will also be threatened with malware. So I’ve bought 1Password so that even if a keylogger were running on the Mac no-one would be able to get at the passwords that I really do want to protect. As it happens 1Password is also useful for form filling and it allows me to manage more than one identity. The form filling is not so impressive given that FireFox can do a lot of that anyway, but multiple identities is good for when I prefer to be anonymous (which is not often). 1Password is a security app that costs real money.

FireFox – Browsing

I’d like to proclaim that FireFox is wonderful, but I can’t bring myself to. It’s just a great deal better than the alternatives, for two reasons. First, the base functionality and configurability beats the competition and secondly, the plug-ins extend its functionality wonderfully.

The tabbed browsing extensions are particularly good. For me, the second best browser is Opera. Safari is OK and IE is a dead duck on the Mac (I’m not going to invoke Parallels just to surf the web). However, the sad reality is that the browser is more of a constraint to productivity than an aid. Browsers in general are mouse oriented, when they don’t have to be.

iStat Pro – Monitoring Software

iStat Pro is a neat piece of freeware which summarizes the information you get from the Activity Monitor and displays it in the menu bar, with drop-down menus providing extra information. It also has the virtue that it gives you a drop-down calendar, allowing you to set clocks for different time zones. If you think the Mac’s behaving strangely then a quick glance at the Menu Bar gives you an idea of what’s happening. It shows memory usage, cpu, hard disk used and network traffic.

iKey: The Hotkey Productivity Aid There are other Mac programs similar to iKey, but iKey was the one that I tried out in depth. iKey is a kind of wizard-based programming environment where you never have to write a line of code. You just select various options and type in the keystrokes. You use it to script keyboard entries and to script mouse movements. You can specify whether the script applies to all applications or just to a specific application. You can then attach whatever script you have created to a Hotkey combination. For more information on iKey read this post: The Fulcrum of Mac Productivity: Hotkeys

Journler – The Alternative File System I use Journler as my file system for all my files except music files (sound), photos and software development (source code, etc.) The reason I don’t even think of using Journler for music, photos, etc. is that those files are already well managed by other applications (in my case iTunes for music, Aperture for photos and Dreamweaver for web development.) For a detailed explanation of why Journler improves productivity read this post: Mac Productivity: The Filing of Files

KeyCue – Hotkey Reminder I’ve mentioned the use of hotkeys in just about every posting on productivity. The upside of hotkeys is that they are fast. The downside is that you tend to forget some of them. (I have a method I use to try to minimize that, which I’ll explain in another posting – but the truth is that it’s not perfect). KeyCue is a really well conceived reminder of the hotkeys that are active at any point. You load it and forget about it. If you ever want to know which keys are active, just hold down the Command Key for a second and a display like the one shown on the snapshot above will pop up. This is both a good way of remembering hotkeys and a handy reference for learning them. KeyCue is shareware.

Linotype Font Explorer – Fonts Don’t load thousands of fonts, its a performance issue. They chew up memory and every application that uses fonts has to keep track of them. What’s worse is that it is really hard to pick a font from the standard font selection window or the drop down menu that some applications have. OS X’s native program, Font Book is, imho, not the best. Luckily there’s a good piece of freeware, Linotype Font Explorer, which does a decent job. Naturally the software directs you to Linotype’s web site if you’re looking for new fonts, but that seems like a reasonable trade to me.

Monolingual – Disk Space Would you like an extra few gigabytes of memory. Fine. Just download Monolingual and run it, indicating which architectures and languages you’d like removed. You see OS X comes with multiple languages and support for all the alternative architectures (including ARM, G3, G4 and G5). None of this is any use to you, but all software products provide it so that they can run anywhere. Monolingual allows you to remove what you don’t want. So when, for example, you remove Portuguese as a language, you remove it from every Mac application you’re running that actually supports Portuguese. As far as disk space goes that amounts to a lot of space.

OmniDiskSweeper If you have disk space problems, it’s easy enough to buy more disk given that the price per terabyte is now so low, but it’s always worth discovering what’s taking the space. I’ve found nothing better than OmniDiskSweeper for doing exactly that. It’s not expensive and I think it’s worth the price.

Onyx – System Management It’s almost not right that Onyx is free. It does most of what Apple didn’t do in respect of managing the system. It cleans up log files and caches, repairs permissions that have been broken, allows you to set all sorts of parameters and well, to be honest, why don’t you just follow the link and download it and use it.

PTH PasteBoard – Clipboard Manager You need a clipboard that is slightly better than the native Mac OS X clipboard. there are quite a few around. The one I tried was PTH PasteBoard. It works. If you have QuickSilver you don’t need it, because QuickSilver has this as a built-in capability. If you don’t use QuickSIlver then PTH PasteBoard will do the job. It is Freeware/Shareware.

QuickSilver: Subject -> Action -> Target Get QuickSilver, download it and use it as an application launcher. There are choices of app launchers and QuickSilver is just one option. If launching is all you’re interested in you may prefer DragThing or LaunchBar. But QuickSilver is a great deal more than an application launcher, it is a highly effective automation capability. I’d go as far as to say that QuickSilver is:the productivity hub of keyboard-based usage of the Mac. That QuickSilver is free is almost an absurdity. I’ve paid an awful lot of money for software that’s not a quarter as useful as QuickSilver. For more information on QuickSilver read The Primary Keys to Mac Productivity

Service Scrubber – Enabling Services Either you want to use Services or you don’t. (You’ll find Services in the first dropdown menu of most applications.) If all the services available were useless I’d recommend forgetting it, but some of them are worthwhile. Also, services can be invoked by hotkeys. It would be bad news if you could only get at them with a mouse. But how can you get at the Services in order to change the hotkeys? – in case they clash with ones you’ve set up. I would have no idea how to do that had I not run into a very impressive piece of freeware/shareware called Service Scrubber.

I could have specified this program myself, because it does exactly what needs to be done to make Services much more usable. It gives you complete control over which services appear in the menus. As a consequence you can get rid of any services that you know you’ll never use (which is at least half of them) and you can attach your own hotkeys to the services you will use frequently.

SketchBox – Information Clips I’ve been a fan of Stickies since I first got a Mac. It’s a fact that I’m always managing odd bits of information and stickies did it well. SketchBox, which is currently freeware, is an advance on stickies. There’s a sketching capability which can also be a camera and take images of parts of the screen. And you can also set alarms – which is useful for events that are too trivial to put in the diary. SketchBox is a no-brainer. You should get it unless you’re allergic to Stickies.

SuperDuper - Recovery It annoys me that Apple didn’t include a bootable back-up capability with Time Machine. SuperDuper is software that builds a bootable back-up disk for you. It’s the natural complement to Time Machine. This one is pretty much a no-brainer if you’ve got a serious Mac. The truth is that disks die and they don’t know that it’s very poor behavior to die just because they happen to be the system disk. SuperDuper can save your ass.

TextExpander – Text Shortcuts

There are quite a few products that do what TextExpander does. I have no idea if TextExpander is the best, it just happens to be the one I picked on first and it works fine. TextExpander allows you to define abbreviations that stand for long strings of keyboard input. So, for example, when I type e\ TextExpander tracks the keyboard output and replaces e\ with my email address. To use a product like this you have to select a “termination character” for all your abbreviations and it has to be a character that you don’t normally use. I chose the backslash \.

This capability can be very productive. I use it for “standard emails” and bits of HTML and I use it to autocorrect some typos I commonly make. I also use it for form filling on the Internet.

Tidy Up! - Disk Space

Whether you want a deduper (for that’s what it is) like Tidy Up! is a question only you can answer. I paid for this because I’ve got an archive of 12 years of files of various sorts that is shot through with duplicates, so I needed this product. If you don’t have such a sizable legacy of files then maybe it’s not worth the price.

UI Builder

UI Builder is pretty much all you need to write sophisticated scripts in AppleScript for any application or group of applications in OS X. The problem is this: App developers on OS X could build and provide a library of “callable” functions that accompany their applications and provide interface points that AppleScript could use. But most app developers don’t, possibly because it’s extra work for no pay. Apps don’t fail to sell on OS X because they don’t have good AppleScript libraries.

So it’s UI Builder to the rescue. This neat and well built program can examine a running OS X application and identify how to include useful parts of any application in AppleScript scripts. It even writes the AppleScript calls for you. If you intend to do anything ambitious with AppleScript then this is the utility you need to help you. In my book, it’s worth the money. It will pay for itself very quickly.

Scoring

I don’t use a 1 to 5 range and score everything 4, or above. I use the whole range. Nothing will score below 2.5, if I still use it. Anything below 2.5 should be avoided. For anything 2.5 or above you might consider a donation to the author and anything scoring 5 almost mandates it.

2.5 means worth using, if it fits your need.
3 means worth using and a good capability – but it may be bettered in time.
3.5 means very good capability
4 means definitely best in class, imho
4.5 means best in class and highly valuable capability
5 means close to perfect, awesome, superlative, etc.

The Rating graphic depicts the score. If I believe that an app is a no-brainer – it can be a no-brainer without necessarily getting a high score because it may do something simple – then I indicate that with: the no-brainer symbol. This means “just get it.” A no-brainer symbol implies almost no learning curve.

Click on this link: PDQ Mac to see a list of other postings on Apple Mac productivity.