Digital Dawn

OSX Apps I can’t live without…

I’ve been an Apple convert for over a year now, and I find I’m often asked what applications I have installed; so I thought I’d share some of may favourites:

• Divvy – This little app is window management on steroids. Set a keystroke to bring up divvy and you have a grid available to size any window with.
• Secondbar – Working on with dual monitors? It’s a pain not having a menubar on both. Secondbar does as it says by providing a second menu bar.
• SpiritedAway – Perhaps my favourite little app. SpiritedAway sits in the background and minimizes windows in the background after a set period of time. Clean workspace? Yes please.
• Evernote – Note storage for the masses. I use this to keep track of notes / design inspiration. Notes are easily searchable (including scans!), and sync well to iphone / ipad.
• Dropbox – File backup / sharing made stupidly simple. To share, you simply dedicate one folder on your computer to Dropbox and anything within that folder is shared across any device you have Dropbox installed on. You can also sync application settings across devices with this (as I do with 1Password – see below!)
• 1Password – You’re told always to have unique and complex passwords for every different service / application you use; however in practice this rarely happens as a) you physically can’t remember that many passwords b) complex passwords take a long time to type out. 1Password solves both these problems by offering to generate new passwords and storing all your passwords with a ‘master password’ for later use. Couple this with awesome browser extensions, and you have a solution even easier than before; no typing required. You can even sync your passwords across devices so they’re always accessible. [See Tutorial]
• Delibar – Delicious bookmark manager. I have it setup so CMD + B bookmarks the current page. Simples.
• VMWare Fusion – Admittedly sometimes a windows application / environment is needed. Run windows simultaneously with VMWare fusion.
• Textmate – The rightful king of all text editors, and the application I use most frequently being a designer / developer.
• Transmit – A seriously cool FTP client. Also supports AmazonS3 / webdav – and is super fast. Its pretty sexy!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Wisdoms.