Recommended Mac OSX Apps and programs Jan. 2011

You know the big ones. Here are some other mentionable ones.

Adobe Acrobat Pro-paid- Lets you do advanced things with scanning, OCR, combining PDFs, highlighting, takingnotes on PDFs, etc.

Alarm Clock-Free. Simple. And simply awesome! Lets you set schedules for waking you up with music from iTunes. Will also wake from sleep if you go into preferences and type in your password. Great for recurring alarms.

Audacity- An audio program that's a lot more basic than Garageband. It's good for splicing songs, making ring tones, recording audio files, etc. You'll want to install the Lame mp3 codec if you want to export to mp3. It's easy to learn.

Audio Hijack Pro-paid- Awesome if you want to control the volume from different apps separately, mute programs, or even increase the volume past the normal capability of your Mac. For example, you can watch a TV episode online with the Firefox 3 based version of Flock, and boost the volume past the normal levels. Especially if you insert a Double Gain effect and crank the dials right. You can also hijack a program and inset the 10-Band EQ effect. This will give you control over the bass and treble. I believe it can be used with Safari 32 bit, DVD Player, iChat, Skype, WebEx Meeting Center, etc. You can run two hyjacked apps seperately and have them playing at different noise levels if they can't easily be controlled within their own program. Does not work on certain 64 bit programs that don't have a 32 bit version they can resort to. For example, the 64 bit of Safari will shut down and a compatible 32 bit version will start up. Google Chrome and the Stainless browsers aren't compatible at all.

Chrome- I am hesitant to recommend it. It has a fast load up time. It is still not completely compatable with some sites. If the flash/shockwave plug in crashes, the entire browser needs to be restarted. Not cool.

Cyberduck- If you manage a website, this is a good FTP client to upload pictures and such to.

DivX-Lets you play DivX movies in your browsers.

FanControl- If you are having fan issues on your mac, Fan Control may be able to help. It tells you the speed of the fan and lets an advanced user set different fan speeds for different temperature levels. No matter what you (safely) do, you will get fan noise with your fan maxing out around 6200 rpm when you watch flash movies online. My temperature is 176 Fahrenheit and 80 Celsius after watching movies online for a while. If your fan stops working, your computer will automatically turn off when it gets too hot. I opened up the macbook and reattached the fan cable as well as clean out the dust from the fan and make sure it could spin freely. It had a bit of resistance to it, so I cleaned it out which freed it up. http://www.lobotomo.com/products/FanControl/index.html

Flip4Mac-lets you play windows video files in your web browser. I think AVI or wmv.

Fluid Web Browser-This is a site specific browser. It will always stay on one page and open links in a different browser. It can bee good for something like a google calendar. You can also set up transparency and a dock icon. http://fluidapp.com/

Firefox-This is a pretty nice browser. It is highly customizable. It can hang on flash games at times.

Firefox Beta-A bit ahead of its time, and not in a good way... yet. Will hang at times when watching video and become unresponsive. Has potential, but has problems right now with survey popups and problems syncing with its own user server to store

Flock-I use the Firefox based Flock instead of the Chrome based one. I've found it a bit more stable than the newer Firefox and Chrome for flash games. It may be a tad slower than some newer browsers, but it makes up for that with a tad bit better stability. It doesn't have a "View Full Screen" feature for my external monitor like other browsers. The social media sidebars are sometimes nice, but I generally have them hidden. No harm done.

Get Lyrical-Displays lyrics and searches for the lyrics online to display them

Growl-I don't recommend it yet. It seems more annoying than productive. It gives you updates on things that go on with your computer.

GimmeSomeTune-Lets you view the lyrics stored in iTunes (sometimes it can find the lyrics online) in a small window as a song is playing. (Get Lyrical may be better)

iPartition-paid-... maybe?

MPEG Streamclip - Lets you easily convert video files.

NeoOffice- This is probably the most full-featured free replacement for Microsoft Office available for Mac OSX. (It is www.openoffice.org, that was made for Windows, tuned up for Mac. ) http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/index.php

NTFS for Mac OSX- Lets you read AND write to windows drives. http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/26288/ntfs-for-mac-os-x

OmniDiskSweeper - Can help you find large files on your computer.

Onyx- Also can help you find large files on your computer.

Opera Web Browser- May take a bit getting used to, but not bad. Only does Full Screen on your primary monitor. Good for sharing large files between another person with Opera. Works with Audio Hijack without restarting.

Parallels -paid- Lets you run Windows, Linux, and other operating systems on your computer while also running OSX at the same time. Both systems will run a tad slower than usual. Sometimes it's nice though. Similar to VMWare.

PDANet - combine this with a phone/PDA/Android/Windows mobile that has thePDANet app, and you can get free tethering... unless your plan monitors your data usage. Sprint does rock in this aspect.

PTH Pasteboard - keeps a list of the last 100 or so things you copy so you can paste as need. The Pro version is paid. I have version 4.3.2. http://pth.com/products/pthpasteboard/release-notes/ 4.4.1 is the last free version.

Shift It- Similar to Windows' Aero Snap, but with keyboard shortcuts. May have issues with dual monitors.

SuperDuper-paid for increased functionality- I like this backup program a tad better than the default Time Machine. You can actually keep a live working bootable clone of your mac hard drive on an external drive and run it through a USB or Firewire connection. The files are searchable from another mac/Windows computer with MacDrive 8 (paid) or maybe a these free things http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/ and http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/.

TeamViewer-Lets someone take remote control of your computer to fix issues. Free for non-commercial use.

TextExpander-(paid)- will let you save shortcuts for paragraphs or the current date. So you can type "ddate" and "January 13, 2011" will show up. Or you can type "newc" and a pre-written paragraph you have for a new customer will show up.

TextWrangler-A text based app on steroids. You can select vertically instead of just horizontally and cool things like that. Good for note taking on a local computer.

Transmission- Lightweight app for downloading torrents.

UnRarX- I think this one lets you unpackage seperated .rar files into one original file.

VLC player-Plays most media other players can not.

VMware Fusion-paid-Runs Windows, linux, etc simultaneously as OSX. I haven't picked this over Parallels yet... or Vice versa. Sussposedly VMware has more business potential and Parallels caters to the home user interested only in running two operating systems at once.