Apps List, Part I

I love trying out new apps on my mac. There is so much stuff out there to choose from, if you can think of something that your mac doesn't do, try to find an app (application) for it, I bet you can. If you have found something you like, add a comment and I'll check it out. If you cant find what you're looking for on the short list below click here for a list of over 400 freeware apps. As always, keep it legal. Here are a few that I use and recommend:




Quicksilver is an app that I could not live without. It's hard to explain what it actually does but here goes: it improves productivity and ease of system use. It can find applications and launch them with a few keystrokes, reducing icon clutter. Any file found with Quicksilver can be manipulated however you like, whether it be emailing that file, compressing it or uploading it to your server. Quicksilver’s collection of plugins and modules allow you to do things like display iTunes info, find a del.icio.us (more on this later) bookmark, perform command line tasks, integrate with any other app or browser you might have. Trust me with this one, download it, google "hints for quicksilver app" and watch as it changes how you use the computer.



Adium is a great tool to have if you have a bunch of friends who all use different IM services. Adium supports instant messaging protocols like AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Jabber, ICQ, iChat, Google Talk, and more. If you like to chat with several people at the same time, you’ll appreciate Adium’s tabbed messaging feature, where a single window can contain several conversations in separate tabs. A lot of the preferences and appearance can be enhanced via the library of add-ons that can be found here.



Safari is great but Firefox’s amazing archive of valuable extensions, themes, and toolbars makes it king of the web browsers. Firefox’s search function is also far superior to that used by Safari (I won't even discuss Internet Explorer). If you don't have an e-mail service that you like, try Thunderbird. We also suggest that you take a look at Camino and Flock for alternative browsers. I'll have a blog post later on comparing internet web browsers.



Senuti is a free application for OS X that allows you to transfer songs from your iPod back onto your Mac (no, it's not impossible). It reads information from the iTunesDB file located on your iPod in order to retrieve information on all of the songs. I personally don't use this one but I know many people who swear by it - especially if you want to get stuff from a friends iPod.


Miro is a free application for OS X that downloads, manages and plays the latest videos on your Mac in fullscreen mode. You can set up channels, choose from over 2,000 presets, save YouTube videos. Download this app and never watch TV again. "The revolution will not be televised, it will begin on YouTube" In a future post I'll suggest some great tech channels to add.


So what do you do if you download an App and never use it or don't like it? Don't just leave it on your hard drive eating up space. Get AppDelete. It's a way to delete an application and all of it’s associated items. Just drag and drop an app and off you go. I like that it puts all of the items into a folder and puts it in your Trash. That way, you can still take a look to be sure that it didn’t take anything it wasn’t supposed to take.