SPARK (free)

Because I was never happy with Snow Leopard’s “work-around” of creating a new service in Automator (too cumbersome, too slow to execute) I’ve tried a few utilities that would allow me to map keyboard shortcuts. This one is by far the simplest, most efficient and free-est!

GROWL (free)

A classic. Provides customized notifications. Already interfaced with many softwares (iTunes, Mail, Safari...). Is also fun to work with in your scripts.

ISTAT MENUS (3.0 is $10, 2.0 was free)

An awesome app to monitor your system. From RAM usage to HDD activity (I do miss my little flashing LED), temperatures... you name it.

DROPBOX (2GB free)

A newcomer but already widely adopted. Gives you the ability to have an internet drive to share documents amongst your computer and your peeps.

Note: I found this cool set-up that allows you to use Dropbox to host your web site. Super easy, super fast.

GLIMMER BLOCKER (free)

It’s a proxy server. Your best bet to get rid of ads in Safari.

MAGICPREFS (free)

If you have a magic mouse and an iMac, you cannot be happy with the slow pace at which the cursor moves across your screen, even with the full speed setting on. This’ll do it and plenty more.

SQUEEZE ($12.95)

If you’re tight on space, this will work for you. Just list the folders you want to “squeeze” and this does it magically. You can even uninstall it and your folders remain squeezed.

STARTUP SOUND PREFERENCE PANEL (free)

Now, this may sound weird to you but the sound noise my iMac makes at start-up would always startle me (or the sleeping kids...). And Apple provides no way to adjust the volume. This is as helpful as it is simple.

F-ILTER - My own creation.

As my kids are getting older, it becomes clear that I need to use more discretion when it comes to the (constantly playing) music in my house. “F-ilter” is my answer.

It uses a temp file produced by my iTunes Geektool set-up to get the track information and automatically skips the song if a “key” word is encountered or if the song has been black-listed. The front-end is in AppleScript.

Warning: this is not properly packaged (at all) and is currently built to work with the iTunes set-up in geektool, although it could be adapted. I included a readme.txt with instructions.

Utilities

iWeb SEO Tool (free)

iWeb is really cool and puts out really nice web sites, plus it comes packaged in OS X. The one thing it’s not good at is handling custom meta-tags (e.g. the code snippet Google asks you to add to track your traffic in Analytics). This utility will save all your tags (and more) and will allow you to retrieve them and re-apply them every time you publish a new version.

VirtualBox (free)

Not many mac users are dying to dive back into the muddy waters of Windows (in all fairness, Windows 7 is not bad at all, sure did MS a lotta good to get back to copying Apple) but in case there’s need, this is the way to run any OS (even OS X as of beta 3.2.0) on your machine without hurting anything. Very similar to VMWare or Parallels but a lot cheaper...