10 Mac applications that promise to improve your productivity
Featuring some of the most useful applications that will definitely help you improve your productivity on Mac. These utilities are available totally free of charge and can be downloaded right away.
SketchBox is a multifunctional sticky notes manager for your Mac Desktop. Unlike other Sticky notes it doesn’t limit itself to just writing text but you can even draw and set individual reminders for each sticky to use them as visual alarm clock.
SketchBox Sticky notes consists of three layers: The drawing canvas, a little text editor and an intuitive alarm timer that combines the best of analog and digital clocks. While editing text you can still see your drawing in the semitransparent background and vice-versa.
Anxiety is an excellentt To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail. It is extremely lightweight and aims to provide a streamlined, easily accessible interface to add and check off your tasks, while remaining poised to melt into the background at a moments notice.
Anxiety’s sleek interface provides just what you need to jot your tasks down, without burdening you with cumbersome large windows. With a tiny desktop footprint and clean minimalist aesthetics, the application is simultaneously small, beautiful and effective.
Camouflage is a tool that allows you to hide all icons behind the wallpaper. If you were looking for Camouflage you probably have a messy desktop, so you should put this window in list-view to have a much better overview over the tons of files
Key features include
- Perfect system-integration: change your wallpaper and Camouflage will show the change instantly.
- Works with multiple monitors: attach new monitors and the icons will instantly be hidden.
- Drag & drop: drag files on the desktop and they will be copied onto your real desktop.
- Finder integration: click the desktop and Finder will be activated and opens or selects a separate desktop window. (You can disable this with the Popup Desktop option of the menu. To still open a window, press the option-key while clicking the desktop, or by double-clicking on the desktop)
- Support for Path Finder
- Ability to show and hide the icons
- Works with desktop managers
- Ability to ‘click through’ Camouflage to get the normal Desktop-Context menu
iClockr is a simple tool to show you a simple way to track your time. The concept of iClockr is based on 3 columns including
Projects: A project is a bundle of tasks
Tasks: A tasks is a bundle of durations
Durations: A duration is the smallest brick to calculate your total time.
iClockr is a great tool to Track Timeline for Different Tasks and Projects.
Appointments is an application designed to keep record of customers, contact persons and important events related to them. Information is collected in a structured way: there are separate dictionaries with customers data, contact persons, appointment managers etc. which are used to create appointments record. The application provides convenient user interface tools for sorting and filtering stored data.
Key features include
- Document based architecture
- File based datastore and
- Multiuser access
To take screenshots of the entire page I personally use Fireshot. It is like the perfect add-on for Firefox that also provides editing tool. On the other hand Mac users like to take advantage of a small utility known as Paparazzi.
You can grab a free copy of Paparazzi from here.
iStat pro is a highly configurable widget that lets you monitor every aspect of your Mac, including CPU, memory, disks, network, battery, temperatures, fans, load & uptime and processes.
It even allows you to filter out specific disks, network interfaces, or fan sensors, if you’d like.
AppFresh is responsible to keep all your applications,widgets, preference panes and application plugins installed on your Mac up-to-date. AppFresh works by checking the excellent osx.iusethis.com for new versions and lets you download and install available updates easily.
AppFresh provides a central place to control the software updates available to your Mac, integrating most popular and most common update checking technologies such as Apple Software Update, Sparkle, Microsoft AutoUpdate, Adobe Updater, osx.iusethis.com and more.
TextWrangler is the powerful general purpose text editor, and Unix and server administrator’s tool. You can use this text editor for a wide variety of tasks from cleaning up data, to editing configuration files on your Mac or server, to writing HTML or coding.
Key features include
- Powerful single and multi-file search & replace
- Flexible ‘grep’ style pattern-based search and replace based on PCRE (Perl-Compatible Regular Expression)
- Sort Lines and Process Duplicate Lines plug-ins offer grep pattern support for sorting, extracting, and handling text
- Find Differences to compare two versions of a text file and merge the differences
- Support for a wide variety of BBEdit plug-ins
The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for “BOMArchiveHelper.app”, the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder.
It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems. I personally find it useful for opening Japanese archives, but it should handle many other languages just as well.
These applications can definitely come in handy in everyday life routine.
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