Handy OS X Tools and Apps

[Dippyskoodlez]

Browsers
Firefox
Camino

Chat/IM
Adium- All in one IM tool.
Colloquy- Traditionally, chat clients on the Mac have been anything but glamorous. Colloquy is an advanced IRC, SILC & ICB client which aims to fill this void. By adhering to Mac OS X interface conventions, Colloquy has the look and feel of a quality Mac application.

Audio/Video Tools (Codecs/Players/Etc.)
Handbrake
VLC
Flip4Mac - Allows WM video playing in OS X
DIVX
ffMpegX - Video converting program.
xACT - Audio conversion program.
Senuti - Allows you to extract the music from your iPod back to your computer.
Micro- A free application that turns your computer into an internet TV video player. You can download it for Windows, Mac, or Linux.

Virtualization
Parallels - [INTEL ONLY]
Vmware Fusion - [INTEL ONLY]
Crossover

Utilities
Onyx
Azureus - bittorrent client
Toast 7 - fully featured burning suite for cd and dvd.
Pacifist - 3rd party package installer. Lets you control every aspect of using .pkg installers. Seeing where everything goes, changing where everything goes, partial installs, force installing .pkg's that are soft-locked for no good reason, etc., etc.
Tech Tool Pro 4 - Hard disk/volume maintenance and repair program.
Disk Warrior - Another volume maintenance program. Note that I haven't tried Ver 4 yet, only 3. This and Tech Tools both consistently recovered broken volumes for me, but this has a very slightly higher success rate on recovering already damaged volumes. Tech Tools offers more maintenance options, however. Both programs have saved countless Gigs of data for me.
Cocktail - Very similar to Onyx, but offers some different and useful options, especially in reference to network performance settings.
StuffIt Expander - Multiple format archive extractor.
unRarX - Graphical .rar extractor, way more stable than StuffIt at extracting .rar files.
Share Points - Lets you control what folders and volumes are shared over your network
QuickSilver- A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.
Burn- Burning application for Mac OS X
CyberDuck- Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and Amazon S3 browser licenced under the GPL with an easy to use interface, integration with external editors and support for many Mac OS X system technologies such as Spotlight, Bonjour.
Carbon Copy Cloner - Similar to Norton Ghost, but far better!
The OSX Folding client: Caution: WILL EAT LAPTOP BATTERY LIFE!

Text/Editors
Neo Office- NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database programs) for Mac OS X
SeaShore- Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS X's Cocoa framework. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing. It is based around the GIMP's technology and uses the same native file format.
Boot Camp- Now built in to Leopard. (Drivers are located on the Leopard CD that comes with the computer.)
-Terminal
-Disk utility
-OS X CD.

BURNING A CD
This is kinda an unknown, yet blatently simple way to burn data cd's..

Works like windows XP's built in cd burning, except its just a folder you put stuff into. Open folder, click burn and you're off! No need to select cd/dvd/etc, because it just asks for something that fits!

 

[Wile E]

You should add VLC to that list. Plays most anything, except WMV/WMA.

And are we sticking to free tools? Cause I have suggestions for some that cost money, but are well worth it IMHO.

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

You should add VLC to that list. Plays most anything, except WMV/WMA.

And are we sticking to free tools? Cause I have suggestions for some that cost money, but are well worth it IMHO.

If they have a trial, I'll see how good it is

VLC is good for ANY platform!!

 

[Wile E]

Other freebies:

StuffIt Expander - Multiple format archive extractor.

Firefox - Web browser

Azureus - bittorrent client

unRarX - Graphical .rar extractor, way more stable than StuffIt at extracting .rar files.

ffMpegX - Video converting program.

xACT - Audio conversion program.

Share Points - Lets you control what folders and volumes are shared over your network

Senuti - Allows you to extract the music from your iPod back to your computer.

Things that cost, but are worth it imho, are:

Toast 7 - fully featured burning suite for cd and dvd.

Pacifist - 3rd party package installer. Lets you control every aspect of using .pkg installers. Seeing where everything goes, changing where everything goes, partial installs, force installing .pkg's that are soft-locked for no good reason, etc., etc. I have even used this to force install Front Row on 2 of my Macs. lol

Tech Tool Pro 4 - Hard disk/volume maintenance and repair program.

Disk Warrior - Another volume maintenance program. Note that I haven't tried Ver 4 yet, only 3. This and Tech Tools both consistently recovered broken volumes for me, but this has a very slightly higher success rate on recovering already damaged volumes. Tech Tools offers more maintenance options, however. Both programs have saved countless Gigs of data for me.

Cocktail - Very similar to Onyx, but offers some different and useful options, especially in reference to network performance settings.

I have fully tested all of these or still use all of these on my Macs with great success. I'll post any others I find, after I test them.

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

I grabbed some of those I know are great, and will try the rest when I get some time...

Pacificst can be used for free though

Excellent tool.

 

[Wile E]

Pacificst can be used for free though

Excellent tool.

I know, I was just trying to avoid the grey areas, lol.

 

[Wile E]

Wanted to point out that Version .86 of VLC now plays wmv files on the mac. Haven't come across a wma to test yet. Gonna rip one from one of my cd's to test. Will update.

UPDATE: couldn't get it to work with a 192Kb/s VBR wma file. It showed a time, and the timeline was moving, but it gave the "no suitable codec found" error. Might try fooling around with it later, to see if different encoding techniques work.

 

[Wile E]

Just wanted to let all know, Toast 8 is out. Some new features, including Blu-Ray support, and more importantly DISK SPANNING! It's about time they saw fit to add spanning.

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

Wanted to point out that Version .86 of VLC now plays wmv files on the mac. Haven't come across a wma to test yet. Gonna rip one from one of my cd's to test. Will update.

UPDATE: couldn't get it to work with a 192Kb/s VBR wma file. It showed a time, and the timeline was moving, but it gave the "no suitable codec found" error. Might try fooling around with it later, to see if different encoding techniques work.

Use flip4mac.

 

[Wile E]

Use flip4mac.

Yeah, I have it. I just prefer VLC over Quicktime.

 

[Wile E]

Intel only:

Boot Camp and Parallels. You try Parallels yet, Dip? It's coherence mode is awesome(runs guest operating system transparently on top of OS X, you have the Windows taskbar on the bottom of the screen and the OS X tool bar at the top, and it works with Boot Camp partitions.)

 

[Ripper3]

That new feature in Parallels is what's making me want to move over to an Intel Mac. I've got an old Clamshell iBook, which is good enough for doing work in the living room in front of teh telly, and emulating Win98/Snes/Nes, etc. but it lacks the power I'm looking for, and that I'll likely need for uni, so I'm looking at buying a Mac Book.
Anyhu, does any one know of a good program to create keyboard short cuts? I used to have one, and used it to make my Function keys more useful (they controlled iTunes, even without having iTunes on screen), but can't find it any more. Can't even remember a name.

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

That new feature in Parallels is what's making me want to move over to an Intel Mac. I've got an old Clamshell iBook, which is good enough for doing work in the living room in front of teh telly, and emulating Win98/Snes/Nes, etc. but it lacks the power I'm looking for, and that I'll likely need for uni, so I'm looking at buying a Mac Book.
Anyhu, does any one know of a good program to create keyboard short cuts? I used to have one, and used it to make my Function keys more useful (they controlled iTunes, even without having iTunes on screen), but can't find it any more. Can't even remember a name.

If you're into hardcore keyboard shortcuts, try "quicksilver".




As for parallels, GET IT. NQA. Don't even think twice, if you have used a virtual machine tool like vmware in the past, and/or want to game, GET IT.

parallels has some amazing stuff going on. And much more to come.... enough to revolutionize why people are going to buy a mac

Intel only:

Boot Camp and Parallels. You try Parallels yet, Dip? It's coherence mode is awesome(runs guest operating system transparently on top of OS X, you have the Windows taskbar on the bottom of the screen and the OS X tool bar at the top, and it works with Boot Camp partitions.)

I've actually been playing with it since I got my macbook pro, and its been in beta.. this software is amazing (added it to the OP)... best $60 I have ever spent.. and when version 3.0 comes out, I may do a review... its just that good.

The newest beta is amazing. (There is a reason I'm waiting for 3.0 )

 

[DaMulta]

I'm sorry I felt the need to post that.

 

[Ripper3]

Heh, nice image, made me laugh a bit.
To be fair, all you need in life is a knife and the knowledge that the ultimate answer of the life, the universe and everything is truly 42.

I'll give Parallels a try as soon as I get my hands on an Intel Mac (and when that happens, I'll make my iBook a digital picure frame

BTW, I'm trying out Quicksilver, and I'm already dissapointed in terms of support... I'm running Panther on my old ibook, and I have to use an older version... makes me feel left out
First impressions with Quicksilver are pretty good though, so I'll let it slide

Just thought of a good app to put up there, for all of the Mac users that have upgraded to a non-Apple supplied drive called Patchburn. I upgraded my CD-ROM only drive to DVD/CD-RW combo, and couldn't figure out how to get it working, but this app helped, to say the least (it did all the work for me).
Free of charge, and the profile it makes allows all burning apps (that I know of) to support the drive as if twas one of Apple's own.

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

I'm sorry I felt the need to post that.

Someone needs to try parallels.

Its the other way around.

Its just the smart people that realize this.

Its the swiss army knife with a combination lock on it!

 

[Dippyskoodlez]

bumppity for updates, 2 additions. Boot camp 1.2 works great with vista, and how to burn a data CD.

 

[Rob!]

http://perian.org/ Perian is a plug-in for Quicktime that allows it to play AVI files. I also noticed after I installed it that I could import AVIs to iMovie as well.

http://www.isquint.org/ iSquint converts files to mp4 format for iPods, iMovie, etc. It works quite well with avi files, and is pretty quick.

 

[v-zero]

I would add that if you use newsgroups, then Unison (little bit of money) and MacPar Deluxe are fantastic tools. MacPar will fix archives using parity files, then extract them once done - imho better than quickpar for windows - but it does nag you every now and then for an optional donation.

 

[freaksavior]

Just a up.

crossover sucks.

it seems to crash my mac. yes the mac freezes

 

[johnnyfiive]

Adium for your chatting needs. Best chat program on OSX hands down.

 

[Rob!]

Just a up.

crossover sucks.

it seems to crash my mac. yes the mac freezes

I've found crossover works for some things good, not others. Team Fortress 2 runs perfect at high settings and full resolution, although not as smooth as in XP; but HL2 does not run well at all, even though they're the same engine (and the latter is older!). The Left 4 Dead demo was completely unplayable even at lowest settings/resolution.

I haven't bothered testing out anything else as I have the Mac version of Office and any other games I want to play aren't supported.

 

[oli_ramsay]

Songbird is a great little media player which works for Mac and Linux.

 

[distemper]

I have so say I used to use MT-Newswatcher back from the OS 9 days, and I could never get used to any other newsreader. Then when Mac OS X came out, it took forever to get MT-Newswatcher ported over - and it was slow in sorting. I tried them all- Hogwasher to (whatever that newsreader by some money-grubber named Brian ??? that had all kinds of windows open). Unison is very Mac-like with a very familiar interface. No speeed demon though.

What I've been using for the last 4 years or so is PAN (the Pimp Ass Newsreader) from http://pan.rebelbase.com but it has a pretty high hurdle: you need to compile it & its dependencies – its a GTK program that you use in X windows. I use darwinports (never upgraded to MacPorts) with a custom portfile to compile it, but the versions in svn are amazingly fast - using 16 connections and maxing out my bandwidth. It handles binaries so much better than any Mac program I've used, decodes almost all binaries (except Mac-specific encodings) & best of all a queue to load up with things from all kinds of groups and one-by-one it fetches them all. The queue is probably the single best feature of the program.

jBidwatcher is a java ebay sniping program that is really useful

jDownloader (java program) downloads from rapidshare (and other sites) from a list of links sequentially & automatically (that queue thing again - love it).

avidemux edits & converts video files. One particular handy feature that I use is to get a clip from an avi file, set start & endpoints in the video, delete those segments (preferably on a keyframe) and save the clip without re-encoding to a small clip file. Kind of a Final Cut Open Source.

 

[freaksavior]

Adiumx

Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.
http://adiumx.com/

Micro

A free application that turns your computer into an internet TV video player. You can download it for Windows, Mac, or Linux.
http://www.getmiro.com/download/osx_front.php

VLC Media Player

A free application that allows you to watch almost any video file
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-macosx.html

Quick Silverr

A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.
http://blacktree.com/?quicksilver

App Fresh

AppFresh helps you to keep all applications, widgets, preference panes and application plugins installed on your Mac up to date. All from one place, easy to use and fully integrated into Mac OS X.
http://metaquark.de/appfresh/

Xpad

xPad is the ultimate notepad, TextEdit and Stickies replacement for Apple's OS X. With a simple, easy-to-use interface and powerful multi-document features, xPad will quickly become your daily text editor of choice.
http://getxpad.com/

Neo Office

NeoOffice is a full-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, drawing, and database programs) for Mac OS X
http://www.neooffice.org/neojava/en/download.php#download

Firefox

Firefox.. enough said
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Camino

Camino is an open source web browser developed with a focus on providing the best possible experience for Mac OS X users.
http://caminobrowser.org/

Q Emulator

An open source program to run windows programs on mac.
http://www.kju-app.org/builds/download.php?download=Q-0.9.0a89.dmg

Parallels

Run windows on mac ($79)
http://www.parallels.com/download/desktop/

Crossover

Run windows on mac (standard $39 Pro $69)
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/

Burn

burning application for Mac OS X
http://burn-osx.sourceforge.net/

Hand Break

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.
http://handbrake.fr/

Transmission

Transmission is a fast, easy, and free multi-platform BitTorrent client
http://www.transmissionbt.com/

Xtorrent

Xtorrent is also is a fast, easy, and free multi-platform BitTorrent client
http://www.xtorrentp2p.com/

Acquisition X

BitTorrent client
http://www.acquisitionx.com/

Vuze

Vuze a java based torrent program
http://www.vuze.com/app

Seashore

Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS X's Cocoa framework. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing. It is based around the GIMP's technology and uses the same native file format.
http://seashore.sourceforge.net/download.php

Xee

Xee is a lightweight, fast and convenient image viewer and browser. It is designed to be a serious tool for image viewing and management, with a sleek and powerful interface.
http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/xee.html

Unarchiver

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.
http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html

UnrRarX

UnRarX is a Mac OS X Cocoa application that allows you to expand rar archives and restore corrupted or missing archives using par2..
http://www.unrarx.com/l

RAR Expander

RAR Expander is a MacOSX program which extracts the files contained in RAR archives. It supports both single and multi-part archives, and has support for password-protected archives as well. It uses the official unRAR library internally so it is fully compatible with archives produced by WinRAR.RAR Expander also features AppleScript support, and includes a few useful example scripts for expanding multiple archives at once.
http://rarexpander.sourceforge.net/

Transmit FTP

FTP program
http://www.panic.com/transmit/

cyberduck FTP

Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and Amazon S3 browser licenced under the GPL with an easy to use interface, integration with external editors and support for many Mac OS X system technologies such as Spotlight, Bonjour
http://cyberduck.ch/

Colluquy IIRC

Traditionally, chat clients on the Mac have been anything but glamorous. Colloquy is an advanced IRC, SILC & ICB client which aims to fill this void. By adhering to Mac OS X interface conventions, Colloquy has the look and feel of a quality Mac application.
http://colloquy.info/downloads.html