a few mac apps to check out
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I rarely talk tech around here, usually because my good 'ol PowerBook G4 is in a state of flux when it comes to which non-standard apps I'm using. I tend to try out productivity apps, especially, but rarely stick with any of them. Here's a quick and dirty list of a few (not necessarily for productivity) that I've latched on to, however.
- last.fm. Yes, there are several websites and apps that let you stream internet radio, etc., but last.fm is the only one I've found that throws your iTunes library into the mix. I think they have a slight edge over Pandora anyway, but when you add in the factor that it keeps track of what I also play on my own iTunes AND my iPod (called "scrobbling"), last.fm screams ahead. Call it musical voyeurism, but I don't mind sharing with the world that even though I may listen to Fleet Foxes while on the web, when I'm doing homework I'm listening to Chopin or Enya (among other things of course). The main advantage of all this is that I don't really have to "teach" last.fm what I like, unlike Pandora - by reading my iTunes library and its play count, it knows what I like.
- Evernote. Thanks to j. for this one. Definitely productivity-based, Evernote helps you keep track of just about everything you may use when doing research. You can organize things by class, project, etc., take screenshots of things from the web or even your iSight camera, import PDFs, and the list goes on. The best feature, though, is Evernote's ridiculously good OCR text recognition...it not only reads text from PDFs and screenshots, but even handwriting! Everything's indexed and searchable...no more scrounging through physical folders as well as virtual folders.
- Delicious Library. This is a recent app I've gotten hooked on. There are many free media organizers out there, including Books, which I've used up until now. DL comes with a price tag, but it's worth it. Not only will it catalogue your books, movies, and music, but even video games, toys, gadgets, tools, and clothes. DL can visually organize things on bookshelves for you, sorting by just about every category imaginable. The only hitch I've run into so far involves Library of Congress classification...which is probably going to be a hitch for only people like me. Though it comes with a script to acquire said call numbers, the script doesn't seem to work because of the nature of the LoC's searching (that is, the site times out, so the script doesn't quite know what to do when it reaches that point). It would be a really nice time-saver for people who like using LoC (DL does, however, automatically track down Dewey numbers), but at least they make it easy to enter it in manually (simply go to the LoC's site, plug in the ISBN - which DL fetches automatically when the book is entered into your library - and copy and paste into the appropriate field in the book's description).
- IceClean. Yes, Mac is simple and intuitive, but a lot of stuff can accumulate in hidden recesses of your hard disk. IceClean works to clean that stuff up. It's not pretty, but it definitely gets the job done, and it works with native Mac functions to do it.
- AppTrap. Like I said, Macs are great...but sometimes they can gloss over important things. For instance, to uninstall an app, all you really have to do is drag it to the trash. However, it does leave stuff behind, and if you're constantly installing and uninstalling programs like me, AppTrap is a savior. It installs in your system preferences and works behind the scenes. Whenever you drag an app to the trash, it will ask if you want it to track down all those other little files that get left behind. This will definitely save you some space...for some of us without a gajillion-gig hard disk, that comes in handy.
- jDiskReport. If you're like me, you sometimes look at how much space is left on your hard disk and wonder, "where the heck is all that going?" With jDiskReport, you can find out. Do you know how many gigs of printer drivers come default on your Mac? Do you really need help files in Magyar? Track 'em down and get rid of them!
Definitely feel free to post others that you've found rather helpful.
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