UPDATED:
I had to back up and rebuild my PowerBook this weekend. I’d run out of hard drive space, and the machine suddenly began misbehaving: losing network connections, applications freezing and becoming corrupt, scrolling and saving not working. Some of this was due to lack of drive space, some due to almost five years of using the archive/save settings method of updating OS X. My machine was carrying chunks of the operating system necessary to run the previous iBook, which ran on a different CPU, no longer supported config files, and other cruft and hairballs. It took forever to boot, what with it looking for hardware that wasn’t there and tripping over old configs. No matter. I juggled the available space on my external drives, backed everything up, and erased the hard disk and did a fresh install. Only a few apps got lost in the shuffle mostly because i had to back up over multiple hard drives and cds. The machine runs so much better now.
Unlike 2001, I no longer have the time, network connectivity or focus to keep up on fresh updates to my utility software. So I used the fresh install as a catalyst to updating the things I can’t live without. Some of them are set and forget, some are use everyday, but either way I can’t live without them. These are all free, most of them will except your donations.
First up is TinlerTool by Marcel Bresink. A lovely GUI to turn off the animations, show hidden files in the finder, add quit to the finder menu, turn on hidden features, pin the dock position and so much more. Killing the GUI animations improves performance and the other customizations just make OS X work better for me.
Next is Shadowkiller from Unsanity. It does one thing, and one thing right: it removes the shadow that OS X draws around open apps and windows. On older machines, this speeds things up considerably.
OS X has lots of plists, barely human readable XML configuration files, not all of which are adequately documented, and all of which are subject to change. I could spend all my time opening plists up to find out what they control, or I could just get these apps. For some things you just have to open terminal and type, like for disabling Dashboard. Dashboard is just a waste of memory and processor power for me. Get the simple instructions to turn it off here.
iTerm it’s better for me then the included OS X terminal, and has tabs. Plus I never have to remember to change the term type to talk to SGI computers. Since I no longer have to have a dozen terms open at once it’s a lighter load then running the OS X X11 subsystem and running RXVT. If i was still doing hard core admin, X11/RXVT is the way I’d go.
There are times you really don’t want to open up Photoshop, like when you have 30 apps already open open or your just have to resize an image. Sometimes Preview just can’t do the job, or you just don’t want to go digging in it’s image processing menus. For lightning fast image editing, cropping, resizing, captioning and mangling there is ImageWell. It crams lot of power in a small space.
If you need a graphical FTP or SFTP app, you need the free and open source Cyberduck. Not as powerful or as fast as Transmit, but close enough for casual use and you can’t argue the price.
iStumbler helps you find wireless networks. Much better then the OS X Airport menubar icon, which is much better then MS windows.
iSquint takes those YouTube and Google FLV videos and other odd video formats to something Quicktime or your video iPod can see. It’s optimized for iPod and TV sized videos. Doesn’t need Quicktime pro!
Service Scrubber removes all those worthless items like “convert to Chinese” from the Services menu item that eat up your computers memory and processor time.
Quicksilver. What if Spotlight actually worked? What if the OS X services menu item actually worked (I’ve been highlighting words and trying to use the dictionary item to no avail)? What if you wanted another religion to follow? Quicksilver lets you launch apps by key strokes, and so much more. I don’t use 1/3d of it’s power, but once you wade through all the support sites for it, you can get this app to trim your workflows, it really saves haivng to toggle up a finder window and go hint for a file or app. Again, thats not the half of of it. If all you want is a menubar application list, got get Tigerlaunch.
I can’t survive without a RSS feed/news reader. The two free ones I recommend are Vienna and NetNewsWire Lite. Vienna is open source and a work in progress, NNWL is a feature chopped version of it’s legendary big brother.
Which brings us finally to Firefox and it’s OS X optimized offspring, Camino. OS X ships with an adequate browser (Safari), one that is making a serious effort at standards compliance. Firecox and Camino are mostly there already. They’re fast, extendable and open source. I still keep Opera around for sentimental reasons. It’s taken it a while to find it’s legs on OS X, but it’s currently fast and free. Like Firefox it runs great on MS windows too.
