My Favorite OSX Add-Ons

Back in the pre-OSX days, my Mac was loaded up with extensions and control panels. You'd see this long march of them across the screen every time it started up.

The original Mac OS was mature (as in nearing the end of its life) and there were all kinds of useful hacks and add-ons that you could install. Of course, these add-ons had a detrimental affect on the stability of the OS, though you could count on the original Mac OS to crash at least once a day without any help at all. Ah...the good old days. (?)

Now that Mac OSX is more mature I'm seeing a similar march of icons, but this time in my toolbar. Fortunately, protected memory in a modern OS means that one program crashing usually doesn't bring down the whole system. I thought I'd take some time to highlight some of the tools that I use that I couldn't imagine using a Mac without. 

1Password

Are you one of those folks who uses the same password for everything? And is it your child's name and their birthday? You're playing with fire.

1Password is a little pricy, but it's invaluable for what it does. You remember 1 password and you let the program create passwords and keep up with them for all of the websites and services, bank accounts, etc. that you visit.

It will also automatically fill out forms including credit card data, and you can sync it to an iPhone or iPad client so that you have access to your passwords on the go.

I have no idea what my Amazon password is, even though I buy a lot of stuff there. It's a long string of characters and symbols that are completely random, I do know that. If I were to visit a site where I didn't already have an account, I would just hit the 1Password shortcut and let it fill out the form, including a username and password. As soon as I submit the form, 1Password would then ask if I want to save that password.

 
1Password is $39.95 for the Mac app, and $14.99 for the Universal iOS version.

TotalFinder

I have been using this one for about 6 months, but I already consider it indispensible.

One of the problems with OSX is that after a while, you get about 25 Finder windows open at a time, and half of them are the same folder over and over again.

TotalFinder does for the Finder what tabbed browsing did for the web browser, but it goes one better. One of the secondary features is called the Visor. The visor makes the Finder work like the old popup drawers in OS9. So now, when I need to go to the Finder, I swipe up with 4 fingers on my Trackpad or Magic Trackpad (a shortcut from Better Touch Tool—reviewed below) and up pops a Finder window, no matter what app I'm working in. I never have free floating Finder windows anymore.

This ones' a little buggy at times, but getting better with each release.



TotalFinder is $10.

Better Touch Tool

After a years and years of using a Kensington Trackball, I decided that touchpads and multitouch interfaces were the direction of the future for Apple and decided to standardize the way I interface with my Macs, regardless of whether I'm using my Mac Pro at work or my Macbook Pro at home.

Apple added several multitouch gestures into OSX a couple of years ago, but I just hadn't incorporated any of them into my muscle memory. Now, I go way beyond that by using Better Touch Tool, which allows for dozens of multitouch gestures that you can set up on a app by app basis. You can even take over the standard Apple gestures and make them your own. In any app I'm in, if I swipe up with 4 fingers, my Finder window slides up from the bottom. I can reload a web page when I'm editing my putting three fingers down and dragging my pointer finger downward. Using the pinch inward gesture will close a window. After a while, most of this becomes second nature.

The interface is a bit clunky, but slowly improving. The developer is apparently a student, but he is continuously updating it.


Better Touch Tool is donationware.

LaunchBar 

For a long time, I was a Quicksilver user. Not a power-user necessarily, but I did use it to launch apps, attach files to emails, search Google, etc.

The developer never made any money off of the app, because he never sold it. I would've paid $50 and probably more because it was so useful. He went to work for Google, and the app was turned into an open source project. When OSX 10.6 came out, Quicksilver didn't quite work right anymore and days passed with no update (it was eventually updated). I decided to commit my money towards supporting a similar app called LaunchBar, hoping that money will help keep an app alive.

By invoking LaunchBar, a small window pops up that listens for you to type to find items in the program's index, which can include whatever you want it to. Apps, files and folders, artists and songs in iTunes, contacts, and more. I never go to the applications folder except to delete an app or periodically weed out apps I don't use. When I want to launch InDesign, I invoke LaunchBar with the shortcut, and type "in" and hit return. When I want to email someone, I invoke it, start typing their name until their contact info appears, use the right arrow to move over to pick which address to use and hit return.

Spotlight can do some of that, but it's no where near as fast and versatile. When you use a Mac with LaunchBar, you'll hate using one without it.



LaunchBar is $35.