Tagged: mailplane

30 Mac OS X apps and utilities I love: Part 2

Mac OS X ApplicationsOver the years I’ve installed a lot of commercial software, shareware and freeware on my Macs. I love trying new apps. That being said, most of what I install gets used once or twice, then discarded. A few days ago, I shared the first group of apps I use regularly. Today I have another collection of applications and utilities I use on a regular basis.

The applications listed below contains some names you’ll probably be familiar with, but there’s a reason for that. They’re just superb at what they do, thus very popular.

CaffeineCaffeine

If you work on a MacBook Pro, you no doubt have your LCD screen set to dim and turn off after a relatively short amount of inactivity in order to save battery charge. This is generally fine unless you’re doing a lot of reading or watching a DVD. Caffeine is a small application that lives in your menubar that solves this problem by preventing your screen from dimming and the computer from sleeping. A click of the coffee cup icon in the menubar prevents your computer from sleeping for a user-specified amount of time ranging from 15 minutes to 5 hours (or indefinitely). Caffeine is a free utility.
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3 great cloud-based apps every designer and Mac user should use

Cloud appsThere is certainly no shortage of applications available that heavily rely on “the cloud” to do their work. It’s the hip thing to do nowadays. Personally, I prefer a more robust, reliable and feature-rich desktop app any day. But there are a few cloud-based apps that I love, and simply couldn’t live without.

The advantage, of course, is that these applications store information on servers accessed via the Internet, so that information is available to you anywhere you go, from any computer you have access to. This is huge for any Mac user who’s lucky enough to have a desktop and a laptop, or splits their time between their office and home computers. The three apps below can, and for many people have, killed the need for transferring files via physical media such as CD or USB thumb drives, and made accessing and sharing information dead simple.
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