Over 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.
Caffeine
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.
(more…)
If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, or simply wish to convert video to a number of formats, you can get a free copy of iSkySoft’s DVD To iPhone software just for friending them on Facebook, and giving them your email address.
I recently had the overwhelming desire to rip a DVD to my Macbook for watching on the road. It’s not something I had done before, so I was shocked at how incredibly complicated it can be. Everything I read told me to get Handbrake because it was so simple. After giving it a try, I nearly gave up on the entire project. I sat there after hours of unsuccessful attempts thinking “there has to be an easier way.”
