Essential OS X Apps

There are some apps that I always recommend to Mac switchers, that I found myself the hard way. Most are free and do their job better than many similar paid apps. For me such apps would be the following:

• Middle Click: When I first switched to Mac was when I bought my first laptop. Being accustomed to the mouse, it was a bit weird for me to navigate the web the way I used to (usually 20+ tabs open at the same time). While cmd+click was a useful shortcut, I wanted something easily done with a gesture on the trackpad. This is how I discovered MiddleClick, a nifty script running on the background that emulated a middle click by a 3-finger tap. Unfortunately, with the update to Mountain Lion MiddleClick didn’t work so I had to resort to another solution. After a bit of searching, I found BetterTouchTool, which may be a bit heavier but is definitely more customisable.

• Onyx: This is one of the greatest utilities and I urge anyone to give it a try. It helps you verify and repair disk permissions, run various tasks of system maintenance, such as reindexing Spotlight, deleting caches, profiling your system and messing with various system parameters you could previously only do through the Terminal. I regularly run the automation scripts every 2 weeks, which ensures a much more polished system.

• Bowtie: As stated in the site, Bowtie is a desktop accessory that allows you to control your music playing through iTunes or Spotify, among others, through customisable shortcuts. Also available is real-time Last.fm scrobbling and growl notifications when songs change, along with many themes to show which song is currently playing.

• Spotify: Spotify for me is a revolutionary service that could change the music industry once and for all. While not available in my country at the moment, I wanted to see if the hype was true. I installed a VPN app (Tunnelbear) and logged in through Facebook for the free, ad-supported experience. Now this app is a must-have for me and I will definitely subscribe to the premium version when I move to the UK next year.

• Dropbox: What more is there to say about Dropbox that hasn’t already been said? I’m currently thinking of starting a Pro subscription, now that they doubled the plans (100 GB for $9.99/month).

• Delibar: I use Delibar as a Pinboard client. Pinboard is a great service (one-time $10 fee, but definitely worth it), similar to Delicious for saving your bookmarks in one convenient place, with short descriptions and tags.

• Cinch: Cinch brings the window snapping ability of Windows to the Mac. Great for working side-by-side on documents, especially if you are a web developer.

• Sublime Text 2: Anyone who has witnessed the heated debates on the “best text-editor for programmers” knows that Sublime-Text is the future of text-editors. It’s features include multiple selections, split editing, distraction-free mode, a Vim-mode and full customisation through JSON files.

I’ll keep this list updated for future worthwhile apps.

About Me

I'm a Computer Science student at the University of Bristol. Can't think of something smart and witty about me to write right now so I'll just leave this as is for the time being. Twitter || Github.

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