The Readers Strike Back

Well, well, well. You, dear reader, have not been shy about informing me of omissions in my recent list of ten programs I couldn't live without. And as I did indeed promise a follow up, I hereby present (again, in no particular order) a supplemental list of your top submissions in the world of must-have cheap or free apps.

1) Ecto

Having mentioned NetNewsWire Lite as my headline aggregator of choice in the original list, I was pointed to a standalone blogging client geared towards those who tirelessly bring the world those aforementioned headlines. Ecto (formerly known as Kung-Log) is a pretty slick way to add blog entries to Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger, or MetaWeblog accounts (fig. 1), and being a recent drinker myself of the Movable Type Kool-Aid, it didn't take me long to scrap the browser-based MT entry interface in favor of Ecto. Ecto allows complete blog entry access (category settings, comment and trackback activation/deactivation, date modification, etc.) and one-click publishing in a nice, compact package that is very good at its dedicated task.

Developer: Adriaan Tijsseling
Price: $17.95 shareware
Available for download at: http://www.kung-foo.tv/ecto/

Figure 1: Ecto takes you to a whole new plain of blogging.

2) Little Snitch

Once you install Little Snitch on your machine, you'll instantly be amazed and quite possibly appalled by just how many programs (some of which you may not even be aware of) try to send data back to the servers of their respective developers (fig. 2). Little Snitch is worth every penny to the paranoid and not-so-paranoid among us who may be interested in controlling which programs and services get Internet connectivity. It takes a while to train Little Snitch to behave the way you need it to, but once you get settled you'll rest easier knowing that you'll be alerted if some program tries to "phone home."

Developer: Objective Development
Price: $24.95 Shareware
Available for download at: http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html

Figure 2: Little Snitch is essentially a "reverse firewall," preventing outbound connections on a case-by-case basis.

3) So many launchers, so little time

The application/file launcher market on OS X is apparently alive and well, judging by the fierce loyalty many of you have developed for your particular utility of choice. And at the risk of drawing ire from those who think their anointed launcher is superior to all others, I'm grouping a few of them together here, since they all ostensibly have similar functionality (though often very different implementation). With the exception of DragThing, which relies on you to create any combination of launcher docks you desire (plus has a nifty process menu and desktop Trash Can as well), these products catalog the contents of your machine and provide access to whatever you want to have access to through some combination of keyboard shortcuts or a menu bar. That's about as simply as I can boil it all down. Now, if you're like me, one of these launchers will just about instantly jell with the way you like to work, so it's all a matter of personal preference. In my case, I had a hard time getting used to LaunchBar and Butler while Quicksilver seemed like a natural fit, so I imagine your mileage may vary. Long story longer, here's the roundup:

Program: Butler (formerly Another Launcher) (fig. 3a)
Developer: Peter Maurer
Price: $18 (suggested) Donationware
Available for download at: http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?thema=butler&sprache=english&kopf=labor

Program: LaunchBar (fig. 3b)
Developer: Objective Development
Price: $19 (Non-commercial)/$39 (Business use) Shareware
Available for download at: http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

Program: Quicksilver (fig. 3c)
Developer: Blacktree, Inc.
Price: Free
Available for download at: http://blacktree.com/apps/quicksilver/

Program: DragThing (fig. 3d)
Developer: James Thomson
Price: $29 Shareware
Available for download at: http://www.dragthing.com/

Figure 3: Perhaps I'm assigning just a smidge too much importance to the supposed phenomenon, but we appear to be firmly ensconced in the "golden age" of Mac launcher utilities.

4) Carbon Copy Cloner

CCC is quickly becoming legendary (if it hasn't achieved such status already), and I got more than a few emails from incredulous readers demanding to know why such a highly regarded utility wasn't included on my original list. Well, it is this time. In addition to being a general-purpose backup and file synchronization tool, CCC finds itself in the somewhat rarified air of being able to clone system drives (fig. 4) as well as providing the tools to create your very own bootable OS X media. And having had my own recent drivesaving and timesaving experience with this particular program, I'd be remiss if CCC didn't get an enthusiastic mention now.

Developer: Mike Bombich
Price: $3-$50 Donationware
Available for download at: http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html

Figure 4: Making perfect copies of your system partition can be as simple as selecting a source, destination, and hitting "Clone."

5) ToyViewer

I had never heard of ToyViewer before your emails started rolling in, but I quickly found out that this utility is a good choice for those who are on the prowl for a bare bones, free image manipulation and conversion app. ToyViewer opens and saves many common image types, gives you access to a set of basic editing functions (like crop, resize, rotate, and color space conversion), and even provides a nice number of filters (fig. 5) to help punch up things. I personally found the interface to be a little dense, but it does have a nice feature set for a free utility.

Developer: T. Ogihara
Price: Free
Available for download at: http://waltz.cs.scitec.kobe-u.ac.jp/OSX/toyv-eng.html

Figure 5: ToyViewer's built-in effects cover just the staples, but hey, it's free.

6) CandyBar

This is one I left out of the original piece, because I had to stop somewhere, you know? Fortunately, several of you love this icon customization app as I do, so CandyBar definitely gets on the list the second time around. This so-called "L'il App" may have dubious value for some, but for those of you who enjoy the black art of customizing the look and feel of Mac OS X, CandyBar certainly helps satisfy by allowing unfettered access to all of OS X's system-wide icons (fig. 7).

Developer: Panic
Price: $12.95 Shareware
Available for download at: http://www.panic.com/candybar/

Figure 6: You're one step closer to the meticulous customization you so richly deserve with CandyBar.

7) gCam

Yet another forgotten program from last time that I was gently reminded of, gCam is a no-frills video capture application that I (and some of you, apparently) use constantly. I'm always grabbing a snippet of video from here or there to use in projects, and often find iMovie or (more recently) Final Cut Pro a bit of overkill to just grab the little clips that seem to often be the bane of a multimedia producer's existence. Plug in any FireWire source, fire up gCam, mess with a couple of settings if you want (fig. 8), and capture away. Easy, free, and an everyday timesaver.

Developer: MacMice
Price: Free
Available for download at: www.macmice.com/gcam.htm

Figure 7: If you're feeling saucy, you don't necessarily have to capture to DV with gCam. You can use any QuickTime codec you have access to.

Same time, next year

Having thoroughly bludgeoned this particular dead horse for the foreseeable future, I'd like to thank all of you that took the time to write in and offer up suggestions for more programs to spotlight here. I'm sure I'll get follow-up hate mail from those whose cherished utilities didn't get a mention, but in a weak effort to preempt such responses, all I can say is yes, there were a few that didn't make the cut for various reasons, so please accept my apologies. But I'll keep my eyes peeled over the next several months, by which time I should have a fresh batch of apps to along with OS X 10.4 Lion or Tiger (or Bear—oh, my?), or whatever it'll end up being called.

Filed under: Feature on April 28th, 2004

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