10 Programs I Can't Live Without, 2005 Edition

It's been eighteen long months since I did my first, and admittedly self-indulgent, list of "here's what I use because I'm so scary important" list of cool free/cheap Mac OS X apps. But since it seems a fair number of folks not only 1) read the original article but 2) sent in enough suggestions to spawn a sequel, I figured it was high time to compile another list for 2005. So here we go again: ten more excellent helpers that are deserving of a little good press.

1) MPEG Streamclip

Those people you see walking around with large patches of hair torn from their scalps are probably the folks who have been asked, at one time or another, to turn a finished MPEG clip into something reusable. I used to be one of those people, until I discovered MPEG Streamclip. Before, I had a set of about four different apps I needed to run MPEG clips through in often vain attempts to "demux" them, helplessly spewing out .m2v and .m1a files that were themselves almost never editable. With MPEG Streamclip, I simply can drag a clip onto the window, choose the format to export to (audio, video, or both), and away we go (fig. 1). A word of warning, however: in order to deal with MPEG-2 clips like those commonly found on DVDs , you need the Apple MPEG-2 playback component for QuickTime. Final Cut Pro or DVD Studio Pro users, you're already covered. Otherwise, you'll be out $20 to buy this from Apple, which is a small price to pay for the incredible convenience afforded to you by MPEG Streamclip.

Developer: Squared 5
Price: Free
Available for download at: http://www.alfanet.it/squared5/mpegstreamclip.html

Figure 1: With MPEG Streamclip, you don't have to be afraid of MPEG conversion anymore.

2) VLC Media Player

What MPEG Streamclip does for MPEG conversion, VLC does for playback. Simply put, it handles just about any clip you can throw at it. From regular ol' QuickTime movies to VOB files on an authored DVD to Windows Media to DIVX, VLC is a veritable Swiss Army knife for video clips. Hell, even Flash Video (FLV) files can be played back in VLC (sadly, pre- Flash 8 only, but useful nonetheless). Sure, you'll occasionally come across a WMV file that chokes, but for general purpose clip-playing, VLC is pretty hard to beat.

Developer: VideoLAN
Price: Free (also available for Windows, Linux , and just about every platform under the sun)
Available for download at: http://www.videolan.org/

Figure 2: Here, VLC is playing a VOB file right off of an authored DVD . If you've got a clip you can't play anywhere else, definitely give VLC a shot.

3) Iconverter

Mac OS X icons can be things of beauty, but for all the simplicity of cutting and pasting icons in the Finder, the icon files themselves can sometimes be hard to get at. Enter Iconverter, which makes it easy to get icons into and out of OS X icon format. On the "out" side of the coin, you only need to drag an application (or document, or anything that has an icon you want to use) onto the Iconverter window, set the conversion format, choose where it will be saved, hit convert, and you're set (fig. 3). As for the "in," take an image file (preferably PNG with its built-in transparency), check the "Use file contents" option, set the conversion format and location, hit convert, and you'll instantly have an icon file. There's even a batch convert option if you want to blow through an entire folder. Iconverter is a very handy tool for those who work with icons, but it's one that doesn't seem to be under active development. However, the most recent version works great (even on Tiger) and is still available for download through VersionTracker, so make sure to grab it before it ups and disappears on everyone.

Developer: Extraneous Software Price: Free Available for download at: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16468

Figure 3: Finally, I can now extract that wondrous Safari icon I've been longing for lo these many years.

4) CanCombineIcons

The perfect companion to the aforementioned Iconverter, CanCombineIcons (hereafter CCI) pretty much does what the name implies: it can, in fact, combine icons. Drag a couple of icons into the wells, set properties like size, location, color, rotation, opacity, and shadow, and you're left with a nifty hybrid icon (fig. 4). You can also use text in one of the wells if you're simply looking to overlay an existing icon with a label. But truthfully, I don't really even care about the combining part, as the feature that was chiefly responsible for the removal of my ten bucks is somewhat of a stealth one: CCI can take a Mac icon and save it as a Windows .ico file, complete with all of the embedded sizes and color depths that make the various versions of Windows happy. CCI is by far the easiest program I've found to create Windows icons (on either platform), a feat which I'm happy to say puts CCI in the special class of apps that have paid for themselves many times over.

Developer: Infinity-to-the-Power-of-Infinity Price: $10 Shareware Available for download at: http://www.ittpoi.com/cci/

Figure 4: CCI making short work of that hybrid QuickTime/grayscale iTunes icon the world has been waiting for.

5) FormsToGo

Apart from some light- to medium-duty PHP and JavaScript, I'm not much of a Web developer coding-type guy. However, it's nice to be able to add a standard form here or there to any given page without a whole lot of hassle, so this is where FormsToGo (or FtG for short) comes in. I don't know jack about how forms are supposed to do their mojo when talking to whatever server -side process controls such things, but since I can lay them out in HTML, that's all I need to know. Create a form, open the HTML page with FtG, and it does the rest, walking you through options such as required fields, validation (fig. 5), and where the data goes once the user presses the "Submit" button (usually an email, but databases are supported as well). FtG then generates out nice, clean ASP, PHP, or Perl code for you to drop on your server . This is exactly the type of "little stuff" that I love to offer clients without having to send it out of house, and at $12, FtG is an absolute steal.

Developer: BeBoSoft Price: $12 Shareware (also available for Windows) Available for download at: http://www.bebosoft.com/products/formstogo/

Figure 5: Not the most exciting screenshot, but I had to show you something.

6) OnyX

Since many of us are either a) on our own or b) are loath to find Mac aficionados in a typical IT department, it often falls to the man or woman in the mirror to take care of business. Therefore, system maintenance means yet another hat to wear, adding to the tower of 50 or so already teetering precariously atop our collective skulls. Fortunately, OnyX bundles pretty much everything one would need in this department. I've tried all sorts of little system tweakers over the years, and with the exception of keeping TinkerTool around (another fine utility in its own right), OnyX is the alpha and the omega of system utilities. In addition to the standards (optimization, permissions repair, daily/weekly/monthly scripts, cache and log deletion, etc.), OnyX packs several UI enhancements that fine-tune things like Sheet speeds, whether Dock icons bounce or not, the file format for screen captures, and the number of history items in Safari (just to name a few).

Developer: Titanium Software Price: Free Available for download at: http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

Figure 6: Top: the various categories OnyX functions fall under. Bottom: a tab from the "Appearance" category.

7) CleanArchiver

Packing files up into neat little archives isn't exactly the most glamorous thing that us hip-hip-happening creative types do on a day-to-day basis, but it's got to be done, and on many days, done often. Sure, the ZIP feature that's been in Mac OS X since Panther is nice, but it has a not-so-nice way of expanding in ugly, ugly ways on non-Mac systems. And with so many archive formats to choose from (DMG, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP, Stuffit), it can be maddening trying to track down utilities for each one. Fortunately, CleanArchiver packs many of these formats into a single (and simple) program. Select your format type, check any of the settings (including the ability to leave out those annoying .DS_Store files), drop some files onto the CleanArchiver window, and you're good to go. Even better, save a set of default options (like in fig. 7), add CleanArchiver to your Dock (or use a utility such as Zingg!, which I covered in the 2004 version of this column), and you have drag-n-drop (or right-click-n-select, in Zingg!'s case) simplicity for making archives. Now, you'll need DropStuff installed to enable Stuffit compression, but everything else is already built in.

Developer: Sopht Square Price: Free Available for download at: http://www.sopht.jp/cleanarchiver/

Figure 7: It's clean, it archives, hence the name.

8) Unpkg

Another decidedly unsexy, but absolutely necessary, thing we tragically hip artsy types tend to do with our Macs is install software. Come to think of it, pretty much everyone needs to do that. The point is that some Mac software comes in the form of PKG archives, which use OS X 's built-in installer program to put files where they need to be. Maybe it's just me being paranoid, but I very much prefer the mount-DMG-n-drag way of installing, and I don't entirely trust PKG files to do no harm on my system. They tend to ask for admin passwords and then throw things around in folders I shouldn't be messing with, so I like to see what's doing inside a PKG archive before I let it run amok on my machine. Enter Unpkg, a no-frills program that extracts PKG archives to a simple folder so you can see what's inside and where things are supposed to go. More often than not, I then drag the various files to their disparate locations by hand, and I feel much better about everything when all is said and done.

Developer: timdoug Price: Free Available for download at: http://timdoug.freeshell.org/unpkg/

Figure 8: Here, I've dragged the PKG from the Desktop to Unpkg, which has created a folder on the desktop containing the hierarchy of the files to be installed. Not pretty, but definitely useful.

9) DejaMenu

Screen real estate isn't quite the precious commodity it once was, what with the equivalent of suburban sprawl happening in the form of 457" monitors and zillion pixel resolution. If you're one of the folks with such an embarrassment of riches, DejaMenu just may be the ticket. It's a one-trick pony, but it's a decent enough trick, as DejaMenu replicates your menu bar wherever your cursor is on the screen. On first run, DejaMenu asks for a keyboard shortcut, and when that combo is invoked, you get a fully functional menu bar wherever your mouse was (fig. 9). For those of you with a Wacom tablet, setting a button on the pen (or whatever) to trigger the menu means less moving around on your gi-normous monitors. Lucky jerks.

Developer: Karl Hsu Price: Free Available for download at: http://homepage.mac.com/khsu/DejaMenu/DejaMenu.html

Figure 9: If you don't like to have to go all the way up to the menu bar to select a command, DejaMenu is for you.

10) KeyViewer

What in blazes happened to KeyCaps? That was, by far, the most useful Desk Accessory (outside of the Chooser, of course) Apple had in "Classic" OS versions. In OS X , it's just gone, replaced by an enormously convoluted method that requires you to go through the International Preference Pane and an always-on Flag icon in your menu bar just to get anything close to quick access to the Keyboard Viewer. Well, stash those flags away, because KeyViewer bypasses all that garbage and pops up the Keyboard Viewer when you want it. So go ahead and take a nice nap with all the time you'll save.

Developer: MacParc Price: Free Available for download at: http://www.macparc.ch/mirror/KeyViewer/

Figure 10: KeyCaps (now known as the Keyboard Viewer) has been on the lam, but KeyViewer managed to track it down.

Well, there you have it, folks — this year's version of what I currently find useful is officially in the can. But, like last year, I'm going to open up the floor to the peanut gallery. I'm always on the lookout for more, and am definitely interested in what you're using out there. So what are you waiting for? Use the email link below and sound off, and hopefully I'll be able to scrape together enough submissions to actually follow up with what everyone said.

Filed under: Feature on October 5th, 2005

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