Whichever type of Mac user you are, today’s post will certainly help you in completing your day-to-day tasks, develop & code projects and make your Mac as fast and clean as possible. For this post we tried to get you the best selection of New Mac Apps that will help you be a more efficient designer. Though, not many applications mentioned here are free, you do receive a good range of features for your money. You should note that the apps listed here are lightweight and are not memory hogs.
Desktop Utilities
Store all sorts of information: Credit Card details, SSN numbers, Software Licenses, e-mail account details, product registration codes and serial numbers. All are easily stored in SecretBox’s flexible database.
Most people will use SecretBox for personal use, but businesses can also use SecretBox for managing their customers passwords or for managing software licenses.
Fast and simple multi-format unarchiver for Zip, Tar-gzip, Rar, 7-Zip, StuffIt, Tar-bzip2, LhA, and many more.
A 802.11 wireless scanner and connection manager. This will detect access points and clients in ad-hoc mode if the SSID is being broadcasted. It can be used for wireless site surveys, wireless discovery, and to connect to wifi networks. The tool reports signal strength in dBm and shows access point BSSID/MAC addresses.
IceClean is a powerful System Maintenance and Optimization Tool using only UNIX built-in System Tasks to help your Mac stay healty and to keep it running smoothly.
A cross-platform benchmark that measures processor and memory performance. Designed from the ground up to take advantage of the latest technology like vector instructions, multi-core processors, and 64-bit instructions, Geekbench provides a quick and simple way to measure your Mac’s performance.
Productivity Tools
Séquence is a simple way to capture and save an image or a movie of your screen to your computer’s clipboard, or a file (in an image format of your choice). A video or screenshot can be emailed, uploaded on the web, or passed around however you want. Séquence supports saving screenshots as bmp, pict, gif, jpg, png, tiff, pdf.
ClipMenu can manage clipboard history. You can record 8 clipboard types, from plain text to image. To paste a recorded item, you just pop up menu by invoking the shortcut key, and select a menu item from the menu.
SimpleTask grew out of frustration with other to-do list applications. They all had too many fields to fill in, too many different views and ways to organize things.
SimpleTask has two lists: Pending and Complete. All controls are intuitive and nearby so adding a task is a snap. Adding tasks can be done entirely from the keyboard making adding multiple tasks take seconds instead of minutes. Best of all, SimpleTask syncs with its iPhone client for an on the go to-do list that never gets outdated.
The Hit List is a simple, yet sophisticated application to manage the daily chaos of your modern life. Based on the simple concept of making lists, The Hit List lets you plan, forget, then act when the time is right.
Price: $49.95
It is very easy to fall into bad habits when using a computer for hours on end. The human body isn’t built to sit in one position for endless hours, gripping a mouse or typing on the keyboard. Dejal Time Out will gently remind you to take a break on a regular basis. Time Out has two kinds of breaks: a “Normal” break, typically for 10 minutes after 50 minutes of work, so you can move about and relax, plus a “Micro” break: a very brief pause of typically 10 seconds every 10 minutes.
Price: Free
Save time and effort with TextExpander! Whether it’s a simple email signature or several paragraphs of a standard response, you’ll love how easy it is to use TextExpander to avoid typing the same thing over and over.
Price: $34.95
Graphic Design
ColorSchemer Studio 2 is a professional color-matching application for your Mac that will help you build beautiful color schemes quickly and easily.
Use ColorSchemer Studio to identify color harmonies for the web (RGB) or print (CMYK), create palettes from photos, search over a million existing color schemes, mix colors, create gradient blends, and much more!
Price: $49.99
Acorn is an image editor built for the Mac with simplicity in mind. Add text and shapes to your digital pictures. Combine images together to create your own. Work with layers to touch up your favorites or make something new from scratch. Do all this and more with Acorn.
Price: $49.95
Acron Free Price: Free
An application for scanning documents with your digital camera with support of optical character recognition (OCR). Prizmo uses the state-of-the-art, highly accurate OCR Engine from ExperExchange, Inc. for optimal results under various conditions.
Price: $39.95
Lineform is the clear modern Mac alternative to Illustrator, FreeHand, and other more costly vector drawing apps. Useful features combine with a simple interface to create a wonderfully intuitive artistic process. Lineform has all of the most popular tools, including everything from freeform gradients to compositing effects, enabling you to create the designs you want without getting in your way with superfluous “features” you might not need.
Price: $99.95
Web Development
You already know Coda, Espresso, CSSEdit, Rapidweaver, Transmit, Textmate and Cyberduck. Below we will cover less known and new Mac apps that worth trying.
Flow brings the best of the Mac to your server’s files and folders. Because Flow can connect to FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3, WebDAV, and MobileMe iDisk servers, you can rest assured that whether you need to connect to your web-host, your iPhone, or another Mac across your network, Flow can do it with ease.
Price: $25
Snippet allows you to easily create Snippets from selected text anywhere, sync Snippet with MobileMe so you always have your snippets and search your snippets instantly with a few keystrokes.
Price: $12.95
Slammer overlays any grid you want, anywhere you want. Typographic Grids, Golden Sections, Fibonacci series or Rule of Thirds. Slammer also has Rulers, Crosshairs, Magnifier, Measurements & Screenshots.
Price: $20.00
Flux is an advanced Web design application, capable of creating stunning sites from scratch. Flux isn’t a template based solution, it’s a creative design environment. Flux has an amazing WYSIWYG rendering engine. The Flux Code Editor has syntax highlighting for HTML and CSS, auto-completion and line numbering.
Price: £49.99
A desktop application for Time Management on your Mac OSX. It is a simple but effective way to manage your (coding) time, and it’s based on the Pomodoro technique.
Price: Free
Allows you to install many popular Windows applications and games on your Intel OS X Mac. CrossOver includes an easy to use, single click interface, which makes installing Windows software simple and fast.
Price: $39.95
Noura Yehia is a Web Designer, Blogger and Creative Thinker. Founder of Noupe.com a popular blog about web design, tutorials, resources and inspiration. If you’d like to connect with her, you can follow her on Twitter or at her blog Devsnippets.
