14 useful apps for Mac

With so many many amazing apps for Mac, everyone is sure to have a favourite or two. I decided to list a few stemming from my own meandering experiences. Some of them might be familiar to you too, but on the off chance that they are not, I felt compelled to share them. If you have other favourites you simply cannot live without please feel free to share them in the comments.

Sparrow – http://www.sparrowmailapp.com
Minimalist and beautiful, with special attention paid to Gmail integration, it’s one of the best ways to experience Gmail natively on your Mac.

Twitter for Mac – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/twitter/id409789998?mt=12
Simply the best looking Twitter client for Mac. If you’re a fan of the interface, be sure to check out the aforementioned Sparrow mail client.

Adium – http://www.adium.im
The Swiss army knife for chat clients with support for all the major instant messaging services including AOL, MSN and Yahoo, with secure SSL support built in.

OmmWriter – http://www.ommwriter.com/
OmmWriter is a simple text processor that makes writing a pleasure by throwing away all the bloat that distracts the writer. The more intimate the relation, the smoother the flow of inspiration. Welcome back to concentrating.

Transmit – http://www.panic.com/transmit/
Maybe you need to transfer files to an FTP or SFTP server, or the cloud via Amazon S3, or using WebDAV. Transmit has you covered. Simply the best FTP client for Mac. Hands down.

AppCleaner – http://www.freemacsoft.net/AppCleaner/
Installing an application distributes many files throughout your System using space of your Hard Drive unnecessarily. When you’re ready to uninstall, AppCleaner finds all these small files and safely deletes them.

Komodo Edit – http://www.activestate.com/komodo-edit
Komodo Edit is a fast, smart, free and open-source code editor. Switching your trusty code editor is hard, but give Komodo Edit (or its big brother Komodo IDE) a try: it’ll be worth your while. It loves Perl, Python, Tcl, PHP, Ruby and Javascript.

Alfred – http://www.alfredapp.com/
Alfred is like Spotlight on steroids. It’s a keyboard driven app launcher, quick web searcher, calculator, spelling app, iTunes control, search result action taker, and comprehensive searcher. With the additional Powerpack add-on, you get file system navigation, clipboard history, address book, email and terminal control features to name but a few.

Reeder Beta – http://madeatgloria.com/brewery
Reeder is an RSS reader favourite on iOS devices, and it will be coming to OS X very soon. Only avaliable in beta right now, it still manages to be one of the best ways of comsumng RSS feeds on the Mac with a clean, uncluttered, uncomplicated and rather elegant interface. Google Reader enabled, you’ll up and going in no time flat.

Kaleidoscope – http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/
This app might have the most gorgeous logo ever created for app, but I digress. Kaleidoscope helps you spot the differences in text and image files and review changes in seconds with “the world’s most advanced file comparison application.”

Permute – http://www.fuelcollective.com/permute
Permute is an easy way to convert audio and video formats. Coined as the perfect A/V conversion tool for those of us that are not A/V experts, its drag and drop interface is the answer to all the “other” confusing and complicated alternatives.

Dropbox – http://www.dropbox.com
The darling of the all back up solutions, saving any file to Dropbox also instantly saves it to your computers, phones, and the Dropbox website, making it accessible from anywhere.

VLC – http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
VLC plays any video and audio format under the sun. Its bills itself as as a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols.

Caffeine http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/
Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ⌘-click) the icon to show the menu.