OSX system utilities for power-users

As it says on the tin:

Update: Here's a great list of things to do.

  1. Main­Menu. Free. Superla­tive. Cre­ates a neat lit­tle menu item on the top bar. Bet­ter than most other tools I have tried for this pur­pose, espe­cially in its clean inter­face. Some­times, if you have the plea­sure of expe­ri­enc­ing a sit­u­a­tion when the Trash won't clean because OSX says that the "Appli­ca­tion is still in use" but you're sure you quit it and it's not live any­way, MainMenu's "Force Empty Trash" is a fab­u­lous tool to have at your fin­ger­tips.
  2. Lit­tle Snitch: Tells you every­time some pro­gram on your machine wants to "call home" and con­nect to some server. Great flex­i­bil­ity in allow­ing the pro­gram to con­nect to a server, a port, or in gen­eral. Allow (or Deny) it to con­nect only once, or until the appli­ca­tion quits, or For­ever.
  3. RCDe­fault­App: Just as it is on any OS from Win­dows to Ubuntu, it often hap­pens that you would like to asso­ciate cer­tain file types with cer­tain appli­ca­tions. On Mac OSX, we do have the same right-click con­tex­tual menu as Win­dows that allows "Open with [Appli­ca­tion]" and "Make this the default appli­ca­tion", but for some rea­son this doesn't always work, and occa­sion­ally doesn't even show up as an option. No mat­ter. RCDe­fault­App is the appli­ca­tion that allows you to do that superbly, and then some.
  4. But­ler: Another small util­ity with a neg­li­gi­ble foot­print that allows for some nifty short­cuts to stuff already on your machine.
  5. Per­ian: No Mac should be with­out this. This pretty much explains itself. There's a nice video tuto­r­ial here that shows how easy it is to install and then for­get it. Sud­denly your Quick­time (and iTunes) will be able to play a whole raft of video for­mats. If you want to be really equipped, get the Divx codec, the 3ivx, and Flip4Mac which plays wmv (Win­dows Media Player) files on your Mac. Of course if you get really frus­trated there's always the tried and tested VLC Player.
  6. CleanApp: The best appli­ca­tion unin­staller out there, hands down. Don't believe for a minute when the OSX man­u­als tell you that on a Mac all you need to do is drag the appli­ca­tion into the Trash and you're done. BS. Many appli­ca­tions (think Adobe) install sev­eral things in sev­eral loca­tions. CleanApp 3 tells you all the asso­ci­ated trap­pings of these appli­ca­tions and allows you to unin­stall them all together.CleanApp is not free, alas (there is always a poor man's App­Cleaner, which does some basic stuff) but it allows for much more gran­u­lar con­trol. The best part: CleanApp has a "Log­ging" ser­vice that keeps track of what­ever you install, and then knows in gran­u­lar detail every­thing that you need to unin­stall later; you can enable and dis­able this log­ging ser­vice at will, so it is use­ful to keep it gen­er­ally off and only switch it on before you are under­tak­ing a seri­ous install of soft­ware, such as Final Cut Pro from Apple for example.
  7. Tin­ker­Tools: To mod­ify the many sys­tem pref­er­ences in your OSX that should have been made tinker-able but are not. Us Win­dows switch­ers are used to mod­ding every­thing, so this is a fab­u­lous tool.
  8. Trans­mis­sion: The best tor­rent client for OSX. Very sim­ple, no-nonsense, and yet pretty inter­face. BitRocket is all google-juiced as it has been around longer, but it went down more often than Paris Hilton's pants.  Limewire now has an OSX ver­sion too, but I am done with crash­ing and slow down­load speeds unless you cough up a few dol­lars.
  9. Candy Bar: If you really, really want to mod­ify your icons. Panic is one of the bet­ter soft­ware devel­op­ers for the OSX plat­form. Their Uni­son tool, a native OSX Usenet client is pure code poetry. There's a lot of iconog­ra­phy avail­able at their part­ner web­site Icon­Fac­tory. Can­dy­Bar is not free though. If you are short on cash, you can always try the some­what bare­bones Lite­Icon.
  10. Vienna: The best and most ele­gant RSS reader client for OSX at the moment. Now if only they could sync it with Google Reader, Bob might be my uncle. How long has the Google API been out now!?
  11. Chicken of the VNC: The best VNC client out there, con­nects with­out prob­lems to Win­dows VNC servers too.

  12. Omni­DiskSweeper: As you start using your OSX, and installing appli­ca­tions and such, your hard disk usage keeps mount­ing (no pun intended). The fast, small foot­print Omni­DiskSweeper does this job faster than any­thing else on the mar­ket, includ­ing the some­what visu­ally pret­tier What­Size.
  13. Mono­lin­gual: Like Win­dows, OSX also comes with about a gazil­lion lan­guages pre­in­stalled, which take sev­eral giga­bytes on your hard disk. Like­wise, OSX the oper­at­ing sys­tem also comes with a num­ber of archi­tec­tures such as Pow­erPC even if you have an Intel sys­tem, because the same OS needs to sup­port older Apple hard­ware. Any­one who has bought a new sys­tem with Intel's archi­tec­tures (the lat­est Mac­books or iMacs) can safely get rid of the other archi­tec­tures. Mono­lin­gual is a sim­ple, free util­ity that does exactly that.
  14. Tech Tools Pro: Expla­na­tion com­ing soon.
  • Man­heim

    Wow. After quite a spell. Great arti­cle but just one glitch: I use Windows :)

  • http://keakaj.com/visage.htm Just Pass­ing

    Inter­est­ing list. For cus­tomiz­ing some use­ful fea­tures such as desk­top Vis­age is quite handy too. http://keakaj.com/visage.htm

  • / snip­tools

    Just Pass­ing, that's a dan­ger­ous util­ity, Vis­age. Doesn't really offer a huge set of func­tions — do you REALLY need to update just the bootup screen while risk­ing affect­ing OSX sys­tem files? Be care­ful with these kind of untried third party utils on OSX because OS repair­ing is one aspect in which Leop­ard is hideously weaker than Win­dows. Been there, suf­fered that. No sim­ple "Insert CD and start Repair" process. No backup machine jazz either. You just have to rein­stall the entire OSX in one sweep. Big pain.

  • Pingback: Reinstall Kotoeri Japanese input on OSX | Sniptools | Mac OSX()

  • kyman

    hey what are those other plu­g­ins in your top bar in the screen­shot at the top of the arti­cle? Like the one that says dic­tio­nary? Those look really helpful

  • http://slrman.wordpress.com James Smith João Pes­soa, Brazil

    I think Mono­lin­gual is very use­ful. I have three macs and it's sav­ing me a lot of drive space on all of them. The price is right, too 😀

  • charles

    CotVNC isn't the best, IMO… i've come across a cou­ple that are bet­ter. JollysFastVNC is great… it's sup­posed to be a pay util­ity after 30 days, but it keeps let­ting me renew the trial period. Another is Vine Viewer (same peo­ple who brought us Vine Server) and that's slightly bet­ter than Jollys (if you use it you'll see why) … i actu­ally just used it for the first time today, and it looks like there's only a 7day free trial on it… we'll see if i can extend that out.

    sim­i­lar to tin­ker­tool is MacPilot.

    MacLoc is a great screen-locking tool. Really awe­some is that it'll lock your screen, but if you have Vine Server run­ning, you can still VNC into it. NB: the screen still looks locked for the built-in VNC server clients.

    Disk Inven­tory X

    Water­Roof

    Quick­sil­ver