My Favorite 10 OS X Uni-task Apps
I'm often asked about OS X apps that I find useful. One thing I really love about OS X is the sheer number of quality 3rd party applications out there. However, with as many apps out there as there is, it's often tough to find the best ones. There is a category of apps that I feel get left out of the media far too often - the unitask apps. These are the one trick ponies, the apps that you use daily and rely upon, but they either sit in the background or only get called upon when you need them. They often don't sit in the dock, or even the menubar yet are still a vital part of your workflow. We've all got them, and I thought I'd spend my morning putting together a list of my favorite ones. Besides what I just mentioned, the criterea to make my list consists of a couple things:
1. Slim. The idea behind a one-trick app is just that, one-trick. Bloat is the cardinar sin and one that will get an app deleted off my hard drive quicker than anything else.
2. Beautiful. Okay, this isn't necessarily a criteria, but I do use OS X and I like things to fit in. If I have 2 identical choices in functionality but one is far better looking, you can guess which one I'll choose.
This app does exactly what it says, unarchives stuff. I'm amazed at how many differnt compression and delivery models there can be for one platform, but the unarchiver has really strived to be an all inclusive app. Sure, there are still some file formats that it can no process, but overall I'd say it takes care of 98% of my unarchiving needs, it's gorgeous, simple and free. I find this a much better alternative to Apple's own bomArchiver and Stuffit.
Service Scrubber
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I had never really paid attention to OS X's system wide service menu up until about a year ago. I keep quite a few apps on my system which tends to make the service menu incredibly bloated and unusable. There are however incredibly advantages to using the service menu and I set out to find the best way of organizing and simplifying it. Service Scrubber was my answer and it does an incredible job at it. It allows you to restructure the services menu, change keyboard shortcuts & disable unnecessary services. I'm all for organization and this one certainly helps.
Whether you want to organize your DVD library or just throw a few on your computer for a trip, DVD ripping is becoming a much more common task these days. There is a myriad of DVD ripping apps out there, but none of them are half as elegant or powerful as Handbrake. I can't recommend this app enough, especially since it's recent .9 update that includes numerous bug fixes, extra features and a substantial performance boost.
Viewing video on OS X used to be a bit of a pain. For one, Windows Media was clunky at best and unviewable at worst, and two, the sheer amount of video codecs out in the wild made it near impossible to know whether a particular video was going to fully work, only half work or work at all. Most users were stuck with utilities like VLC and MPlayer that both proved themselves to be extremely unstable. The other option was to hunt down all the codecs for QuickTime, but this was hard to keep updated and some of them were hard to find. Then along came Perian. It's one codec that enables almost every type right through QuickTime. This means pretty much any video you're staring at will work, including when embeded in your browser. It's easy to take this little utility for grantent but let's not forget what an amazing effect it's had and will continue to have for OS X and Quicktime.
Transmission is a BitTorrent client. And it's amazing. There are plenty of people out there who require a powerful torrent client like Azaueus and uTorrent, but Transmission found the niche of a simple interface that doesn't get in the way and just does exactly what you want it to. Apps like Transmission I feel are great testaments to the philosophy of OS X and just how well it can work when apps just handle one task and handle it well.
WriteRoom started this last year as a small app with one goal: provide full screen writing for OS X. Over the many months it's gained quite a few extra features, but it still remains a small focused app that does it's job very well. I'm still using the previous freeware version, in fact I'm writing this post right now in it, and it makes writing incredibly enjoyable. Plus I love the nostalgia of a black screen with neon green fixed-width text.
Pukka is a del.icio.us client that has been invaluable to my workflow, but I easily forget that I even own it. It's never open unless I'm posting a bookmark, and it automatically quits itself as soon as I do. But with features like tag-autocomplete, growl support and bookmarklet support, it's a joy to use and makes posting to del.icio.us just about as painless as it could be. I probably wouldn't still have a del.icio.us account if it weren't for this lil' app.
Twitterific is a fairly new one on the block, and it gets most of it's recognition for its pretty UI. What I love about it however is it's simplicity. It's a great twitter client and does a fantastic job of conveying the simplicity metaphor of Twitter from the web onto the desktop. I personally changed the menubar icon so I only see it when there's new "tweets" from friends. This little app is a great model of why I don't see web apps completely erasing desktop apps anytime soon.
Well it doesn't take a genius to figure out what this app might help you do. This app comes in handy incredibly often, unless you are one of those people that never washes your keyboard (gross). Keyboard Cleaner simply places a black screen over your desktop and locks the keyboard. This a) protects your computer any accidental input and b) gives you a nice black screen so you can see smudges and streaks easier while cleaning it.
Ever been stuck somewhere searching for a wireless network and found Apple's airport menu extra to be less-than thrilling? iStumbler is a fantastic wireless service discovery tool that just works. It provides signal graphs and lock notifications. On top of that, it supports Airport, Bluetooth & Bonjour. Brilliantly done and non-bloated.
I should mention that I probably have and love about 10 to 20 more of these uni-task apps, but I tried to just pick my favorite 10 that are universal and would apply to most users instead of ones I use that are more specific to my workflow in nature. If you are interested in any of the other apps I use, check out my I Use This Profile.