· tools

Useful Mac Utilities

I have had a MacBook Pro since mid 2009 as my primary laptop (currently experimenting with moving to a Surface Pro completely, will cover in a later blog post). I am a .Net dev and spend most of my time in a Windows Virtual Machine, but I have found a couple of cool tools on the Mac side over the last few years, either to help with some coding on side projects, or just to get some work done.

##Generic Utilities

  • Bartender lets you clean up and organize your menu bar.
  • LICECap Capture an area of your desktop and save it directly to a .GIF.
  • SelfControl Block access to distracting websites to get work done. I use this a lot.
  • Slate A keyboard driven window management application. Great Setup instructions here.
  • ClamXav Free Anti-virus.
  • MiniUsage displays various data like CPU usage, amount of network flow, battery status and process names which uses much CPU time in a menubar.
  • TimeOut Break reminder tool with micro-breaks.
  • iTerm2 Awesome Terminal replacement.
  • KeyCastr lets you easily display your keystrokes while recording screencasts or during presentations. Very useful when demonstrating complicated keyboard shortcuts.
  • Keymando productivity and automation platform for Mac developers and power users.
  • Quicksilver is a launcher utility app.
  • ClipMenu A clipboard manager for Mac OS X.
  • VMWare Fusion to run my Windows and Ubuntu VMs.
  • Sketch Vector graphics app.
  • ScreenFlow Screencasting software.
  • KeyRemap4MacBook A powerful and stable keyboard customizer for OS X.
  • Disk Inventory X Disk Usage Utility.
  • Caffeine Prevents your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers.

##Developer stuff

  • AppCode is an Objective-C IDE. I am a big fan of ReSharper from JetBrains, and AppCode is their offering for Mac/ios dev. Besides great refactoring support, it also has a Vim plugin, which in itself was enough for me to justify getting it.
  • Viemu XCode Vim plugin.

##Cross Platform Awesomeness

  • Dropbox Sync stuff!
  • f.lux makes the color of your computer’s display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.
  • VLC Multimedia player.
  • Viscosity OpenVPN client.
  • Vim My favorite text editor.
  • HandBrake Video Transcoder.
  • FileZilla for FTPing.