By Liyo Kikon
FOR all you mac lovers out there, here is a list of “must have” apps to spice up your mac experience. I have left out obvious giants such as Photoshop and Final cut pro. These are kinda like the underdogs but an absolute necessity.
mplayerX: Sure, we all love VLC player, but when it comes to easy skipping of video, quick playback and general look and feel of the player, I find that this player is much better than the competition out there. And like most other players, this one can play any video you throw at it without worrying about the video format, codec or anything. The best feature I like about this player is the ability to find the next file on the finder and play it automatically when the current video is over.
Paragon NTFS: Lets face facts – you have a Mac and your buddy has a PC, and when he/she brings over an external hard drive, you will most likely face an issue where you can’t copy a file into that hard drive or maybe even cause a problem where you can’t see any files on the hard drive. This is where Paragon NTFS comes in. Basically, it acts as a gateway between PC formatted hard drives and a mac computer. You don’t need to configure anything, just install the software and restart your computer. You won’t even see any difference other than the fact that an icon has been created on the system preferences (which you can ignore). And the next time your buddy brings over the PC formatted hard drive, it will work like any other hard drive since this software works in the background.
Memory Clean: Is your mac slowing down? is that even supposed to happen? Ok, lets get one thing straight, if you have a really old mac from the stone age ( also known as ten years ago ), then there is little anyone can do to speed it up. But if its one of the later versions, this little app can save your neck. It works by cleaning up your unused memory from the RAM, it won’t affect any of your files. All it does is scan the RAM, looking for memory chunks from unused programs which take up too much memory and clean them up, making free space for you to use.
VOX player: When iTunes isn’t enough for you and you want a better audio player, vox comes to the rescue! it supports all kinds of audio files and has a simple layout which can be easily understood. It even scans your current iTunes database for all the music you have in your collection. The biggest advantage for me was this player’s ability to play FLAC (Free lossless audio codec), the other one is the support for soundcloud, which syncs flawlessly with your soundcloud account.
Alfred: If you press “Command-space” on your keyboard, it opens up the spotlight and helps you quickly search for programs in your computer. Alfred works when you press “Option-space” but it searches through everything on your computer and the web for answers. Now this might not seem like a big step up but believe me, when you start using it, it will increase your productivity a lot more! You can do quick google search from your default browser even if you’re working on a different screen and you can quickly search through your contacts. In summery, it acts like a quick access tool for everything under one search bar.
The Unarchiver: You probably have this installed but if you don’t, then you need to have this! The unarchiver is a small app which can unzip any files – Zip, RAR (including v5), 7-zip, Tar, Gzip and Bzip2. Need I say more?
Little snitch: Whenever you are connected to the internet, a whole lot of apps try to communicate with the outside world without your permission and if you are on a limited bandwidth plan, this might use up all your data, or maybe you’re just like me and like to control every data which leaves your computer and enters the big web. Either way, this app acts like a gate keeper for your computer, and every time a program tries to access the web, a little pop up will appear asking you if you want it to have access to a specific port online and you have the option to let that particular software access everything online forever (such as a web browser) or just allow it to access a specific port for a short period of time ( such as an unknown software downloaded from the web ).
There are a lot of awesome apps for mac but the ones listed above are just a few of the essentials.
If you have some in mind which I might have left out, send me a tweet @liyokikon
