My favorite Mac applications

Here are some of my favorite Mac applications. If you know of better ones for the task please leave me a comment at the bottom.

	1Password Password Manager I finally got fed up with using a text file on an encrypted disk image to manage all my passwords. I figured that there must be good Mac software for managing passwords and I figured it might even sync with my iPhone which could come in handy when I’m on the road. Sure enough there are many, but one of them costs a fair bit more than the rest. Being a believer in “you get what you pay for” and figuring that the cost of losing one of my or my clients hosting control panel passwords would be pretty huge, I went for the most expensive one, 1 Password. It also had the best reviews. I did the 15 day free trial and I was not disappointed. This app ROCKS and once you’ve used it you will wonder how you lived without it for so long.
	Things Task Manager When I was a Windows user I tried using Outlook’s Task feature. It never quite worked for me the way I wanted to so I often went back to managing my to-do lists in a Word doc or an Excel spreadsheet. But then I switched to Mac and saw an ad for Things and decided to try it. I have never looked back. The interface is beautifully designed and the Cultured Code guys really understand how a busy person thinks as they are trying to organize their lives. For example I love that there are Areas of Responsibility that you can create like: Personal, Job 1, Job 2, Sports Association, Father, Husband, Church etc. These are different from Projects which can overlap with Areas of Responsibility. I also love the Today, Scheduled, Next and Someday buckets. A pretty key feature is that it syncs with my iPhone so I can organize my life on the go or make lists on my Mac and then have them with me when I’m out.
	Skitch Screengrab with annotations I often want to grab a section of a webpage or an image, add a note with say an arrow pointing to something and then email it to someone. I need to do this a lot in developing websites: fix this, move this, make this white, delete this etc. Skitch is the best way to do this that I’ve ever found and the free version is what I use. If you are a Windows user try Jing.
	Billings Time tracking and invoicing I’m a consultant so I use Billings every day to track all my time, billable and non-billable, and then do all my invoicing to clients. I use a bookeeper so I don’t need my own accounting program, but I do need to track my time and invoice clients and Billings does it perfectly. It has beautiful templates for invoices and reports and it has a nice iPhone version as well. I tried Freshbooks for a while but for a one-time cost of $50 and the ability to use it without a web connection, Billings was better value for me.
	Daylite Sales CRM and Project Management Daylite is the CRM program I use for managing my sales funnel: prospecting phone calls, meetings, opportunities, revenue forecasting etc. It’s like salesforce.com except much cheaper and with nicer interfaces. It’s a very powerful program and I use only a fraction of what it can do. It fully integrates with all things Mac like iCal and Mail in a very slick way and it has an iPhone version as well. It will also do Project Management.
	Transmit FTP I used Cyberduck, a free Mac FTP program, for 2 years but I recently switch to Transmit because I use FTP so much and all the Mac web developers I work with use it. The main feature I’ve discovered that I really like is the ability to edit remote files right in Transmit (sweet!). So I can navigate to a .css or .html file, open it in Transmit without downloading it, make a change, hit Save, refresh the browser and voila – done!
	Jungle Disk Remote backup manager I use Jungle Disk to manage remote backups of my Mac Laptop to a Rackspace cloud account. It costs me about $3.50 a month to backup around $10GB of my most important files. They are fully encrypted and the backup is incremental. I looked at Moxy but liked this because of the pricing and the security of going with Rackspace vs an unknown. You can also back up to Amazon S3.
	Disk Inventory X Disk Space Manager (when you run out of disk space and need to delete files) Have you ever run out of space on your harddrive and wished there was a way to look into your harddrive, see what’s taking up all the space, and be able to easily delete what you don’t need? This is what you need and it’s free.

Tags: linkedin, Mac

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.