Since it’s holidays at the moment, this will be my last post for a while. So I thought I would just do a short list of a few Mac Apps and Games I have been using lately and enjoying. Normally I try most new Apps for a week or two before I decide whether they receive permanent hard-drive space. These have passed the test and mostly free or open source as well, which is the best price of all.
Grand Perspective
I always like to do a bit of a hard drive cleanup every holidays, and since I’m lazy, I wanted a nice GUI to tell me what is taking up the most space on my disk so I can quickly remove it. I found such an app: Grand Perspective Disk Usage. It is almost exactly what I was looking for, and I was quite suprised with how much information it provided me. Whilst I don’t think its amazingly pretty - it did the exact job I was after - graphical representation of disk usage for files/directories.
Skitch
Screenshot tools don’t come much prettier than this. I didn’t think it would be possible to improve on something so relatively simple and focused as taking a screenshot. However, until you give Skitch Image Capture a go, you will never use Grab again. The literal drag and drop interface works like a charm, and it allows image re-sizing as well. Ironically from my point of view, the main feature they promote on their website - the capture sharing - is one that I don’t personally have a need for, I find it easy just to drag my capture straight into Mail and fire it off to whoever needed it. All in all though, a sexy little image capture add with a nice bonus feature.
World of Goo
Having only found this recently, it is a perfect little game to kill some time. A physics style puzzle game that involves you getting globs of Goo to merge together to escape from a particular level. Not only is this game fun and a nice little distraction on your lunch break, but it is extremely well presented. The animations and graphics are gorgeous and it has alot of character for what is basically a puzzle game. World of Goo is a game for a variety of platforms, but I have only used the OS X version. This piece of software’s only crime? There is no iPhone version.
Integrity Link Checker
The final one I will mention in this post is one I use quite often in my website development and maintaince work. With websites changing all the time, you need to make sure your links are correct and re-directing properly all the time. Integrity Link Checker does exactly that. Its just a tiny little app that checks all links on your website and reports which are broken and redirecting and so forth. You can export and do a couple of other nifty things. And if you have a bit of creatively, you can use the data for some nice little SEO tweaks as well. This is a tool needed for all website dev guys.
So there you have it, not a huge list, but I think that’s a good place to start, especially if you have a brand new Mac and you are looking to fill it out a bit with useful tools. If you use these or you have a better alternative to any that I have mentioned today, leave a comment and let me know, I am more than happy to give anything a go!
