Something so simple that I can’t live without it. As a web developer I do a lot of my work in the terminal, usually while I have other windows open. What Visor does is provide a system wide terminal window that you can access with a hot-key — if you’ve played any FPS’s then it’s quite similar to the way you’d bring up the console (though instead of putting on godmother or no-clip, you’re ssh’ing into your server). Visor is brought to you by the group that produced Quicksilver — an application launcher/controller/so much more.
This program is as simple as a little icon that sits in your menu-bar and a folder in your user account on your hard-drive. Copy your files into that folder and they’ll be uploaded to your account on dropbox.com (free accounts come with 2GB of storage). I find it invaluable for sending large files to clients; I’ll drop the .psd’s into my Dropbox folder and right-click to get the link to the file on the server. I can then paste this link into an email for my clients to download at the time of their choosing. It’s also possible to use Dropbox for rudimentary backups and version control with their system of recovering deleted files.
I happen to have typed the draft of this post in The Hit List; Potion Factory’s new task-management application, and — although in beta — already a much better alternative to Things. I much prefer the layout, the ability to add start and end dates and time estimates, the tagging functions, and the multitude of hot-keys available. It’s a great looking app, and I really recommend giving it a download and a try before they start charging for it in the coming months
NicePlayer is a simple alternative to QuickTime, VLC, MPlayer and all the other movie players out there for OS X. It came out at a time when you had to pay for QuickTime to view movies in full-screen, but even though this has changed recently (and indeed QuickTime Pro will become obsolete in the coming months) I still much prefer the clean layout in NicePlayer. Couple NicePlayer with Perian (a collection of open source QuickTime components ) and you can view almost any type of file. My favourite touches are using mouse gestures to zoom the view window and the ability to send the window to the background.
Spotify is only recently out of private beta, but is already proving to be a promising replacement to iTunes and a hard-drive full of .mp3 files. Just type in an artist name or a song name or even genre and it will bring up a list of matches of full-length songs. The library is surprisingly diverse — though there’s still some glaring omissions — but the rights have been cleared for every song so it’s entirely legal. All the content is streamed via P2P, so if you’re on a fast enough connection there will be no waiting for the stream to buffer (RealPlayer I’m looking at you …). You can even build up playlists by dragging and dropping songs. What’s the catch? Because it’s free it’s supported by ads (a premium ad-less account costs £10 a month), in the form of fairly unobtrusive ads in the side-bar, but also audio adverts after every 5 or so songs — so you likely won’t be using this to DJ a set on a free account. Even so, it’s a great alternative to an iTunes library full of .mp3’s.
As of the time of writing, uTorrent on OS X is still in public beta — and it’s buggy, has problems with speed limitations, crashes frequently and the interface is horrible. The only real torrent client available is Transmission. The pared-down interface, ability to watch folders for .torrent files, remote web interface, and the all-important bandwidth limiting preferences (albeit not as important now I am no longer in a barbaric country that caps my bandwidth every month) make this a brilliant choice.