Visor

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.

Drop­box

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.

The Hit List

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

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

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.

Trans­mis­sion

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.