Apple's built-in screenshot app is pretty okay, but it's not quite seamless enough. When I want to file a bug report, or post a humorous screenshot to Flickr, or snap a screenshot to post on Technophobe, I turn to Skitch. Skitch has system-wide hotkeys, so it's just as convenient as the built-in Mac screen grab utility. It also has has the most crucial image editing features built right in, and when you're finished, you can even drag your image into an email or IM, or post your screenshot on the web with a single click. The Skitch interface is intuitive and just complex enough. You can't retouch a photo in Skitch, but resizing or cropping is a snap. Skitch sports a handy -- and relatively full featured -- editor. It takes just a couple of clicks to quickly crop or resize, and to highlight, annotate and scribble on your photos or screen grabs. I love the little touches with Skitch. Edits are never destructive. Everything can be undone, or deleted, or edited later. When post a screenshot it is saved to your history with layers, so you can come back later and remix things as you wish. Perhaps the best feature of Skitch is the integral upload capability. A single click posts your image to Skitch's own sharing service, or to Flickr, or to an FTP server you control. Once it's uploaded, one more click copies the link, all formatted and ready to paste in an email message or blog post. Skitch is a neat little package that captures my entire screen grab workflow from start to finish. Get Skitch If you need a little more convincing, check out this killer screencast (courtesy of the Plasq/Skitch crew):

Don't get me wrong, I still use Skitch1 for quick and dirty screenshots and annotations. In fact, I use it more than Layers. But Layers gets my vote for coolest screenshot app of all time.

Everything. On. Your. Screen. Is. A. Photoshop. Layer.

Do I need to say anything else? Try it yourself, they have a free trial.

Get Layers

1. 1. The observant among you will note that I wrote this review before I wrote about Skitch. Isn't retroactive continuity great?

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to get to a calendar in OS X? Yeah, me too. You either launch iCal and wait for it to load, or you open the "Date & Time" preference pane and risk changing your time zone to Port-au-Prince.

And then you meet MagiCal by Charcoal Design. Not only is the name clever—MagiCal, Magical… get it?—it's a super useful app. MagiCal hangs out next to the clock until you need it, then jumps to life as a sweet little "month at a glance" calendar. It's packed with features, too. Clicking on a date will launch iCal and take you to the day's schedule. You can skip months, or jump to an entirely new date with a couple of clicks. If you want it for longer than a second or two, tear off the calendar and drag it around as a standalone window.

MagiCal can completely replace your system clock, if that's what you're into. It's crazy customizable, so you can make your date/time experience as complex or minimalistic as you want. MagiCal's bang/buck ratio is amazing. It has more features than you can shake a stick at, and it's absolutely free1!

Get MagiCal here

1. 1. Like any free app, if you use it and love it, please support the developers so they can keep cranking out great software.

Caffeine is a menu extra1 that does one thing, and does it well: it keeps your computer from going to sleep.

Do you get tired of wiggling your mouse to keep the screen from dimming while you're watching a YouTube video? Do you ever wish you could close the lid of your MacBook without it falling asleep immediately? Wouldn't it be great if you could keep your computer awake for an hour or two before power management kicked in? Want to easily disable or enable your screen saver? Check out Caffeine to turn your Mac into an insomniac.

Get Caffeine here

1. 1. Menu extra: n. An icon on the right side of the menu bar. "That's a sweet menu extra you have there... what does it do?"

Today my moving truck1 came, and I tracked it the whole way with Mike Piontek's Delivery Status Dashboard widget.

This is one of the few widgets that I actually keep using. Maybe because it's better than refreshing the UPS tracking page every five minutes. Maybe it's because this widget updates me through Growl so I don't even have to pull up my Dashboard. Yeah, that's probably it. It's slick, easy to use, and indispensable.

Stay on top of your deliveries. Just enter the tracking number and watch it count down the days. Track as many packages as you want, from almost any carrier on the planet.

Get Delivery Status here

1. 1. Please see also: UPS.

If there's one utility that should be installed on every Mac, it is Growl. Growl provides a unified system notification interface. By itself, it does nothing. But it allows all other apps to interact with the user in a clean and consistent manner. Growl is inherently Maclike, as it creates a consistent, attractive and unobtrusive way to let you know what's going on with your whole system.

Growl settings are almost too customizable, allowing each user to define exactly how notifications should appear and act. Notification styles range from small bezel windows to giant marquees to synthesized speech. Notifications can even be enabled, disabled or customized on a per-application basis. Check out some of the stock Growl themes. If none of those quite do it for you, choose from an extensive collection of third-party skins, or even create your own!

But just because you can tweak it doesn't mean you need to. Apps that use Growl "just work" out of the box. Once you install Growl you will be surprised how many of your applications already support it. The list of applications currently supporting Growl is huge: everything from download notices to incoming messages to update notifications are delivered via Growl. Growl "Extras" also exist for Mail.app, iTunes, hardware notifications1 and lots of other system apps.

Get Growl here

1. 1. HardwareGrowler saves you from yourself by growling when your flash drive has finished mounting or unmounting.

One of my biggest problems with the "clipboard" paradigm is that it only holds on to the last thing I clipped. I'm forever forgetting that I just clipped something I wanted, and haphazardly replacing it by copying something new1.

Jumpcut gives the OS X clipboard a healthy sense of history. It's a simple little menu extra2 that keeps track of a configurable amount of recent clippings, just a hotkey or a mouse click away. If the top of the screen is too far, you can hit ⌃⌥V to pop up a bezel window that pages through all your recent snips. This slick little app has become an indispensable part of my workflow.

Get Jumpcut here

1. 1. You should check out my clipboard history sometime... Sometimes I copy the same thing three or four times before I get it pasted.
2. 2. "Menu extra" is the official name for the little icons that hang out at the top of your screen next to the clock.