Free
Save real cash with Save Benjis.
This app has already paid for itself and more. Well, it was free, but it would have paid for itself... You can compare prices or look up deals by keyword or UPC anywhere you have an internet connection. And don't tell anyone I told you, but I've heard that you might be able to use it to get in-store price matches.
Apple's Remote might be my favorite iPhone app.
This is definitely one of the best free apps in the iTunes App Store: Apple's remote lets you take control of your entire iTunes library so you never have to get out of your LoveSac. The latest version even has full Genius Playlist support. :)
Magical MagiCal.
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!
- 1. Like any free app, if you use it and love it, please support the developers so they can keep cranking out great software.
1Password's native iPhone app: In a word, disappointing.
1Password is the best security software ever written for a Mac. I've been a great evangelist for the app, and I've personally recruited over a dozen customers. Their my1Password service is really slick. It lets me synchronize passwords between all my computers and access my secure passwords on any internet connected computer. So I was understandably excited to hear that they were making a native iPhone app.
In short: The new 1Password iPhone app is pretty, but that's where the usefulness ends.
Note: As of version 2.9, 1Password again includes the ability to sync with Safari bookmarklets. I use this method to auto-fill passwords on my iPhone, as I find it far more useful than the native iPhone app reviewed below. Since Agile has decided to allow both methods, you can decide for yourself which sync method to use.
Before the native app, 1Password had iPhone support via javascript bookmarklets. It was a clever little hack that allowed filling forms in MobileSafari before Apple even mentioned the possibility of third-party apps.
I understand that there are stability issues with the 1Password bookmarklets. I understand that Apple's restrictions make it difficult to extend MobileSafari the right way. Instead of addressing these issues, 1Password's native iPhone app uses their own proprietary browser. Who decided "let's roll our own replacement browser" was a good alternative?
When I'm browsing the web on my iPhone, I'm doing it in MobileSafari. When I open an email with a link I want to visit, I click it. Clicking on any link in any app on my iPhone it takes me to MobileSafari. Without 1Password support in the browser I have to close MobileSafari, open the 1Password app, enter a password or two, look up my password, open MobileSafari again, head back to the site I was using and type in my login credentials. Amazingly seamless login process, right?
I suppose they'd prefer me to browse the web in their 1Password proprietary browser. The one without bookmark syncing. The one that doesn't even have bookmark support. The one without tabs. The one without a search link. I can't even enter a url, I have to use the ones prefilled in my 1Password database... So please, remind me how this is better than the javascript bookmarklets?
If Apple had given me a mechanism for copy/paste, it might be usable, if a bit annoying, to copy and paste urls or passwords between 1Password and MobileSafari. If cookies were shared between MobileSafari and 1Password's lamesauce browser, I could at least enter credentials in 1Password then head back to a real browser to use the site. If I could bookmark sites in my desktop browser then visit those sites in 1Password's proprietary browser, that might make things easier. If 1Password actually provided a full-featured browser, I could understand using it for sites that require credentials. Unfortunately, none of these is the case.
Until these issues are resolved, I'm keeping an older copy of 1Password on my desktop so I can keep my javascript bookmarklets up-to-date. Unfortunately that means I'll miss out on the fancy new 1Password features, but I think it's worth the sacrifice.
Read more about the 1Password iPhone app here
Keep your computer up late with Caffeine.
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.
- 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?"
Track practically any package with Delivery Status.
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.
- 1. Please see also: UPS.
You need Growl notifications.
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.
- 1. HardwareGrowler saves you from yourself by growling when your flash drive has finished mounting or unmounting.
Jumpcut keeps your clipboard around a little longer.
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.
