Accessories

These are useful little apps for the hardware or other misc tasks.

System accessories

Customise your setup with TinkerTool.

Set alarms for Birthdays.

Check your disk space with a chart interface: jdisk, or using Omni Disk Sweeper.

Use Caffeine to stop your laptop going to sleep.

Virtual Network Computing (VNC)

Remote Desktop in other words. The only (free) server app I’ve found is OSXvnc, and the best client seems to be Chicken of the VNC.

Multiple Desktops

The Interview questions for the guy behind Desktop manager really give away that this is the best multi-desktop system for the Mac, and the interview also gives lots of good tips on how you would program something like this.

Widgets

In OSX 10.4, dashboard widgets have a little catching up to do with Yahoo’s Widget engine. For example, it isn’t easy (although it is possible) to set whether a widget appears without going into dashboard.

Another option is Opera’s widgets, open when Opera is.

Quicksilver

“Eliminate the middleman”, Quicksliver is a application launcher and more, allowing targets and actions to be used. I did a quick, quicksliver tutorial, which is a good overview.

Burning CDs or DVDs

I haven’t tried the built in CD/DVD burning yet, will do, but the main application for this is:

Toast

Not installed yet… I’ve had a problem with the Mini just spittingn out writable DVDs with no indication of the problem.

Sync & backup accessories

Mark/Space seems to have a good range of sync apps that fill in the gaps from Apple’s iSync.

Somewhere between a sync and a backup, Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) will clone one hard drive to another, copying every single block or file to create an exact replica of your source hard drive.

SuperDuper gets the Daring Fireball recommendation for backup utility.

Deja-vu is aimed squarely at backups, and is basically a nice interface onto cron & rsync.

To do

I’ve never found one to be happy with, but this one I will try: Anxiety.