I compiled this list of apps I use on my mac to help with productivity. As a web designer, I’m always looking for cool apps to make life easier for myself when it comes to getting things done faster and easier. All of the apps listed are Freeware and/or Open Source with the exception of BBEdit, but its well worth the money!

Paparazzi!

Paparazzi! is a small utility for Mac OS X that makes screenshots of web-pages. Paparazzi! allows you to define minimum size and capture size, so you can capture the best screenshot according to your needs. You can choose between saving the resulting picture as .jpeg, .pdf, .png or .tiff, also adding a thumbnail and thumbnail icon.

aLunch

aLunch is a very lightweight but powerful application that does what it is supposed to do and nothing more: a handy launcher that runs from within the menu bar.

CyberDuck

Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files and Amazon S3 browser for the Mac. It features an easy to use interface with quickly accessible bookmarks. The outline view of the browser allows to browse large folder structures efficiently and you can quickly preview files with Quick Look. To edit files, a seamless integration with several external editors makes it easy to change content quickly. Both Amazon CloudFront and Cloud Files from Rackspace can be easily configured to distribute your content in the cloud. Many OS X core system technologies such as Spotlight, Bonjour and the Keychain are supported and a large number of translations makes you feel at home.

Clip Menu

ClipMenu can manage clipboard history. You can record 8 clipboard types, from plain text to image. You can also register texts you frequently use, like e-mail addresses, user IDs and so on, as snippets. You can paste these snippets from the menu, too.

Name Changer

NameChanger saves you the time of naming each file manually. Name Changer gives you a wide variety of options that go from select text replacement to fully customizable text replacement.

BBEdit

BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. Specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers, this award-winning product provides an abundance of high-performance features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. An intelligent interface provides easy access to BBEdit’s best-of-class features, including grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files (even unopened files on remote servers), project definition tools, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Mac OS X Unix scripting support, text and code completion, and of course a complete set of robust HTML tools.

Rapido Resizer

RapidoResizer allows you to resize your pictures and then to save them. Also, this utility allows you to extract applications icons. This is very useful if you got a website like “MacUpdate”. Moreover, RapidoResizer allows batching. This allows you to, for example, to drag your “Applications” folder and then resize and save all of extracted icons, just with two mouse clicks.

The Unarchiver

The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for “BOMArchiveHelper.app”, the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder. It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems. I personally find it useful for opening Japanese archives, but it should handle many other languages just as well.

OnyX

OnyX is a multifunction utility for Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel). It allows you to verify the Startup Disk and the structure of its System files, to run misc tasks of system maintenance, to configure the hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock and of some of Apple’s own applications, to delete caches, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome and more.

AppCleaner

AppCleaner is a small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps. Installing an application distributes many files throughout your System using space of your Hard Drive unnecessarily. AppCleaner finds all these small files and safely deletes them.

I use all of these apps and they help me immensely when its comes to completely certain tasks. If you feel I have left something out, feel free to leave some comments and I will update the list.

Other Related Resources

The Ultimate Mac Setup for Web Designers – Mac AppStorm
A simple List of Free, Open Source Software for Mac OS X – OpenSourceMac.org
The Free Mac – TheFreeMac.com

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