Favourite official & unofficial Mac-plugins
I decided to make a list as many of these help in my productivity. Feel free to suggest some of your own in the comments.
In no particular order:
- Quicksilver (systemwide, free): the mouse-killer. I use it to launch different apps, look up words in the dictionary, search google, and search for apps (it’s quicker than Spotlight). I could write a book on the many ways this app has improved my life.
- TextEXpander (systemwide, payware): for correcting my terrible spelling and changing all instances of ‘movie’ into the British ‘film.’ It also helps with long usernames like Kari’s @ksilvennoinen on Twitter
. - Skitch (systemwide, beta so far): a replacement for the regular screencapture, which allows you to add text, etc. quite easily to your pictures.
- Quicklook (systemwide, comes with Leopard): adds preview-functions to just about any file and can be added too by third parties.
- Growl (systemwide, free): notifications for different apps, ranging from iTunes to Adium.
- Secrets (Sytemwide, free): allows you to hack your mac.
- Default Folder X (Systemwide, payware): adds things like favourite folders and history to your save-this-file dialogs. Huge time-saver!
- Genius (free with iTunes): I cannot count the ways that I love this addition to the latest iTunes, but it’s really made my listening experience a 100 times better.
- Saft (Safari*, payware): How I love thee. it allows me to add my own shortcuts for bookmarks (the default ones have already been reserved by Quicksilver). It also adds a number of tab-management functions, like focus on last selected tab.
- Safari AdBlock (Safari*, free): it’s free and you can add publicly available lists to it from Firefox’s Adblock. Works better than Saft’s for-pay adblocker.
- MailActOn (Mail, free afaik): adds short-cuts that you can use to shift mails to different categories.
- Bookmarklets (for any browser, mostly free): my current favourites.
That’s about it! Which little gadgets do you use to improve the MacXperience?
Vincent
*: why I prefer Safari to Firefox (which supports more plugins): it launches insanely faster.
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