Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Top Ten OS X Apps

Since everybody else seems to do one of these, I thought I'd put together my own OS X top apps list with an exclusively PPC bent. Hopefully some of these are obscure enough that this will be new information to you, because as this blog attests, obscurity equals quality. So on to the apps:

1) The Unarchiver -- Simply install this when you first get your Mac and never worry about unpacking zipped or stuffed files again. An essential download.

2) Burn -- Getting errors burning discs? Have an uncomfortable number of coasters decorating your coffee table? Burn will write your discs more efficiently and with more options than OS X's built-in burning software.

3) Transmission 0.8.2 -- Ever wonder why there are so many updates for Transmission? Because each new release breaks something. 0.8.2 is the last version that just works.

4) Seashore 0.1.9 -- Does all the photo editing I've ever needed. There's a new beta out, but it's a single window interface, so let's you and me stick with the old multi-window floating toolbar look:).

5) avidemux -- A cross platform GTK app for editing and filtering video. I use it to splice avi's of old movies and post the clips on Youtube.

6) mplayer -- The best media player out there. Go with the command line version and play 720p HD video on something as low end as a 1.25 GHz G4 Mac Mini, with the right presets of course.

7) iText Express -- Like Bean except it remembers window positions.

8) SABnzbd -- Effortless Usenet downloader, written about here.

9) Camino -- Same rendering engine as Firefox with a faster Cocoa-native GUI.

10) CocoViewX -- A lightweight variant to iPhoto.

11) MacTubes -- Okay, I couldn't leave MacTubes off this list. Plays Youtube content stutter-free by using Quicktime for playback and lets you secretly laugh at all the people on the internets complaining how flash is grinding their computers to a halt.

Honorable mentions go to Celestia, ffmpegX, Max, and Pref Setter. But a top ten list going to fifteen would be ridiculous.

2 comments:

  1. mactubes - will try this out on the MDD. thx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Great top 10! I will check out CocoViewX. Thank you!

    ReplyDelete