Okay, so you’ve got the new hotness from apple up and running on your mac. Now all you need are a few applications that are equally as hot as your new operating system. Well, your boy, Allen has a few suggestions for you. Naturally. Some are great for increasing productivity, some are just flat out fun, all are extremely cool and good looking. So in no particular order:
Skitch: Image capture goes from ho-hum to badass with skitch by plasq, the fine people behind another favorite app., Comic Life. With Skitch you can capture j-pegs from the web, do screen captures of your desktop and save images to your hard drive with drag and drop ease or with a mere click, host them online in a “My Skitch” Account for access where ever you go and for easy sharing. You can email an image directly in Skitch. Rotate, do some rudimentary photo editing, rotate, crop, doodle, add text… all that good stuff. Also, the window is customizable, which I love; of course being a mac user, I’m into aesthetics. If you try Skitch, I know you’re going to love it. You can get it now in beta for free, it will almost certainly cost you later on.
Sapiens: Leopard is a true 21st century operating system, what you need to pair with it is a 21st century application launcher. Admittedly, app launchers have been done to death. What is different about Sapiens is it utilizes the mouse as opposed to the keyboard, like say, the ultra-popular Quicksilver. Quicksilver is cool and all but sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in the 80s with it. A quick spin motion of the mouse springs Sapiens to life. It will intuitively learn the applications that you use most often and store those in its UI for you to click on it to open the application when needed. Or, for those of you who must type, type the first few letters in the name of the application ala Quicksilver, toggle the app to the center of the UI with the arrow keys and hit return. The extra step makes it, obviously, a few seconds slower than quicksilver but the cool factor more than makes up for it. Sapiens costs $19.95 (peanuts) and is produced by Donelleschi Software who also brought the world Sticky Windows (which I can’t live without).
istat menus 1.2: islayer.com just updated istat menus for Leopard, which made me very happy because now I can list it here. I don’t think there’s a better way to keep an eye on what’s going on under your mac’s hood than with istat. Again, this is a crowded area of development in the mac universe and there are plenty of nice apps that will do the trick for you. But istat menus is customizable (big plus) and it’s up there in that dead zone known as the menu bar not taking up screen or dock real estate. And it’s free. Top that.
Dress Assistant: Okay now, I’m cheating. Software De Arte’s Dress Assistant has been out for a minute and has not been updated for Leopard but it still works exactly as it always did with Tiger. Besides, how can you have a music and fashion blog and not talk about the only mac application for fashion obsessed people? There are apps for cataloging your video games, books, manga, DVDs, CDs, etc… etc. Dress assistant is an app for cataloging your wardrobe. Will do nothing for your productivity. Absolutely not. But Damn, if this is not cool. You can even match up stuff to check out different looks. Store clothing by seasons and by type (blazer, pants, skirt, dress, and so on). It costs 19.95 and there is a full functional demo mode available that is limited to 20 pieces of clothing. Need to keep track of your Bape gear? Got a major league shoe fetish? This is a fun way to keep it together. Hey, for $20 bucks this is totally doable. Dress Assistant is a very, very beautiful thing.
iWork ‘08: Personally, I feel iWork ‘08 beats the pants off of Microsoft Office. Flat out. With the addition of the spreadsheet application, numbers, the much needed improvements to pages ( Keynote was always great), and full compatibility with office, the office suite war is over and apple is king. All three applications have the usual ease of usage that we come to expect from apple and at $79, it is a fraction of the cost of Microsoft Office and, of course, on mac Os X Leopard it runs like a dream.
