Semantic and reliable programs you use on your Mac

[mitridi_g]

Hello everyone
I am asking you ALL to add your stone on my tower of knowledge.
What programms you do want to have installed on your Mac, what is it doing in a few words and with 10 as perfect how much do you give in order speed-reliability-cost (if it's free, even better).
I will start saying that:

MacTheRipper: It can extract commercial DVD movies to your hard drive, minus all the copy protections and region controls put in place by DVD publishers.
With perfect 10, i give 9.

Toast Titanium 8 : Toast 8 sets the standard for burning CDs, DVDs, and now Blu-ray discs on the Mac. With perfect 10, i give 8,5.

Little Snitch: Little Snitch tells you when a program tries to send info to the internet so you can see what's going on in the background!Very usefull, With perfect 10, i give 9.

Greetings from Athens, Greece
Dimitris

[CkretAjint]

never even heard of Little Snitch. Sounds interesting, wish it was free though...

I enjoy DVDpedia alot, especially since I have about 300+ movies and they get 'borrowed' a lot. I can easily keep track of my collection, and who has what and for how long. It was about $18... I give it an 8.5 out of 10.

*shrugs*

[urstwile]

I'd give a ten to Ambrosia software's screen capture program called SnapzProX. It's saved my butt a bunch of times, particularly in terms of converting Flash .swf's to Quicktimes that can then be presented on a DVD playable in a DVD player (not on a computer). In all truth, it's not really converting anything, it's just allowing for the file to be saved as Quicktime because it's a video screen capture tool (as well as stills). Works great, all the time.

[PrintDriver]

PrintWindow - for printing your disk info without doing a screen shot. I only give it a 8 out of 10 for not being customizable enough to let you select the folders on the disk you want to expand.

[CkretAjint]

Urstwhile, you mean like www.vixy.net ?

[mojoprime]

Onyx (http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html), AppleJack (http://applejack.sourceforge.net/) and Tiger Cache Cleaner (http://www.northernsoftworks.com/tigercachecleaner.html). Though they have redundant functions, each one performs some specifics tasks quite well. AppleJack puts a easy interface on disk troubleshooting when you boot into single-user mode, Onyx runs a lot of system maintenance tasks and TCC even has anti-virus in it.

[Craig B]

I like Hey Folders (http://www.bronsonbeta.com/heyfolders/), it's nothing fancy but it colorizes your folders to match any label you put on them.

I also like iClip (http://inventive.us/iClip/), which lets you store multiple items in your clipboard. Very useful. It looks like it's been updated alot since I last used it. It doesn't handle all files perfectly from what I remember (maybe they fixed it), but it's useful if you cut and paste a lot (an what designers don't)

Repeating Motif Generaotr (http://www15.plala.or.jp/NovemberKou/manualDocBased/manualDocBasedEV3_01.html) is also useful if you just need a quick, seamless, tiled background. It's free, very customizable and generates .eps files ... seriously cool. it's not real intuitive though.

Transparent Dock (http://www.freerangemac.com/) is also nothing fancy, but helps clean up your desktop by making your dock transparent (you can set the transparency level)

This isn't an app, but it's a nice free dock related tip. Click here (http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031027022943749) to see how to make any hidden app semi transparent in your dock. It helps you keep track of what's hidden and what's showing. I find it useful, you might not.

And finally, this is a great site (http://www.opensourcemac.org/) with a list of a lot of other great free Mac apps.

[urstwile]

Urstwhile, you mean like www.vixy.net ?
Does that work on a Mac, Ckret?

[urstwile]

In terms of Mac stuff, I've become a big fan of using the Dock's calculator vs. using the Calculator included with Mac OS X.

Basically, I hit F12 to invoke the Dock, use the calculator once and then it's permanently the active widget any subsequent times I hit F12. The thing I like is that you can see your document window (and measurents palette) behind it, so you don't necessarily have to write down numbers to do the math.

[CkretAjint]

Yes it does. I have used it a few times. They even make widget for it! Just enter the URL, select the file type you want, hit send, and they email you a link and you DL it :)

[urstwile]

Interesting, I'll check it out and pass it on if it's worthy.

I find that I like Snapz Pro because it does a variety of things. Including helping me recover a corrupt DVD player file that wouldn't succumb to Mac The Ripper's charms but was completely amenable to letting me view it on my Mac and take a video screen shot of it. Thus allowing me to incorporate it into a new business reel we were putting together of past TV spots we've done.

[CkretAjint]

I concur Urst. ;)

I am sure each have their own uses. I like mine cause I can plug in a YouTube link, and they email me a link where to pick up my file in the formet I want. Quicktime mostly. But I don't have to do any work!!!! LOL :D