C6 Top Mac Apps 2007: Utilities

What’s a mac without a good set of utilities? These programs are, just like the rest of this series, the ones that are proven in my workflow to work. Not always beauty contest winners, and not always well known, but tried and tested by me. Not that I’m offering money back guarantees or anything :). The topics range from disk repair and archiving to memory management and there should be something here for any intermediate to advanced mac user.

Utilities

BetterZip is my current choice in archive utilities. It provides what have come to be pretty standard features, including archive exploration without extraction (ala Winzip), a filesystem browser, file previews, single or selected file extraction, zip creation and updating, and the ability to create archives with no hidden mac filesystem files (and clean existing archives). It can also be set to ignore filepatterns (like .svn directories) when archiving. The latest version is a big speed boost and I’ve personally never experienced a crash, even on large archive operations.

Price $19.95

Springy ($18) and Zipeg (Free) both deserve mention in this category as well. Springy provides a context menu that, in the Pro version, is supposed to allow content exploration on the fly. I found the demo version to be very *fast*. CleanArchiver is a long standing favorite and if you just want a bare bones archive-only tool, check that one out. When these are combined with Ziplight, you end up with a great archiving workflow.

iFreeMem is one I wish I didn’t need constantly, but I do, and I’m grateful for it. I turn friends on to this utility on a regular basis and have probably helped the author with a decent chunk of change. It’s a smart program that optimizes your RAM based on the current environment. Take for example, the situation you’re left with after you’ve just finished editing a 300M file in Photoshop, with Illustrator and InDesign open at the same time, and now you’ve closed all the apps and moved on to a new project. Things seem a little unresponsive? It’s a memory allocation issue, and your choices essentially boil down to adding more RAM, or rebooting in these situations. iFreeMem can rescue you in about 2 minutes. It even gives you a pie chart in the menubar to show you your currently free, incactive, wired and active RAM, which makes it pretty obvious when it needs to be run. The new version has Applescript support and can be run from calendar events for scheduling or triggered in any other variety of ways. If you ever do anything that maxes out your memory, like, I don’t know, running applications, you should check this out.

Price $18.90

Cocktail is a handy multi-tool for your system. It fits into a category with a dozen other contenders, all of which have their pros and cons. I have no particular steadfast love for Cocktail, it just happened to have the best upgrade policy when I switched to Leopard, and doesn’t really suffer from any downsides. It can modify system settings and run repairs, clean files, run scripts and schedule maintenance routines. It has network optimization tools and a plethora of hidden interface tweaks. Onyx, Leopard Cache Cleaner, Mac Pilot, etc. are all up for consideration when playing this field, but for $14.95 Cocktail is a viable competitor.

Price $14.95

DiskWarrior 4 fixes directory trees. Seriously, you don’t have this yet? I’ve talked about the controversy surrounding the mac “defrag” before, but will state again that I can attest from many personal experiences that running a program like DiskWarrior on occasion not only gives a noticeable boost in performance, it can fix some serious problems that are hard to nail down otherwise. I love my Protogé with Tech Tool Pro, but I’ve found a bootable DiskWarrior disk to be more reliable and to come through in a pinch when the Protogé choked. These utilities are handy, in my opinion, for everybody, but especially for people who are creating and deleting a lot of files, particularly large ones.

Price $99.95

LicenseKeeper is another one-trick pony. I used to keep all of my receipts and serial numbers in whatever app I was currently using for archiving all of my documents (Yojimbo, DevonThink, NoteMind, etc.) but stopped for a couple of reasons. Obviously, I switch programs a lot, and tracking my numbers got annoying. Second, I found features in dedicated serial tracking programs that just made life easier. LicenseKeeper simply lets you add an application and record some metadata for it, including purchase price, links, and a license or serial number. It can attach files and emails. In fact, my favorite feature is the email scanner, which will grab the selected message in Mail, attach it to the entry and scan it for serial numbers. If it finds one it will update the serial number field with the information. The attached email will link right back to the original so my purchase receipts and original emails are a click away. It’s handy. Not irreplaceable, but I use it on a very regular basis.

Price $19.95

DiskCatalogMaker archives volumes and gives you a searchable database of external data. I went through a dozen programs in this field trying to find a solution to locating client files quickly in a folder of backup discs. Sure, labeling goes a long way, but database searching is so much more efficient. The vast majority of the programs I tested crashed after archiving a few discs and proved pretty worthless for any large amount of data. On several occasions I lost entire catalogs after a crash. DiskCatalogMaker has proven to be a solid and dependable solution. I can record location information for catalogued volumes, label them as the discs are labeled, and then search in a very finder-like way for files.

Price $19

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