Melinda & Cristiano

Yes, it’s time for Appdate #10, meaning that there are at least 10 cool applications out there for the Mac!

My pick for this Appdate is a simple little application that does something very powerful: it prevents your Mac from getting any sleep. The fitting name that was chosen for this application is Caffeine as it works like a shot of caffeine to your OSX. It measures only 48KB and it can be downloaded for free from here.

The idea behind Caffeine is that there are these moments that you want to prevent your Mac (including the screen) to go to sleep or standby. Some examples for why you would want to do these include reading a PDF on screen, or showing a YouTube movie to friends. In both cases you don’t want to go and touch the mouse every few minutes, and you neither want to go and mess with your power saving settings.

When installed, Caffeine gives you a little icon in your menu bar that can be clicked on to turn Caffeine on/off. It is the simplest app I ever used, but it does something so powerful that I can’t live without it anymore. Thanks to Melinda for pointing this little application out to me.

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I got an invite from Tom Morris a few days back for MailPlane (why do you need an invite to download a beta app? just because it IS an invite?) and I must say I like the tool a lot. MailPlane is basically an Application wrapper for GMail, enabling you to have a Mail like app that allows you to drag and drop attachments into a GMail email and much more. It is still in Beta and definitely not complete, but give it a try. I have 4 invites left, so drop me an email to have me send you one.

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I am a real PDF person. Not because it is a technically cool product or something, but mainly because it is very well integrated in Mac OS X and it makes exchanging documents very easy. Unfortunattely I think that reading a PDF on Mac can be a pain in the ass, so I was very happy that Melinda discovered Skim: A PDF reader and note taker. The full emersive full-screen mode is perfect when you want to read an e-book or just concentrate on the text in general. Best of all: it’s free!

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Now, I won’t be the first one to promote this program, but Audio Hijack Pro is a really powerful tool. I use it to boost the sound of my not so powerful MacBook. The program can take the sound of any program, boost it, apply a whole bunch of filters, mix it, and even record it. I am using it mainly for boosting audio and recording podcasts. Unfortunately not free but at a price of $32 very reasonably for people that like to listen to audio.

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ImageWell is a nifty little program that gives you that little extra options that Preview doesn’t have. Just drag an image into ImageWell and you can resize, crop, add watermarks, add logo’s and draw some basic shapes.

Then, when you are done fooling around, it has build in presets for export formats and locations. You can even save directly to your iDisk (if you have one). Best of all: it is free.

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