Mac Apps article

Here's an article I wrote a while ago for my college newspaper. I'm posting it here mainly so I can put something up here at the moment.


It’s happened to everyone at least once, your on your Mac, trying to do something, when you come across an application that does what you want it to, just not exactly, or not as fully as you would like. Sure, Leopard’s Mail can store notes, Pages and Word can word process, and iChat can use AIM. But what about other things you might want to do with your files and information? Shareware developers feel your pain. I’ve downloaded and tried many, many different shareware apps, and I have found a few that other students would find useful.

I’ll start off with possibly the most popular and cheapest Mac application out there, Adium (adiumx.com). I have yet to meet another Mac user that doesn’t use Adium, or hasn’t tried it. Adium is a free messenger app, which allows you to use all of the major messenger services: AIM, Yahoo Instant Messenger, MSN, ICQ, Jabber, and even Google Talk. Even if you only use one or two of these, Adium is well worth the download. Adium allows you to view all your contacts and groups in one window, or to make your own windows from just certain groups. The biggest draw, though, is the interface. Adium is open source, meaning you can download Xtras (think Firefox extensions) that change anything about the look and feel of the app, from the icon, the the contact list, message window, and even smileys. For example, I currently have my Adium contact list sitting at the top left corner of the screen, with 80 percent transparency, with both Trillian and original MSN smileys in my clean green and blue chat window.

If you’re like me, iTunes is constantly open on your computer, playing through the entire music library. However, there are time when you are typing something, say a paper, or an article, and you don’t want to have to mouse down to iTunes to change the song. Coversutra (coversutra.com, 14.95€) helps with that problem. It adds universal hot-keys to your computer, that can do certain things with iTunes, change songs, pause, search tracks and playlists, and toggle shuffle and repeat on and off. It also puts a small jewel case anywhere on your screen that shows album artwork as well as the song title, artist and album name below the jewel case. There’s even a floating window that can appear with a hot-key showing everything you need to know about the song that’s playing.

A major problem I always have with any sort of word processing app is the lack of features. Most, such as Pages or Microsoft Word simply show a page and a toolbar on the top of the window. Scrivener (literatureandlatte.com, $35), solves this problem. With Scrivener, writing can be broken down to different component, such as each scene to it’s own section. Each of these can be put into separate folders which can be chapters, or acts depending on what you’re writing. This is a great organizing tool for creative writers, or even if your writing a paper, and want to separate each topic. Footnotes can be added to the document, and printed as such, saving a lot of time for people who need them. Other files, such as PDFs can also be added so all your research can be right there with you as you write. Perhaps the best feature, however, is fullscreen mode. As you can guess, fullscreen mode takes the entire screen, placing the text in a white rectangle at the center of the screen, blacking out both the right and left sides of the screen. It makes typing so much easier, especially when you enable the typewriter mode, putting the text you are editing at the middle of the screen so you can see what comes before and after, and also so your eyes don’t have to focus on the bottom of the screen.

These are only a few of the apps I use nearly everyday. Some other, however won’t be useful to everyone, or only to some people. These ones do cost some money, though the support and the time put into the app more than make up for the cost. The costs can seem like a lot of money, until you use the apps, and wonder how you ever went by without them.