Three little-known Mac OS apps
Here are 3 little built-in apps that I recently discovered on the Mac OS. You can launch them from Applications/Utility or by typing in their names in Spotlight.
Grapher
Grapher clearly shows Apple’s historically strong presence in academia – especially sciences. Grapher, as the name implies, allows you to plot equations. You start Grapher, choose the type of graph you want, type in the equation and a graph is plotted. You can add multiple equations to a plot.
You can even use a template as a starting point for your equation. Select New Equation from Template from the Equation menu to get started.
Under the Examples menu you’ll find some very advanced examples of Grapher’s usage – like one here:
Do check out some of the 3-D examples as well.
Here is a fun equation for you to try out (Cassini Ovals):
({x^{2}+y^{2}+a^{2}})^{2} – 4a^{2}x^{2 }= b^{4}, a = |_list_{0.1,0.5…1.5}, b=|_list_{0.1,0.5…1.5}
DigitalColor Meter
DigitalColor Meter allows you to pick a color from anywhere on your screen – much like Photoshop’s Eyedropper tool. It can show the color’s value as hexadecimal RGB – something that should come in handy if you are into web development.
You can press Shift+Command+C to copy the currently selected color to clipboard as text and directly paste it into your editor or even into Photoshop’s Color Picker!
Network Utility
Network Utility brings a host of networking related tools into a neat application – including Ping, Traceroute and Whois. Most of these are available as Terminal commands too. But Network Utility comes in handy when you need to run a bunch of these commands in quick succession. The app is multi-threaded, which means you can run a Ping or Whois while you wait for that Traceroute to finish.
