Here are three handy Mac applications that I find myself using often. Hope you’ll find them useful too!

Caffeine – does to your machine what caffeine (of the tea/coffee/Coke variety) does to your body – keeps it awake! Imagine you are watching a long-ish video on youtube – just then your screen goes dim and a little later the screensaver kicks in (or depending on your settings the display turns off). Sure you can go to ‘Energy Saver’ settings on your Mac and adjust sleep settings or you can let Caffeine run in your menu bar.

Caffeine’s UI is as minimal as they come. When you run it, a cup icon shows up on your menu bar. When the cup is ‘empty’, your usual sleep settings are active. Clicking on the icon ‘fills’ it with coffee and now your computer wouldn’t sleep.

Backdrop – as the name probably suggests, this application creates a blank window which you can use as a backdrop to take screenshots against. Alternatively, if you have a particularly cluttered desktop, you can use it as a temporary backdrop to help you concentrate on task at hand. You can customize Backdrop to use an image or a different color for your background (I personally prefer a light shade of grey over white).

Smultron – Although I am a dyed-in-the-wool Emacs user, here is one text editor I really admire. I’ve tried several editors on Mac – both free and paid – but this one feels just right. It supports syntax highlighting for practically every language/mark-up I throw at it (including C# and ASP.NET – how many people on Mac would you find working on those for a living ). Its features include a Safari-like ‘find-as-you-type’ mode, splitting a window into two panes, clubbing a set of files into a project, multiple encodings – including robust Unicode support, jumping within a file to function definitions (when editing code files), highlighting matching parans, a nifty fullscreen mode that allows you to edit without being distracted by other windows and numerous others.

In short it is everything that a good Cocoa application on Mac should be and more. Highly recommended!

This entry was posted Saturday, December 6th, 2008 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Software, Tips. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.