More Mac Tools

After having watched a vast number of MacBreak issues over the last week I have started to play around with a number of new applications. I thought that I would share these with you...

The first piece of software that I have played with is Growl, a notification tool for the Mac. This allows me to display notification of various events, such as network address changes, track changes in iTunes, email, Adium etc. Growl also provides a nice network feature that allows me to get notifications from my notebook on my desktop. This allows me to work without having to look at the notebook screen for "interesting" events.

I have really enjoyed the Distracted Mac and related episodes with Merlin Mann and as a result have started playing around with the tools that he mentions in the episode. The first productivity enhancing change I have made is to clean up my desktop...

To really clean this I have been playing with Path Finder and its ability to hide the desktop icons. In addition to hiding the desktop icons this program provides a replacement for Finder. I am still using the trial and I am not sure that its worth the $, so I have been looking for alternatives. Path Finder is quite nice, but the interface is a little too busy. I'm not sure but I will think about it when my trial hsa run out.

Rather than switch to Path Finder on both my Macbook and my desktop I decided to look for another alternative. What I found was Desktop Sweeper, which is a Application Enhancer plug-in that hides desktop icons. This has worked really well, and I absolutely love the icon :)

The next tool is Menu Shades. This program provides the ability to hide the menu bar, removing another source of distraction. It is quite a nice program, but the problem is that it takes up space in the Dock. It would be much better is this had a menu bar icon... So I started looking for a way to remove the icon from the dock...

Having a look around I found the Dockless program. This provides an easy way to indicate to programs that you don't want them to load in the Dock. The program is a little "interesting" but it does work. The quit and relaunch buttons are used to quit or relaunch the selected applications... Anyway it all worked fine once I understood how it worked. Don't relaunch the Menu Shades program from this as it then fails to load it preferences. I got Dockless to remove it from the Dock and then manually restarted and it worked fine. Menu is shaded, and it is not in the Dock.

I have been playing around with some other applications, but more on those at another time. If you have some other interesting Mac applications let me know.