The Sage finds these applications to be very useful in his workflow. Feel free to give them a try.

Media Tools

  1. Final Cut Studio is apple’s professional level video production suite for OS X. The hallmark application of FCS is Final Cut Pro®, a professional grade video editing application. In addition to FCP, FCS includes Motion, Soundtrack Pro, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro, and as of FCS 2, Color.
  2. Creative Suite 3: Design Premium As somebody that used Macromedia Studio (Flash®, Fireworks®, and Dreamweaver®) and Creative Suite (Adobe Photoshop&®, Illustrator®, and InDesign®) a lot, The Sage is pleased with acquistion of Macromedia by Adobe and the incorporation of Flash & Dreamweaver into CS3. Although quite pricey these applications are hard to be topped.
  3. QuickTime Pro is the professional version of Apple’s Quicktime Pro. Quicktime Pro adds the ability to save quicktime movies, transcode movies, create slide shows, perform limited editing, and much more.
  4. Video Land Client (VLC) media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. The bottom line is that almost any video format will play on VLC.
  5. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.
  6. iSquint is a freeware media conversion application from the makers of visulahub.
  7. iShowU is a screen capture utility that allows you to capture and record anything you can see on your screen, along with audio from a compatible source (like a microphone) as well as any audio from the mac itself.
  8. PodTube is a 1-click solution to download, encode, and add video from YouTube, MySpace, and DailyMotion to iTunes.

Backup Utilities

  1. SuperDuper! is a shareware application for creating fully bootable images of your hard drive. The application is understandable, easy to use, and the built-in scheduler makes it easy to back up automatically. There is a free version of SuperDuper which lacks the SmartUpdate feature.
  2. ChronoSync is a backup utility that performs file and folder synchronization.

Global Applications/Utilities

  1. Quicksilver A unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data. This is the center of The Sage’s OS X world.
  2. TextExpander can save you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently-used text strings and images. With the AutoCorrect Snippet File you have a system wide autocorretion of typos. TextExpander is great for inserting boilerplate paragraphs, email signatures, and anything else that you repeatedly type.
  3. Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X that allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications.
  4. HumaneText.Service is a global application for converting XHTML to Markdown and vice versa. Once installed ⌘⇧[ will convert Markdown to XHTML and ⌘⇧] will convert HTML to Markdown.
  5. Default Applications (RCDefaultApp) is a free utility that adds a preference pane (to system preferences) that allows you to quickly change the default application for many common situations.
  6. ClearDock makes the background of the dock clear. This application require ApplicationEnhancer.
  7. Safari BookMark Exporter is a freeware application for exporting your Safari bookmarks to Firefox, Camino, OmniWeb, Mozilla, IE, iCab, and Opera.
  8. iStumbler is a wireless discovery tool for Mac OS X, providing plugins for finding AirPort networks, Bluetooth devices and Bonjour services with your Mac.
  9. Chicken of the VNC is a fast, lightweight VNC client for Mac OS X. A VNC client allows one to display and interact with a remote computer screen. In other words, you can use Chicken of the VNC to interact with a remote computer as though it’s right next to you

MenuBar Apps

  1. MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for MacOS X that reside in your menu bar.
  2. MenuCalenderClock is an iCal compatible menu bar calendar and clock.

Calendars, Addresses, and Mail

  1. CalTalk is a freeware application for sharing iCalendars over a local network.
  2. DatesToIcal imports all of your birthdays and anniversaries from AddressBook to iCal. The great thing about this application is that you are able to set custom alarms. The Sage sets up alarms that open a automator workflow that automatically sends birthday email messages.
  3. iGTD is a donation ware application developed by Bartek Bargiel that incorporates some of the concepts of the Getting Things Done methodology and makes them easy to implement in your every day life. Think of it as an OS X way to organize your life by context and project. One of The Sage’s favorite features is the Quicksilver integration
  4. Address-O-Sync is an easy to use, but powerful application to share and sync the contacts and Address Book groups of the Address Books on your rendezvous network. If you work with MacOS 10.3 or better: zero configuration is needed, the Macs will find each other.

Blogging, Podcasting, and Web

  1. Textmate truly is the missing text editor for code and markup. The Sage uses the blogging bundle of this shareware application extensively for creating HeySage.com content.
  2. Feeder is a shareware application for creating, editing and publishing RSS feeds on Mac OS X. Whether it’s a news feed for your site or a podcast, Feeder makes it simple.

Of course Dreamweaver, Flash, and iShowU, would be included in this category.

Miscellaneous

  1. Delicious Library is an application for cataloging and sharing your music, books, movies, and video games. The check-out feature is a great way to keep track of who has borrowed what and even adds the checked out item to iCal.
  2. XTorrent is a shareware bit-torrent client developed by David Watannabe. XTorrent is centered around search offering integrated torrent searching as well as searching via google and yahoo.
  3. Inquisitor is like Spotlight for the web. When you start typing text into the google search bar in Safari websites pop up immediately, along with ideas to refine your search. Inquisitor is also developed by David Watanabbe and is freeware!
  4. Combine PDFs is a freeware application that can be used to… you guessed it, combine PDFs. This is great for taking all your receipts for a year or month and putting them into one PDF.
  5. JBidwatcher is a freeware Java-based application allowing you to monitor e-Bay auctions you’re not part of, submit bids, snipe (bid at the last moment), and otherwise track your auction-site experience.

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