In the process of setting up my new mbp which came with Snow Leopard, I have cut down my add-on needs to the bare essentials. So here is my short list for setting up Mac Os X.
Essential system add-ons:
- iStat Menus (the uber-geek tool, can show you any and every stat about your mac's real-time performance and temperature)
- Caffeine (keep your mac awake – won't allow screen or drive to hibernate while it's on)
- Growl (a great notification app that is used by many programs to give you system-level alerts)
- Little Snitch (a lot of apps phone home, but some do it without you knowing about it, and can slow down performance significantly if they are not disciplined)
- DropBox (virtual cloud storage and backup for sharing large files – can be set up as a sync system)
Essential Dashboard Widgets:
- Wikity Widget (a very nice multi-page wiki widget, where I keep passwords and various bits of info that would get lost elsewhere)
- BaldGeeks Countdown 3-2-1 (have to leave for a date in 15 minutes but can't tear yourself away from Spore? Set the 3-2-1 countdown and it will go off to keep you on schedule)
- Countdown Calendar (where I track the days left until my next anniversary)
And Three Crital UBER apps:
- Parallels running WIN 7 and MS Office. (cause sometimes the MS Mac team gets it right and sometimes they don't. In Entourage, they didn't.)
- MS Office for Mac (cause ya gotta have it)
- Adobe CS4 (everything for the creative/technical heart)
That's it for now. I will add others as I miss their presence on my new mac.
@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/11-snowleopard-essentials
December 24th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
[...] 11 Snow Leopard Essentials: iStat Menus, Caffeine, Growl, Little … By admin | category: mac, snow leopard | tags: all-aspects, apple, book, large-enterprise, [...]
January 6th, 2010 at 8:14 am
nice post