| Application | Description |
|---|---|
| Grand Perspective | Free. GPL. After you use your laptop over a long time, you accumulate a lot of files. Over time some of them become junk as they have lost their value (e.g. a user manual you downloaded for a camera you no longer own). This program shows disk usage graphically. It's very useful to see where the biggest chunks of your hard disk are in use. You can visit the folder and delete files if they're no longer required and clean up your hard disk quickly. There's a very useful video demonstrating this application (there are other useful tips unrelated to this topic too). |
| Adium | Free. GPL. If you have ever used 'Pidgin' in Windows/Linux world, you'll quickly fall in love with this program. This program allows you to connect to instant messenger buddies from AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk, ICQ, Facebook, and many many more. The recent 1.4 beta also supports IRC. |
| Growly Notes | A 'Microsoft OneNote'-like application. It's free but not open source. Work of a single person (A Mac enthusast who worked for Microsoft for many years!, go figure). Well thougt out application with many useful features for daily note taking. I've stopped used One Note in my Windows 7 virtual machine since I found this application. |
| FreeMemory | A useful application that shows free memory and also frees memory if you've been running your mac for a long time and need to free memory to start some memory intensive application (like Aperture or Parallels). Lion version adds some more extras (for $0.99) that are also nice. |
| Caffeine | If you have ever had to tickle your keyboard or touchpad to prevent your mac display from blanking while you were busy presenting something, this app is for you. It stays on menu bar quietly until called upon to keep the display awake (with just one click). Very useful. |