20 Apps You Probably Never Heard Of
Windows, Mac, Linux and even Firefox offer more now than ever before in terms of software pre-installed and ready to make your life easier and the experience on a computer better. While each newer version offers more, sometimes it’s not enough to really make your computer experience as smooth or fulfilling as it could be. Here’s 20 apps you probably never heard of that will help make using your computer more efficient, fun and better.
Sapiens (Mac) – Probably the most intuitive apple launcher I’ve ever used, Sapiens is accessed from either a circular motion from your mouse / touchpad or a keyboard shortcut and actually learns which programs you use the most and anticipates what you’ll need. Sadly, it’s still not working with 10.6.
SuperDuper! (Mac) – The easiest way I’ve ever cloned a hard drive, ever. Want to upgrade to a larger hard drive in your Mac, get SuperDuper, connect the new hard drive via an SATA to USB adapter, run it. Pull the existing hard drive and replace with the new one and turn the power on. Brilliant!
PixelStick (Mac) – If you do web design or web graphics, PixelStick is an amazing little app to measure distance and angles on the screen. I can’t tell you how often I use this for laying out sites, creating banner ads and doing alignments of web graphics.
Paparazzi! (Mac) - A small and unobtrusive app for taking screenshots of web pages.
XXCLONE (Windows) – The Windows version of SuperDuper! and it does an excellent job of cloning hard drives.
CutePDF (Windows) – Create PDF files from any printable document, for free!
EASEUS Partition Master (Windows) – Create partitions, resize, format and merge on nearly all Windows platforms, for free!
SpinRite (Windows) – Hard drives aren’t perfect, when you need to do maintenance on them or recover data, SpinRite can help.
PhotoRec (Windows / Mac / Linux) – If you’ve ever formatted the memory card in your digital camera by accident, PhotoRec will be worth it’s weight in gold. Best photo recovery tool ever, and it’s free!
DVD Flick (Windows) – Convert nearly any video file into a playable DVD.
Mac The Ripper (Mac) – Quickly and easily rip any DVD movie to your hard drive. This application is great if you travel a lot and need to extend the battery life between charges. Using your built in DVD slot consumes far more battery juice compared to playing a movie from your hard drive.
HandBrake (Mac / Windows / Linux) - An open source video transcoder for all platforms, you can now extract video or audio or both from any video source and convert it into nearly any other source.
Vixy (Mac / Windows) – Vixy is an online service to rip YouTube videos to your hard drive, but the site can be somewhat unstable due to high traffic. To resolve this problem they’ve released the desktop app. Still in Beta with a few quirks, the options to save as .avi, .mov or just extract the audio as .mp3 are nice.
Pidgin (Mac / Windows / Linux) – Possibly one of the best chat clients available that loads nearly all formats of chat available, from AIM to Gtalk, Facebook to Yahoo.
FireBug (Firefox) An add-on for Firefox, FireBug is essential for anyone who does web design to quickly and efficiently track down errors with web page development.
SciTE (Windows) – Based on the Scintilla text editor, SciTE has extensions built in. This is hands down one of the best text editors available, and it’s free!
Audacity (Mac) – Going further than GarageBand, Audacity gives you a level of fine tuning and editing that is second to none. This open-source project is also free!
FireFTP (Firefox) – If you need to FTP data, chances are you probably already have a web browser open, so why not do it right in Firefox? FireFTP is a small add-on that is simple to use and provide rock solid stability.
Keyfinder (Windows) – This tiny little app does one thing, sniffs out the product key of nearly any version of Windows. Very helpful when you need to reinstall the operating system but the sticker has been scratched or worn off the case.
Foxit (Windows / Linux / Firefox) – Simply the fastest PDF reader I’ve ever used, period. Uninstall Acrobat reader and install this free PDF reader, period.
