Use Kaleidoscope to spot the differences in text and image files. Review changes in seconds with the world's most advanced file comparison application.

os x system monitor

Hazel watches whatever folders you tell it to, automatically organizing your files according to the rules you create. It features a rule interface similar to that of Apple Mail so you should feel right at home. Have Hazel move files around based on name, date, type, what site/email address it came from (Safari and Mail only) and much more. Automatically put your music in your Music folder, movies in Movies. Keep your downloads off the desktop and put them where they are supposed to be.

Keyboard Maestro is a powerful macro program for Mac OS X Lion and Snow Leopard which has received glowing reviews.

Your Mac is capable of producing sound as well as playing sound channeled from outside sources—devices plugged into the Mac’s USB- and sound input ports as well as audio streamed from the Internet. Wouldn’t it be great if you could captures some of those sounds for later listening? You can. And you can for free with Soundflower. Here’s how it works.

ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster — by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations.

ImageOptim seamlessly integrates various optimisation tools: PNGOUT, AdvPNG, Pngcrush, extended OptiPNG, JpegOptim, jpegrescan, jpegtran, and Gifsicle.

It's excellent for publishing images on the web (easily shrinks images “Saved for Web” in Photoshop) and also useful for making Mac and iPhone/iPad applications smaller (see Xcode warning).

Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor for code, html and prose. You'll love the slick user interface and extraordinary features.

Everybody loves the drag and drop nature of OS X. Drag an app into your applications folder, and it's installed. You'd think it would be that easy to delete an app — just a matter of dragging it to the trash. But it's not. Apps install support files on your computer that generate clutter. Introducing AppZapper. Simply drag one or more apps onto AppZapper. Then, watch as it finds the extra files and lets you delete them with one click.

brings tabs to your native Finder and more!

With thousands of predefined corrections for common typos and misspelled words for US and British English, German and French, Typinator is not only a typing assistant that speeds repetitive typing tasks, but also a system-wide auto-correction tool that automatically fixes typing errors and misspelled words.

Bulkr is a desktop app to
backup, browse & download
photos on Flickr. Install it free.

The Mac calendar you'll actually enjoy using

Creating an event with Fantastical is quick, easy, and fun:

Open Fantastical by clicking the menu bar icon or pressing a customizable keyboard shortcut
Type in your event details and press return
...and you're back to what you were doing with a shiny new event in your calendar!

Fantastical's natural language engine is expressive and intelligent so you can write in your own style. Fantastical will even recognize the location of your event and let you invite people from your Address Book to the event.

What makes TrashMe special is that with the help of an add-on fron the developers, the app will also change permissions on apps you may not have write access to and uninstall them, which is perfect if you inherited a Mac from a friend or family member. TrashMe is $4.99 in the Mac App Store.

When you activate tracking, Hidden will locate your stolen computer anywhere on the planet, collect photos of the thief and screen shots of the computer in use. (We also collect lots of nerdy network information, but we won’t bore you with the details!)

The Hidden team will also help you work with the police when recovering your stolen computer.

Pixelpost is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible photoblog application for the web. Anyone who has web-space that meets the requirements can download and use Pixelpost for free!

Going minimalist with my note taking tools has been a fantastic boon to my work flow. Using applications and tools that let me access my data set of files, without taking them over and making my work flow conform to the needs of those applications, has removed a whole set of steps, perhaps most importantly the one between capturing ideas and processing them to finished work.

As many applications as you may have seen, there are always more that you haven’t. And while it’s important to be chary of productivity porn, you also never know when someone else’s favorite tool might do solve a problem that you’ve been having. This was on my mind in the build-up to THATCamp Southeast, which I helped organize and happened on 4-6 March. My session proposal for the Camp asked people to come and show off their favorite applications. We had 75 minutes of people demonstrating the tools that make their work easier, and I thought that I would share that list with you here, as well as brief descriptions. As a caveat, I should mention that I haven’t yet tried all of these tools, but I plan to in the near future.

As I’m working in Coda all day and I’m usually working with WordPress code, I took a moment and parsed our WordPress docs and created a WordPress syntax file for Coda.

TaskPaper is a surprisingly adept to-do list with a paper-like user experience. Other to-do apps start with a database and build up; TaskPaper starts with a sheet of paper and builds down.

★ Paper-like user experience.
★ Powerful search and filtering.
★ Untethered sync to SimpleText.ws.

Wired's How-To Wiki points to a piece of software called NoteBurner M4V Converter Plus (direct download), which will let you convert your iTunes video rentals and purchases to another DRM-free format. By default, NoteBurner simply creates an MP4, but it's also capable of conforming the file to new specifications so you can play it back on a non-Apple device (like a Blackberry, PSP, and several other options).

Here's a plan to convert an old Macintosh into a backup server - for all the computers in your "shop."

AppleJack is a user friendly troubleshooting assistant for Mac OS X. With AppleJack you can troubleshoot a computer even if you can't load the GUI, or don't have a startup CD handy. AppleJack runs in Single User Mode and is menu-based for ease of use.

I keep seeing lists of 10 must have Mac programs, but the lists is they are well known can't-live-without programs like Launchbar and Windowshade already installed on Machead machines. Here are some slightly more obscure programs I use every day:

Command-Tab is great…if you only ever have one window open in each of your applications. With more than one window, though, it's a hassle to find the one you want. Witch solves that problem by taking you directly to the window you want to reach.

SBook®5 is an extremely fast, AI-based personal information manager. Information is organized in free-format entries --- one for each person or company. Each entry can have any number of postal addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, photographs, URLs, and other information.

SBook5 automatically tells the difference between an entry that represents a person and one that represents a corporation, and sorts accordingly. The database then sorts entries as you would, if you only had the time.

SBook uses an artificial intelligence engine to recognize information in each free-form entry. SBook provides for transparent multi-user access to files shared over AppleShare, two-way synchronizing with Apple AddressBook, and automatic export of vCards to the Apple iPod.

Import all your stuff onto your digital shelves using your Mac’s iSight webcam, our wireless barcode scanner, or your keyboard.

Do You:

Look at your notes and wonder what they mean?
Pear Note can jump straight to the point in the recording where you typed that note, so you can listen to what was going on at the time and use the recording to interpret your notes.

Find that your notes have large gaps?
Pear Note lets you navigate to the end of the notes you did take, so you can listen to or watch what was going on when you zoned out and fill in the gaps.

Appointy is an advanced web-based scheduling software tool which allows you to manage your clients and market your services by speeding up your word-of-mouth publicity.

You can be growing your business and gaining new clients 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year; even while you sleep or go to the gym.

Organize your appointment book, staff, services, etc., from anywhere in the world. Appointy will keep you up to date with real-time updates while you are out and about or just away from your desk.

CoverSutra gives you a handy and attractive way to control iTunes without having to leave your current application.

See what's currently playing or enjoy your album artwork. Don't let yourself be distracted from your work... CoverSutra is never in your way but always by your side.

Cocktail is an award winning general purpose utility for Mac OS X. It is a smooth and powerful digital toolset with a variety of practical features that simplifies the use of advanced UNIX functions and helps Mac users around the world to get the most out of their computers. Cocktail is installed at more than 200 000 computers world wide. The largest part being private individuals, but Cocktail can also be found at large international companies (Puma, Sony), educational institutions (Harvard University, University of Texas) or newspapers (The New York Times, Business Week).

The application serves up a scrumptious mix of maintenance tools and interface tweaks, all accessible via a comprehensive graphical interface. Most of Cocktail's major features are arranged in five basic categories. In addition, a Pilot lets you clean, repair and optimize your system with one click of the button.

Snapz Pro X allows you to effortlessly record anything on your screen, saving it as a QuickTime® movie or screenshot that can be e-mailed, put up on the web, or passed around however you want.

InstantShot! offers classical screenshot functionality for capturing the whole screen, a portion of it or a window and also the option to make timed screenshots or to make delayed captures over time. It offers a wide range of preferences and options to fit everyone's needs.

InstantShot! creates an icon in the menu bar. Clicking on the icon, a menu will appear. Select the capture type from the menu (whole screen, a portion of screen, timed screenshot or multiple captures) or, if you want to change the save format, select the desired one from the submenus and then... capture!

Bookends is a full-featured and cost-effective bibliography, reference, and information management system for students and professionals.

A highly configurable, interactive, and editable interface lets you work with reference information the way you want. In the concise reference view arrange fields in any order, show just the ones that you find useful, and label them as you like. Editing or entering information is a single click away. Notecards let you enter, edit, and rearrange your thoughts, and make citing pages in footnotes a snap.

VoodooPad is a place to write down your notes and thoughts. Plant ideas, images, lists and anything else you need to keep track of and VoodooPad will grow with you, without getting in the way. You can even drag and drop folders, images, applications, or URLs into VoodooPad — they're linked up just like on the web. And with powerful search, nothing will be lost or out of reach.

Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ⌘-click) the icon to show the menu.

Backdrop is a simple utility to fill your screen with a giant blank window. Fill the window with a solid color or a custom image, your choice. This is useful for:

This app allows users to share text, tasks and files. Much like topics in Quora, activities in Teambox can be followed by users who need to stay updated, publish updates to their team or view the related stream of information. Projects are invite-only, and users can choose who the collaborators will be and determine permissions for each person.

Library catalogs are big, database-driven websites with lots of metadata but little social interaction. WordPress is an outstanding platform for database-driven websites full of social interaction. Extending WordPress to replace library catalogs is easier than fixing library catalogs to support modern interactions. Scriblio adds faceted searching and browsing as well as structured metadata to make WordPress the most flexible and social platform for presenting any catalog data.

Software for making a movie from content you record off your computer screen. There's no easier way to create videos that are effective and fun to watch.

Use it to make:

training videos
on-demand presentations
marketing demos
how-to screencasts

Mac only: Wine has always been popular among Linux users for running Windows programs, but Wine is available for Mac, too—and now, free utility WineBottler can "bottle" Windows programs into separate application bundles that run as standalone Mac apps.

With the increasing popularity with Voice over IP apps such as Skype, a new set of add-ons and extras is available that make it easy to record Skype video calls. There are several different add-ons and extras available, but at a fundamental level, they all facilitate the recording, saving and transmitting of video chats.

There is a solution: online video conference recording. Here are some standalone apps that will record your meeting as well as tools provided by conference services.

I’ve collated the best apps for recording Skype in this list. While some of the applications are free, most of them require you to shell out a few bucks. The list is split into separate sections for Windows and Mac.

Together lets you keep everything in one place. Text, documents, images, movies, sounds, web pages and bookmarks can all be dragged to Together for safe keeping, tagged, previewed, collected together in different ways and found again instantly.

Birdbrain takes snapshots of your Twitter account and tracks changes in your friend and follower lists over time.

Project management software recommended by Marty Kearns on ProgX.

it allows you to copy songs and videos from any iPod or iPhone to any Mac running OS X 10.4 or higher.

Free Video Dub is the free video editing software that lets you delete unwanted parts from video files without re-encoding

PicLens instantly transforms your browser into a full-screen slideshow experience. With just one click, PicLens makes photos come to life via a cinematic presentation that goes beyond the confines of the traditional browser window. With PicLens, browsing

screen sharing

review of web based bibliography software

MakeUseOf.com

SuperDuper is the most advanced, yet easy to use disk copying program available for OS X. It can, of course, make a full backup, or "clone" — in moments, you can completely duplicate your boot drive to another drive, partition, or image file. In even le

linux.com

If you have a broadband internet service with a monthly download limit, you may find SurplusMeter comes in handy. It measures the download and upload traffic on your Internet connection and keeps a record of your traffic volume. It gives you all kinds of

Here you go, free and easy-to-setup screen-sharing and remote-access tools. There are several ways you can benefit from these apps: (1) Remote-Control: Help out your friend or mom with PC problems remotely, (2) Screen-Sharing: Collaborate on running progr

The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.

The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community. The software is released under an Apache/BSD-style open source license.

@marshallk This might work, free Mac audio tool: