Alfred is now one of my favorite Mac apps and the most commonly used in a day. Moreover, there is this nifty upgrade called the Alfred Powerpack that contains features that enable me to do so much more with Alfred—features that will surely boost time efficiency and productivity better than ever before.

ReadNow gives you access to your Instapaper (paid subscription membership needed) and Read It Later (free) account in a single easy-to-use application. Within ReadNow you can manage your read later accounts without logging in to the services via the browser, all stored articles are just one mouse click away. It's minimalistic design offers you a fast navigation and will save you time storing and accessing articles you are planning to read.

Automatically secure your Internet connection in unprotected wireless networks

It’s DIY all the way. Automator — that singularly-awesome utility and infrastructure for automating damned-near any task — has a new feature that allows you to open any webpage inside a popup window. It’s so easy to use and it’s so goddamned useful that I’m amazed it’s not being promoted.

Clipstart complements your photo application to give you a place that is designed for home movies. Import your movies, tag, search, and upload with one click to Flickr and Vimeo. You can even quickly upload a trimmed portion of a movie without needing to save a new copy. If you have dozens or hundreds of short movies from a Flip or video camera, Clipstart provides the workflow to finally make sense of them.

As a free service to Mac-using Thotzy readers, we offer TraffiX 2.0, an internet traffic rate monitor. If your ISP (like Comcast) is implementing or threatening usage caps on your internet service, you can use TraffiX to see if you are one of the “over-users” that they are bleating about.

This Automator service allows you (on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard) to select an URL in any application and shorten it using the bit.ly API.

These apps are a mix of free and paid for software, and in order to provide you with as much information as possible, we’ve included multiple apps for similar tasks if available. This list is by no means complete, but it should help you to unlock some more of your Mac’s great potential!

When you want to check in on your living room, just call yourself on FaceTime from your iPhone or iPod touch, and your Mac will automatically answer the call. When you hang up the call, the script will close FaceTime and continue monitoring for incoming calls. When you get home, you can just quit the app to stop FaceTime from auto-answering everything that comes in.

keka is a free file archiver for Mac OS X

the main compression core is p7zip (7-zip port)

DockView is a Snow Leopard-only application that extends Apple’s Dock and shows window previews whenever you hover your mouse over an application or while using CMD+Tab. It helps you visualize the windows you currently have open and easily find the window you are looking for.