Shareware I can’t live without

There are a number of essential freeware and shareware apps I use all the time for both fun and business. I thought it would be a nice shout out to a lot of the other cool Mac devs out there to write a little about all of them.

Adium

As much as I like iChat I have a number of friends who use other networks. Adium has long been the best multi-network chat client. It’s running on my Mac almost continually.

AppViz

I used to curse iTunes Connect daily for it’s miserable interface before this wonderful application came and saved me from it. This app lets me monitor my App Store sales with ease without having to mess with CSV files. Apple should license this app for all iPhone devs and garner some goodwill.

Feeder

I use Feeder to maintain ThinkMac’s various Sparkle appcasts and news RSS feed. It’s got lots of nice little thoughtful features that make getting feeds published that bit easier.

Lineform

I’ve been a bit annoyed by the lack of development of Lineform and the persistent bugs that have remained unsquahsed, however it’s still the most user friendly and best designed vector graphics app I’ve found. Many ThinkMac icons have been made with this tool including iKana and iKanji’s icon.

Update: Since this piece was originally written Lineform’s developer has been purchased by Ngmoco, an iPhone game developer. This likely spells the end of Lineform’s development so I can’t really recommend it any more. The current version of Lineform (1.5.3) still doesn’t work properly on Snow Leopard after various betas and updates.

MarsEdit

I have to admit I’m rather new to MarsEdit but it’s proving to be a very capable tool and will hopefully ensure that I keep this blog a bit more up-to-date!

Perian

It’s easy to forget about Perian with it being something I don’t directly interact with. But every time I’m able to load to a movie from the comfort of QuickTime Player that isn’t a standard QuickTime file I’m thankful for this plugin.

TextWrangler

This wonderful text editor is perfect for peering into all manner of text based files and provides a clean and uncluttered interface for hammering out HTML and CSS. One of these days I’ll have to stump up the cash for BBEdit, its big brother.

The Hit List

I’ve been beta testing The Hit List for months now and I’ve found it an essential tool for organising my projects and life in general. I’ve found it great for organising holiday itineraries. I’m really looking forward to the iPhone counterpart, I think I’ll use it even more then.

Transmit

I’ve been using this FTP app for years to keep the ThinkMac website up and running. It’s always been a pleasure to use, and it’s never given me any trouble.

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Well that’s the lot, I hope I’ve helped you discover some cool new apps you might not have tried before!