Due to an impending boot drive failure in my Mac Mini, I took the chance to reload my computer from scratch and reload everything manually. It didn’t need a reload, but since I had to replace the boot drive, I thought it would be some good house cleaning to re-install everything manually, allowing me to get ride of crud that had built up.
As often is the case, when I do a reload, I end up finding some new, neat utilities to load onto my computer. I wanted to point out a couple that I recently discovered.
I’m a big fan of using spaces, even with having a multiple monitor setup. I like tossing programs that I don’t need to look at all of the time off to other spaces, allowing me to switch to them w/o having to dig through the windows piled up on my desktop. TotalSpaces make managing OSX spaces even easier, and has lot of nice features that aren’t stock. My favorite is the grid view, being able to see all of the spaces and programs at once, and even be able to drag programs between spaces quickly and easily.
The other is Bartender. I rather like iStat Menus for monitoring my system, but those monitors do take up space on the menubar, and that along with the other various programs using the menubar, it makes for a lot of clutter. Bartender allows me to have a sub-menubar, so I can toss most of the items into the sub-menubar, cleaning up the looks of the main menubar, but allowing me to access the programs rather quickly. Very nice.
I’ve been using it quite a while, but I think one of the best overall OSX utilities is still Hazel. Perfect for creating rules for managing files automatically, and also has a nice app cleaner built in. It’s like a 2 for 1 utility.
