The bouncer turns to the cleaner and says, ‘This isn’t going to be a deeply disappointing joke, is it?’ The cleaner, quick to correct, replies, ‘Certainly not! It’s just a silly way to start an article about two really useful Mac utilities that Nick wants to share.’
With the great glimmering globs of attention that mobile apps get these days, I thought it would be refreshing to share some cheap, simple Mac apps I’m using every day that make life a bit better. They’re the closest you can get to employing a bouncer and a cleaner without paying full-time staff.
Meet the bouncer
App Tamer pauses open apps you’re not using. Some apps are rude enough to use your CPU even when they’re running in the background, so App Tamer reminds them who’s boss. It makes your Mac feel faster, it’s simple to set up, and it costs just $14.95.
App Tamer works like a bouncer for your Mac. It keeps the rowdy apps calm, but lets anything with a short skirt, some Jimmy Choos, and a splash of make up do what it likes: you choose which apps you don’t want App Tamer to pause automatically — like FTP applications, which often need to run in the background — and it will leave those ones alone.
It’s especially useful if you use Adobe’s Creative Suite, parts of which have the nerve to gobble up 10-15% of my CPU when they’re in the background. ‘Why are they using the CPU when they’re in the background?’ you ask. Perhaps they’re attempting to coax smaller, more vulnerable apps to try hard drugs or join them in becoming unnecessarily bloated and expensive. Who knows? With App Tamer, you don’t have to worry about it.
Verdict: App Tamer gave me faster performance and fewer beach balls of doom. If you’re on a laptop, you’ll gain longer battery life too. An instant purchase for me.
Bonus tip: I suggest turning ‘Dim the windows of stopped apps’ off in the App Tamer preferences. App Tamer seamlessly resumes apps that you bring to the foreground, and I feel it makes for a smoother experience visually if you disable this feature.
http://www.stclairsoft.com/AppTamer/
Meet the cleaner
Hazel is what you’d get if you kidnapped Mary Poppins, a sympathetic witch, and a software genius, and told them they had until tea time to get all the crap off your Mac’s desktop and make sure it never gets into that state again.
In short, Hazel moves or deletes files automatically using rules you give it. I use it to magically tidy my Desktop and Downloads folders, but it’s much more powerful than that: there are many more recipes online, together with these tips from Maclife that should prove useful.
If that wasn’t enough to convince you to try the free demo, the name of the company that makes it is Noodlesoft. Noodlesoft! I make it a habit to always buy software from companies that sound edible, and you should too. Not only that, but they cite Newton’s law of inertia NOT in a technical manual, but in the opening paragraph of their sales page. It just made me want to buy it even more. Told you it was witchcraft.
Verdict: Hazel makes filing stuff fun. Worth every cent of the $21.95 asking price.
Bonus tip 1: If you’re not sure where to start once you’ve downloaded Hazel, there’s a great article on mac.appstorm for new Hazel users.
Bonus tip 2: I set Hazel up to tidy images on my desktop after one day instead of straight away. It stops you wondering where on Earth your stuff went when you’ve just saved a file to the desktop, only to have Hazel tidy it straight away. If you want to do the same, here’s a screenshot of the rule I’m using.
http://www.noodlesoft.com/hazel.php
Meet the other guy
I couldn’t think of a way to include Cinch in my bouncer-cleaner mini drama. It could have played a footman of some kind, but it would be a very specialist and aggressively unionised footman who refused to do anything outside his remit. Anyway, it’s very useful, so here’s the scoop:
‘Inspired’ by a feature from — shock! — Microsoft, Cinch brings the edge snap feature in Windows 7 to the Mac.
Drag a window to the top of your screen, and it grows to use the full width and height of your display. Drag it down again and it shrinks to its previous size. You can also drag a window to either side of your screen to snap it to half the width of the display, allowing you to snap two windows side-by-side to compare or copy-paste between. It’s pretty nifty, and I don’t see Apple swallowing their pride and absorbing the feature into OS X any time soon.
Verdict: I wouldn’t want to use a Mac without Cinch now. Certainly worth $7.
