Caffeine

Have you ever had a 14-hour Hulu marathon, where you had to walk up to the computer and shake the mouse every 10 minutes when the screensaver popped up? Yeah, been there, done that. By default, Apple sets your screen to turn off after a fixed time, which is nice for the environment and your battery life, but incredibly annoying if you are letting your computer do something (i.e. showing a presentation, watching a movie, or running system maintenance for your death ray) that doesn’t require moving your mouse. Of course, you can always disable the screensaver and cancel the energy savings in System Preferences, but then Al Gore would come after you.

Luckily, a middle ground exists. Caffeine, a lightweight utility designed for one and only one purpose, as a toggle for screensaver and display-sleep settings. If you activate it, it will disable the two, deactivate it and regular power-saving settings will resume. We recommend letting it open on startup. Just remember to turn it off after your movie marathon is over, as a computer that cannot dim or turn off its screen will suck up a ton of electricity.

You can download Caffeine here.

LogMeIn

Click the screenshot to embiggen!

The screen-sharing feature in iChat is great if you have friends who have a Mac and you are exchanging tech support for favors, or if you are trying to show them something on your computer, but unfortunately, it is limited to people with OS X Leopard. For everyone else, screen sharing is a tedious and excessively techy affair, involving port forwarding, IP addresses, and VNC clients. LogMeIn is technically a Web app, but its general awesomeness, and the fact that the client software runs from the menubar, forced us to add it to this list. Essentially, LogMeIn allows you to add any of your computers (or friends’ computers) to your remote sharing list. Any time that the host computer is running the client software, you can share their screen, provided, of course, you have their username and password. A more practical use, though, is installing it on your home machine so that you can access your files from work / evil lair / Starbucks.

LogMeIn has both a browser plug-in (for viewing) and a client application, and can be downloaded here.

Mail Unread Menu OR Google Notifier

If you use OS X’s built-in Mail application, you know one of the greatest things about it is that it badges the number of unread messages in your inbox on its icon in the Dock. That said, if you hide your Dock, this advantage is meaningless. Mail Unread Menu fixes this problem by putting a new mail indicator conveniently on, guess what, the menubar. It also adds more customization features, like selecting a specific folder to monitor.

 Mail Unread Menu can be downloaded here.

Alternatively, if you use Gmail on a Mac but don’t like desktop mail clients, the Google Notifier for Mac offers the same functionality, but connects directly to the Web version of the service. It also offers slick Google Calendar integration, reminding you of all the tasks you put off in favor of reading this post. Don’t worry, though, it was totally worth it.

Google Notifier can be downloaded here.

MozyHome

Time Machine is great as a home backup solution because it is so simple to use -- you plug in a huge hard drive, and it backs up all your data every hour. However, those without an external hard drive or a fear of messing up the space-time continuum have other options (check out our detailed review of all your cloud backup options). MozyHome is feature rich, free for up to 2GB of storage, and runs from the menubar, backing up select folders to MozyHome’s offsite data centers.

MozyHome can be downloaded here.