10 Awesome FREE Plug-ins for OS X
Posted 07/06/2009 at 5:02pm
| by Arvind Srinivasan
Spotlight Plug-ins
>>ZipLight
If you love the idea of the BetterZip quick look plug-in (#5), but tend to find files with spotlight instead of finder, check out ZipLight, a Spotlight plug-in that lets you search within Zip files. Of course, when you eventually want to use the file, you will have to unzip the folder.
ZipLight can be downloaded here.
>>Google Importer

If you find yourself searching Google too often and would like quicker access to it, the Google Importer Spotlight plug-in will bring Google’s search engine to Spotlight. It works with regular queries, showing internet results alongside files and folders that Spotlight has indexed. Beware though, it has been known to crash if you try to search too many times in a short period - hopefully the developers will fix this bug in a future release.
Google Importer can be downloaded here.
System Wide Plug-ins
>>NTFS--3G
If you
have a Boot Camp partition, you know one of the most annoying things to
do is transfer files between partitions. Windows does not have read or
write support for HFS Journaled, the OS X filesystem, and most external
hard drives that are built for Mac are HFS Journaled. So, you generally have two options: USB sticks, or emailing files to yourself.
NTFS-3G gives you an easier solution. Using the MacFuse SDK,
which was developed by a few Google employees, it allows you to mount
and handle NTFS formatted drives as if they were native Mac ones. This
means you can drag large files from your Mac drive to your Windows drive,
and vice versa, just using Finder.
NTFS--3G can be downloaded here.
>>Growl
Growl is so widely used by different applications that you likely
have it already installed, without even knowing it. However, it is so critical to
the Mac experience that we felt we had to include it. Growl is
a system wide notifier, of sorts, that allows different applications,
like Adium, Transmission, and Dropbox, to alert you with system messages
without bouncing the dock or playing an obnoxious sound. Instead, you
see a bubble in a predetermined corner of your screen that disappears in a few
seconds. Growl is highly configurable, and you can generally set how it
is used from individual application preferences.
Growl can be downloaded here.
Have a favorite plug-in you want to share with the world? Drop the info in the comments section.