10. TextExpander
www.smileonmymac.com/textexpander/
Cost: $29.95
Developer: SmileOnMyMac
Requirements: OS 10.4

Spare yourself a punishing bout of carpal tunnel by letting TextExpander auto-complete often-used chunks of text.

If your workstation ergonomics are far from perfect, TextExpander could be a crucial weapon in your productivity arsenal. Once installed inside System Preferences, this utility allows you to create shortcut strings that automatically expand into entire blocks of text.

In our case, the string cinfo expands automatically into our phone number and mailing and email addresses in any text-friendly application on our Mac. You can set shortcuts to expand as soon as they’re typed or after a keystroke delimiter-like tab, return, 
or space.

11. ThisService
wafflesoftware.net/thisservice/
Cost: donationware
Developer: Waffle Software
Requirements: OS 10.4

Turning an AppleScript into a service with ThisService is a matter of selecting the script file and saving it to the Services menu.

There are two types of Mac user—those who use the Services menu, and those who’ve never even heard of it. If you’re in the former camp, check out ThisService, an app that allows you to create your own services using AppleScript, Apple’s English-like scripting language. (Ordinarily, creating services requires programming in Objective-C within Apple’s Cocoa framework.) ThisService also accepts any OS X–friendly scripting language.

12. Yep
www.ironicsoftware.com/
Cost: $34
Developer: Ironic Software
Requirements: OS 10.4

Yep is a lean, mean, PDF-organizing machine.

The paperless office promised to eliminate clutter and make it possible to find what we’re looking for faster. But as anyone with a hard drive full of PDFs knows, finding a particular one can be taxing, even with the help of Spotlight. Yep bills itself as an “iPhoto for PDFs,” and the comparison is apropos. Yep quickly locates PDFs in your home folder and displays them as thumbnails. Files are grouped by keyword tags, and the app gives you a head start by auto-tagging files based on their location and contents. Happily, Yep leaves files in their original locations.

Music, Photos, and Video

Between iLife ’08, the iTunes Store, and the Apple TV, Apple does its utmost to make sure we load up our Macs with digital media, and it does a slick job giving us a range of tools to edit that media. But as good as the iLife ’08 apps are, they have their limitations. And very few casual users need the firepower of Apple’s higher-end media apps, such as Final Cut Studio and Aperture. When it comes to editing and managing media on your Mac, you have a lot of excellent third-party options, many of which have refreshingly short learning curves—with affordable price tags to match.

13. Acorn
acorn.en.softonic.com/mac
Cost: $49.95
Developer: Flying Meat
Requirements: OS 10.4.9

Acorn offers a sophisticated selection of filters, Unsharp Mask chief among them.

We love the power of Photoshop CS3, but Adobe’s high-priced flagship image editor is not for everyone. Fortunately, several simpler photo editors have emerged in recent years to appeal to the cost-conscious hobbyist crowd. Chief among them is Acorn, a consumer-level app that blends immediately into the Mac OS thanks to its thoughtful design. Its editing tools are a huge step up from those included in iPhoto 08, including support for layers and levels, an extensive selection of filters, Web optimization settings, and integration with Flickr’s desktop uploader. Acorn’s tool selection seems guaranteed to satisfy the ever-growing army of point-and-shoot digital photographers, although it’s probably too lightweight for the DSLR crowd.

14. Connect360
www.nullriver.com/products/connect360
Cost: $20
Developer: Nullriver Software
Requirements: OS 10.3.9

Don’t hate us because we love our XBox 360. Connect360 enables our Mac to communicate with Microsoft’s game console so we can stream media files to our TV.

Until we make the switch once and for all to an Apple TV for all of our media streaming, we’ll stream movies, music, and photos to our television through our XBox 360 using Connect360. Once installed, Connect360 allows your Mac to appear within the XBox 360’s Dashboard, making it possible to browse and play the media files inside your Music and Movie folders via the Xbox 360. The app’s biggest limitation is its lack of support for FairPlay-protected files purchased through the iTunes Music Store, but given Apple’s lock on FairPlay, that’s hardly the developer’s fault. Besides, Connect360 supports a wide array of other formats, including H.264, WMV, 
and DivX video, as well as MP3, Apple Lossless, and unprotected AAC audio.

15. Audacity
audacity.sourceforge.net/
Cost: Free
Developer: Open-source community
Requirements: OS X

Audacity’s waveform editor and filters offer a level of fine-tuning that is unavailable in GarageBand.

While we prefer GarageBand for no-nonsense recording and editing, the free and open-source Audacity is hard to beat for fixing poor recordings. Its hefty filter menu offers powerful, flexible tools for removing background noise, making low-volume recordings audible, and compressing differences in volume. And Audacity imports and exports a range of formats with greater ease and grace than GarageBand, which seems to begrudge the fact that you might want to use another audio editor. Files exported to the high-quality AIFF format with Audacity are easily imported back into GarageBand. The zoom control on Audacity’s waveform editor can make it a much better choice than GarageBand for editing files that require a lot of fine cutting. On the Mac desktop, Audacity’s big failing is the design of its user interface—it’s obviously a port of a Windows program, and it doesn’t integrate very well with OS X. Aesthetics aside, though, its utility as an audio Swiss Army knife is vastly underrated on 
the Mac.

16. VLC

www.videolan.org/vlc/
Developer: VideoLAN
Cost: Free
Requirements: OS 10.3.9 or later

VLC’s footprint may be small, but it’s a more-than-capable video player, especially if you’re streaming files across your home network.

QuickTime’s hardiness and system integration makes it the go-to video player on the Mac. Still, there are video formats that QuickTime doesn’t support. For those files, we turn to VLC, a free, open-source application ported to the Mac. VLC’s specialty is playing files located elsewhere on a network, though it’s equally happy to play files from a local machine. Supported video codecs include AVI, MP4, FLV, WMV, MOV, and far too many others to name.

17. HandBrake
handbrake.fr/
Cost: Free
Developer: Open-source community
Requirements: OS 10.5 or later

The DVD we’re ripping with HandBrake in this screenshot is a home movie—we swear!

We’re willing to bet you have heard of this one. But we couldn’t live with ourselves if we left HandBrake off our list just to be sticklers for the rules. HandBrake is truly the best at what it does—copying the contents of video DVDs and converting that content to other formats. It builds on that basic premise with a wide array of options, including support for subtitles, chapter markers, and multiple audio tracks. Frame-rate and bit-rate controls allow you to adjust the size and quality of the resulting files, and the software can queue tasks to provide multiple rips from a single disc. Oh yeah, and did we mention that HandBrake is free? By the way, our lawyer would like us to remind you that ripping copyrighted motion pictures from a DVD is probably illegal. He also reminded us that in Oklahoma it’s still against the law to wear your boots to bed.

18. Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes
dougscripts.com/itunes/
Cost: Free
Developer: Doug Adams
Requirements: OS X, version varies by script

If you’ve never used AppleScripts, it might take a little while to get comfortable with Doug’s collection, but you’ll love iTunes all the more for your efforts (see our how-to below).

Technically, Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes can’t be classified as an application—it’s a collection of scripts—but it rates so high on the awesome meter that we’re including it anyway. Anyone with an extensive iTunes library knows how difficult it can be to manage all that music, and Doug’s scripts offer dozens of tricks for getting yours under control. Our favorite scripts remove dead tracks from a library, strip duplicates from a selected playlist, and reveal which tracks have not been added to a playlist. There are more than 440 scripts to choose from, so check them out and let us know which you like best.

Internet Applications
Remember back in the late ’90s, when authorities warned us about the perils of Internet addiction? Today, the Net is so tightly woven into the fabric of our daily lives that no one raises an eyebrow at the thought of spending many hours a day online. These apps help you get more out of the Internet so that the time you spend online gets you more than just fuzzy vision and a hand cramp.

19. Cyberduck
cyberduck.ch/
Cost: Free
Developer: David V. Kocher
Requirements: OS 10.3.9 or later

Uploading and downloading aside, Cyberduck can modify file permissions and send shell commands.

Browser-based uploaders are fine and dandy, but when it comes time for heavy-duty file transferring, nothing beats an old-fashioned FTP client. Cyberduck stands out first for its many capabilities: regular and secure transfer modes, bookmark syncing via .Mac, and support for AppleScript and external text editors, to name a few. Most remarkable, though, is that it’s free. Uploading and downloading are drag-and-drop operations, and the open-source community behind the application releases frequent bug fixes and updates. Some FTP aficionados swear by Panic’s Transmit ($29.95, panic.com), but for us Cyberduck hits the sweet spot with its low price—or should we say no price?—great performance, and an interface that Mac users will feel instantly at home with.

20. NewsFire
www.newsfirerss.com/
Cost: Free
Developer: NewsFire Projects
Requirements: OS 10.4

There are several smart desktop RSS readers for the Mac, and NewsFire is one of the best.

NewsGator’s NetNewsWire (free, newsgator.com) has been the big gun in the desktop RSS arsenal for some time now, but it’s not your only choice. NewsFire is an often-underrated alternative that combines a clean interface with a feature set that was obviously designed for folks who spend lots of time in their feed readers. Updated feeds automatically shuffle to the top of the list, and NewsFire can easily pass items to an email client, desktop blog editor, or a social bookmarking site, such as del.icio.us. The app also offers to discover any feed from whatever site is displayed in Safari.

The main argument for NetNewsWire is its ability to sync across multiple computers with the NewsGator service. Unfortunately, however, syncing doesn’t always work as advertised, which helps to level the playing field. NewsFire is a beautiful, capable desktop RSS reader that’s worth a look.