21. AdiumX
www.adiumx.com
Cost: Free
Developer: Open-source community
Requirements: OS 10.4 or later

Unlike iChat, AdiumX never met a chat protocol it didn’t like.

Even with the help of Chax (see #22), iChat’s overwhelming limitation is its lack of support for several popular messaging networks, Yahoo and MSN chief among them. If you loathe switching between messaging clients just to keep track of your buddies, AdiumX may be the solution. With support for MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Jabber, Google Talk, and a host of others, you’ll never need to switch programs in order to chat. Unlike many open-source apps, AdiumX looks right at home on the Mac desktop. And it offers a long list of customizations for its appearance and behavior, including the ability to automatically accept file transfers. If you’re addicted to voice or video chat, however, you’re out of luck. AdiumX is messaging only.

22. Chax
ksuther.com/chax/
Cost: Free
Developer: Kent Sutherland
Requirements: OS 10.5

We like iChat. But we like it even more with Chax.

Since its release, iChat has gone from a capable if slightly uninspiring chat client to a video-streaming, screen-sharing wonder. Chax builds on that by fine-tuning some of iChat’s most popular features. For instance, Chax allows you to automatically accept file transfers and screen-sharing requests from selected contacts, resize the contact list to fit the number of contacts on the fly, and reveal message senders in the Dock. After installation, look for it inside iChat’s Preferences.

23. Twitterific
iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific
Cost: Free ad-supported version, $14.95 for ad-free version
Developer: Iconfactory
Requirements: Twitter account, OS 10.4

None of these people are actually our friends. We just like to know what they’re doing. Is that creepy?

We’ve given up on trying to explain to non-Twitterers what Twitter is and why it has such appeal. In case you don’t know, it’s a micro-blogging service that gives you yet another way to kill time online (as if you need one). The fact is, it’s great fun once you get a few friends signed up. Twitterific liberates the service from the browser by providing instant notifications through a menuless floating window. It also makes some of Twitter’s lesser-known features—replies and direct messages in particular—one-button operations.

24. Call Recorder for Skype
www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/email_chat/callrecorderforskype.html
Cost: $14.95
Developer: Ecamm Network
Requirements: OS 10.4, Skype 1.4

Recording Skype calls for podcasting purposes was a lot harder back in the days before Call Recorder for Skype.

In the early days of podcasting, recording a voice call over Skype and adding it to a podcast meant using three separate applications. So we overjoyed to discover Call Recorder for Skype, which installs inside of Skype, and handles video and audio with ease. Encoding options let you control the format and file sizes of recorded calls, and AAC-encoded audio is easily dragged into GarageBand for editing.

Email

We never thought we’d hear our grandma say, “Can you just email it to me?” But now that grandmas everywhere are hip to email, you might as well up your game in Mac Mail too. Downloading these apps is your first step.

25. MailTags
www.indev.ca/MailTags.html
Cost: $29.95
Developer: indev Software
Requirements: OS 10.4.7

Tag your messages with MailTags and never lose them again (for pointers, see the how-to below).

If you keep a large email archive (ours is 8GB), you know how frustrating it can be to find a single message, even with Leopard’s much improved Spotlight. MailTags makes your messages easier to search by allowing you to add Web 2.0–style keyword tags to individual messages within Apple Mail. Tags can then be added as filters within Smart Folders, making it easy to browse tagged messages, regardless of where they’re stored.

26. Mail Attachments Iconizer
lokiware.info/Mail-Attachments-Iconizer
Cost: $14.99
Developer: Adam Nohejl
Requirements: OS 10.4

Force Mail to neaten up attachments.

We can always tell when someone has sent us a large image attachment in Mail, because right after we select the message, our hard drive starts grinding and the dratted spinning beach ball appears. This is because Mail tries to render images inline in the message, which, given how strange some of our friends are, is rarely a good thing. Mail Attachments Iconizer forces images over a certain size to display as icons—a huge time saver.

Editors and System Utilities 

What these apps lack in glamour, they make up for in usefulness, keeping your data backed up, offering shortcuts to the Terminal, and helping you write code.

27. SuperDuper!
www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
Cost: Free for basic features, $27.95 for scheduled backups
Developer: Shirt Pocket
Requirements: OS 10.4 or later

The first full backup with SuperDuper! can take many hours, but subsequent backups are much faster, thanks to its Smart Update feature.

We live on our Macs—for work and play—which is why we can’t afford to lose even an hour over a hard drive failure. SuperDuper! provides the gold standard of worry-free backups by making a complete, bootable copy of your Mac’s startup drive (called a clone). If the drive dies, you simply boot from your backup disk, and continue working with all of your applications and files intact. A free version is available, but only the paid version is capable of scheduling backups and reducing the time required for subsequent backups by copying only changed files. Other options include repairing permissions on the source disk before each backup (useful for preventing errors), and backing up to a disk image instead of an external drive.

SuperDuper! does one thing, and it does it well.

28. TextMate
macromates.com/
Cost: $64
Developer: Allan Odgaard
Requirements: OS 10.4.2

A good text editor should save you time and conserve brain power. TextMate does both.

When it comes to file formats, ASCII text is as simple as it gets. So it speaks to how discerning Mac users are that we have so many choices for text editors. Mainstays such as BBEdit, TextWranger, and SubEthaEdit all have their place, but if you’re looking for a hardcore coding platform, TextMate is hard to beat. Of course it has the basics: syntax highlighting for a dozen different markup and script languages, options for file encodings and line endings, powerful find-and-replace filters, and so on.

But TextMate becomes a coder’s dream with Bundles (preformatted chunks of code and common actions for different coding languages and environments) and with its easy handling of multifile projects. When we saw the pages and pages of keyboard shortcuts built into the Bundles, we almost wept for joy. It takes some time to discover all the tricks in TextMate, but it’s worth it. 

29. Coda
www.panic.com/coda/
Cost: $79
Developer: Panic
Requirements: OS 10.4

Eye candy aside, Coda offers an elegant, considered approach to coding websites.

Ever hand-coded a website on your Mac? Then you know how 
quickly the desktop disappears under a dozen different windows and apps. Coda replaces this mess with a remarkably clean, single-window environment that combines a tab-separated text editor, FTP client, and terminal window. The FTP function incorporates Transmit, Panic’s celebrated standalone FTP client, and the terminal function incorporates OS X’s own Terminal app. The text editor covers the essential bases (line numbering, syntax highlighting, etc), but it’s the one part of the package that feels a bit lightweight.

Function aside, Coda’s presentation is gorgeous. Imported websites appear as thumbnail images of each site’s homepage. And the interface enjoys a delightful consistency. The purchase price includes electronic reference books on HTML, CSS, Javascript, and more. In short, Coda offers a revolution in workflow.

30. GeekTool
projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/
Cost: Free
Developer: Tynsoe.org
Requirements: OS X

If you can’t live without knowing the latest output of your favorite shell script, GeekTool is for you.

GeekTool is aptly named, as its most useful feature is its ability to overlay the output of shell scripts onto the desktop. If that doesn’t sound impressive, consider that simple shell commands can provide an instant report on resources, such as remaining hard disk space, system uptime, or memory usage. True, you could bypass GeekTool by running these same commands in the Terminal (Utilities > Terminal), but nothing beats the convenience of having real-time output right in front of you. A good trick: install GeekTool, open its pane inside System Preferences, click New Entry, select Shell from the dropdown menu at the top, type df in the text box, and hit Enter. GeekTool will display a list of all mounted file systems and the available free space in each.