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Episode 66
There's nothing I like better than great software that's either free or inexpensive; here are a few of my current faves:
My office Mac has two huge displays; my desktop measures a whopping 2,880 x 1,024 pixels. Both of my screens are almost always covered with a plethora of windows, docks, menus, documents, icons, and who knows what else. That makes finding the little arrow cursor among all the flotsam and jetsam a challenge, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: It's kind of hard to see the arrow cursor…
Thank heaven for Mouse Locator, a free utility that helps you find the cursor by encircling it with two brightly colored rings (mine are bright fuchsia).
Figure 2: With Mouse Locator it's EASY to see that pesky cursor...
The rings are displayed whenever I wiggle the mouse after my Mac has been idle for a predetermined length of time. So when I wake up my sleeping Mac, the cursor is always highlighted in fuchsia. Or, I can press Mouse Locator's hot key and display the fuchsia rings at any time.
I love this little utility and you can't beat the price -- it's free.
I usually have 8 or 10 applications running at any given moment. Using the built-in Mac OS X application switcher -- Command-Tab -- I can switch to any open application without touching the mouse. That's good, but it's not good enough… You see, many of those applications have more than one open window. What I really want is to choose which window becomes active when I switch to an application. And that, my friends, is what Witch does. It works like the built-in application switcher but it lets you choose any open program as well as any of its open windows. It may not sound like much but I find it extremely convenient.
Figure 3: Notice the window names for Mail, Skype, and Safari...
(Click the thumbnail for a larger image.)
Plus, it's much prettier than the built-in application switcher and offers a bunch of additional window management options as shown in Figures 4 and 5.
Figure 4: Unlike the Command-Tab application switcher, you can specify all kinds of behavior for Witch.
(Click the thumbnail for a larger image.)
Figure 5: And unlike the Command-Tab application switcher, Witch provides almost total control over its appearance.
(Click the thumbnail for a larger image.)
Try it -- I think you'll like it!
When I'm at my desk working, chances are I'm listening to music with iTunes. The only problem is that if I want to play, pause, skip a song, see what song is playing, or do anything else with iTunes, I have to make it active and bring it to the foreground. Or at least that's what I used to have to do before I discovered Synergy.
Figure 6: Synergy lives in my menu bar.
With Synergy I can control iTunes from the menu bar or the keyboard without switching applications.
Figure 7: Synergy's keyboard shortcuts for controlling iTunes.
(Click the thumbnail for a larger image.)
So I can choose the next song, the previous song, play, pause, add a star rating, or see the song title and artist in a transparent overlay (see Figure 8), all without touching iTunes.
Figure 8: Synergy's floating transparent overlay tells me what song is playing.
Synergy rocks (pun intended).
MenuMeters lets me know what's going on with my CPU, hard disks, RAM, and network connection, all without using up a single millimeter of valuable screen real estate. I'm a geek and I like to know what my Mac is doing; MenuMeters tell me more about my Mac than Activity Monitor while taking up almost no screen space.
Figure 9: MenuMeters display a lot of information in a little piece of your menu bar.
(Click the thumbnail for a larger image.)
The MenuMeters are all the icons to the right of the Help menu beginning with the number 73%. From right to left:
Last but not least, if the menu bar display isn't enough information for you, click on any of the four icons and a menu appears with additional information, as seen for the RAM indicator icon in Figure 10.
Figure 10 Caption: More information than you probably need about RAM usage is just a click away...
Don't forget to make a donation for any or all of these programs if you like them enough to continue using them beyond a reasonable testing period.
And that's all he wrote...