I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

Satellite Eyes

Fab tiny OS X app which sets your desktop wallpaper to a satellite view of your current location. Added bonus: You can switch to use the gorgeous “Watercolour” themed maps by Stamen.

Houdini

New favourite Mac utility. Automatically hides app windows after a couple of minutes in the background so you can focus on what you’re working on.

Private Eye | Free Network Monitor for Mac

Dead handy. Lightweight tool to track which apps are accessing the internet, and which hosts they’re hitting.

screenstagram

OS X screensaver that shows your friends’ Instagram shots. Lovely!

Rdio for Mac

Rdio have launched their (mostly-)native Mac client, and it’s grand. Not as nice as Spotify (playlist building is still clunky), but it does 99% of everything you want. I’ve been using it for a few weeks, and it was the sole reason I resubscribed.

Cathode

OS X terminal application that emulates old & busted phosphor displays. Pointless and gorgeous.

Kaleidoscope — File comparison for Mac

New diff viewer for OS X. Finally, a diff tool that can deal gracefully with changesets across multiple files!

Portal is FREE!

The free game is not a lie! To encourage download of Steam, Valve is giving Portal away for free for the next two weeks. If you haven’t already played it, YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE NOT TO.

Valve Brings Hit Games, Steam Service to Mac

This is a big shift: “We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac and the Xbox 360.” I will never need Boot Camp again.

MagicPrefs

I love my new Magic Mouse, but was missing my middle click. This app adds it back. Hooray!

Ommwriter

Oh my, this is rather lovely. A distraction-removing full-screen text editor (similar to WriteRoom), with a lovely background and jangly music!

Glims for Safari

Safari “plug-in” which fixes a bunch of my frustrations since switching from Firefox. This plus ClickToFlash rock my world!

BootXChanger

Replace the Apple graphic on OS X boot. Being a traditionalist, I’ve got with an old school Happy Mac.

ClickToFlash

OS X Safari users: Install this! Blocks Flash until you click on the object in Safari (and other WebKit-based applications). A way to mitigate the risk of the Flash exploit without completely nuking Flash Player from your machine.

atebits - Tweetie for Mac

Tweetie has been my iPhone Twitter app of choice for some time. The new OS X version seems equally lovely. Not going to tear away folks with seven-column Tweetdeck setups, but it seems to be a good step-up from Twitterrific.

Mac Lounge

Alpha version of a new OS X Twitter client. Still a bit rough around the edges, but has a bit more oomph than Twitterrific (and isn’t as complex and desktop-real-estate-consuming as TweetDeck), so I’m giving it a shot.

Flux

“F.lux makes your computer’s lighting adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.”

A Review of Two Things: One For the Mac and One For iPhone

Things has completely changed my life. My moleskine has laid dormant for months, no longer the recipient of a gajillion TODO lists. And, as Shaun Blanc points out, the interface is a near total delight. Dragging a TODO into the project section to split it up into subtasks is the kind of intuitive action that makes it ace. If only it had MobileMe syncing, instead of custom-over-wifi and Dropboxery.

Iconfactory : Somatic Rebirth Apps

Gorgeous replacement application icons for OS X. (See also the Somatic system set) Replacing my “Litho” icons now!

Sen:te - GPGMail

The plugin for OS X’s Mail app which makes cryptography easily manageable.

SmartSleep

Hurrah! Sleep your MacBook instead of hibernating it when you have sufficient battery life left. It was very annoying that I had to wait for OS X to persist 3GB to disk before I could pick up my laptop.

AddressBookSync | Facebook Picture Synchronization with OS X Address Book

Update your OS X Address Book with photos and birthdays from your friends’ Facebook pages (sadly, Facebook bars it from doing anything useful, like updating email addresses and phone numbers)

Poladroid

Gorgeously playful app which takes your digital photos and makes them look like old Polaroid snaps. Features loving touches like having to wait for the photo to “develop”.

macvim

Newer, more Mac-like version of vim than the olde Carbon port on vim.org.

If politicians were operating systems…

Origin unknown.

Boxer: Mac-Friendly DOS Emulation

Nice wrapper for DOSBox, which allows you to bundle up DOS games on OS X. I look forward to a little light “Jones in the Fast Lane” this evening.

Things - task management on the Mac

I will confess to having fallen somewhat head-over-heels in love with Things as a TODO list manager over the last couple of days. Requires some light symlinking-to-an-iDisk to “sync” across machines, but offers the right levels of “This is a task for today/soon/sometime” to help keep me organized. Next step: Play with the iPhone app.

Silverback: guerrilla usability testing

Pretty damned nifty usability-testing app for OS X. With an *awesome* icon. Similar to (and considerably cheaper than) the Windows app Morae.

The Greatest Bug of All

Or “Why you need to understand operating system fundamentals if you want to ship end-user software”

firefox-mac-pdf

In ye olde days, displaying PDF documents in the browser drove me nuts. You’d unwittingly click on a link, and your entire web browser would freeze up for 30 seconds while Adobe Reader started. But since PDF is baked so closely into the OS X system, this Firefox plugin is wicked fast, and thoroughly helpful.

PhoneFinger

Testing tool for iPhone development — Replace your mouse cursor with a lifesize finger. Needs a dirty-fingernail easter egg, if you ask me.

Clutch

Web remote-control plugin for the Transmission bittorrent client. Very handy.

I Love Stars

Lightweight menu-bar app for OSX which displays, and lets you edit, the star rating for the current track in iTunes.

XBMC on OS X

Port of the XBox Media Center to OS X. Works with the Apple Remote, making it more elegant than my usual VLC + Sofa Control combination. Looks good.

tms - Command line client for Time Machine backups

Command line tool for interrogating and diffing Time Machine backups.

TapeDeck. ▸▸ The tape recorder…fast-forwarded to Mac OS X.

Graphically lovely, and drop-dead simple, audio recording app.

Crossover Games

Wine for OS X and Linux especially designed to play graphically-intensive Windows games. The Orange Box and its contents are supported, and Audio-Surf ran OK for me, with some minor resolution-based oddness. Not sure it’s worth $40, though, when I can just reboot to Boot Camp.

Vote for virtualization

I rely on virtual machines for testing Windows code — I cannot fathom how Mac developers can possibly be expected to deliver quality applications without snapshotting and rolling back OS images.

Winclone

I bought a new laptop drive for my MacBookPro last week, and with SuperDuper, was able to copy my OS X partition and boot off it within hours. The Boot Camp Windows partition, however, stumped me. No amount of disk copying or dd’ing worked.

This tool did. It does all the magick required to successfully copy a Windows partition and tweak the partition table to make Windows boot again. Hurrah!

CoverSutra

Got this as part of MacHeist recently, and dismissed it as “pointless eyecandy”. I couldn’t be more wrong — While it is graphically-lovely, it allows for keyboard control of iTunes (including tasks like rating tracks) and is a lower-memory last.fm client than the official last.fm client. Added to my Login Items!

Vara Software : ScreenFlow

Really rather sweet Mac screencasting software. The post-capture editing tools look handy.

Flying Meat: VoodooPad

Local private hypertexty wiki note-taking brain-dumping app for OS X. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and really like it.

TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software

The excellent TrueCrypt now runs on OS X, as well as Windows and Linux. I’ll definitely be shunting some of my files onto an encrypted thumbdrive later.

Iconfactory : Arcade Daze System

Gorgeously-retro 8-bit-esque system icons for OS X.

Mondrianum

OS X system-wide plugin that adds color palletes from Adobe’s kuler community to the ColorPicker widget.

Shelf - jerakeen.org

Cool prototype application by Tom Insam which monitors your foreground application in OS X, and tries to provide you some context by matching it to someone in your Address Book. It’s early days yet, but decidedly cool (and written in Python)

BusySync 2.0

BusySync 2 will synchronize between Google Calendar and iCal in both directions. Unless Apple announce this exact feature at Macworld, I’ll be buying a copy forthwith.

DTerm

Interesting looking tool which is a cross between Quicksilver and Terminal.

SpiderWorks: Learn Objective-C on the Macintosh by Mark Dalrymple and Scott Knaster

I’m giving Mac programming a go over the festive break — This seems to be a good (cheap) e-book to get me started with Objective C.

Cocoa Dev Central: Learn Cocoa

Mega-wicked-simple “getting started with Cocoa” tutorial.

Peggle

The awesome Peggle is now available for Mac, for anyone who hasn’t yet been caught in its crack-like addiction. And only $10 to register until the end of the year. Well worth it.

Macworld | Mac OS X Hints | Add more power to 10.5's screen sharing

OS X’s VNC viewer is possibly my most-used new feature in Leopard. Here’s a handful of tweaks to make it even more awesome.

appscript

Control AppleScript from Python. The prospect of using Python to hack on my iTunes library is massively exciting!

Begley's Blog: Time Machine Menu Bar Add-On

Handy “Time Machine” menu bar icon which Apple removed from the released version of Leopard. (Make sure and read the installation instructions in the comments)

ies4osx

Automatically downloads, installs and runs the Windows versions of IE natively on OS X using Darwine.

Synthesia, Piano for Everyone

The project formerly known as “Piano Hero”.

Jing Project: Visual conversation starts here. Mac or Windows.

Cool looking little screencast app from TechSmith — An easy way to grab images or video from your desktop, and share them quickly. Works in OS X and Windows.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (9A527) Gallery | Finder020.jpg

Apple make good use of their new high-resolution application icons in OS X Leopard. “Here’s to the crazy ones…”

DeskLickr - Flickrize your Mac desktop!

Automatically swap your desktop background for snaps from Flickr. I’ve had some gorgeous stuff come up in the couple of hours I’ve been running it.

infinite-sushi.com - ecto3 alpha

The splendid OS X blog authoring tool gets an (alpha) upgrade.

Xslimmer - Your Mac, on a Diet!

Free up diskspace by removing unneeded bits of applications (eg. translations for languages you don’t speak). Chris Messina reports that you can get an extra 500Mb of diskspace by slimming iWork and iLife ‘08.

A Few Command-Line Party Tricks - MacResearch

Some very cool OS X command-line utilities I never knew existed.

Remote Buddy > iPhone support

The excellent Mac remote control software adds an AJAX web-server designed for the iPhone. It works a treat for the old Mac Mini I keep under my TV.

iGTD

Donationware OS X app to help you get your act together. Comes highly recommended by friends.

iFuntastic 2.0 released with added features | iPhone Alley

OS X GUI which makes it a piece of piss to add your own ringtones to the iPhone. Those wily hackers!

telekinesis - Google Code

Remote control for your Mac, designed to be accessed by Safari on an iPhone.

OliveToast MiniMail

Lovely little email floater for Apple Mail.

Friend Photos - Facebook Screensaver

OS X screensaver which grabs your friends’ photos from Facebook. Playing with this, I was reminded that a) I have some incredibly hot friends and b) I have some incredibly strange friends.

Versions - Mac Subversion Client

“Versions is the first Mac OS X Subversion client that won’t make you long for the command line interface anymore.”

VMware Fusion Overview

If you don’t already own Parallels Desktop, the new VMWare beta is great — I far prefer “Unity” to “Coherence” for mixing Windows apps on the OS X desktop. Only $40 if you buy before the official release at the end of August.

AppFresh - All Software Updates for your Mac in One Place

Free alternative to the VersionTrackerPro Mac software updater, using iusethis.com’s database for version information

Medallia Blog: jQuery Reference Widget

Dashboard widget for the JQuery docs.

Moody - Mac OS X app to mood tag your music in iTunes

Tag your tunes by mood, then shuffle away for the right mix. Would be interesting to see if there’s a consistent way to share moods across users…

nocturne

Simple OS X app which does smart screen-inverting to make late-night computing more bearable.

Pathway

Browser which makes it easier to retrace your steps as you delve through Wikipedia.

MailActOn

Plugin for Apple Mail which allows you to quickly tag/file/act-on your emails with a couple of keystrokes. I’d been looking for something like this for a while.

Wakoopa - Software gone social

Social site tracking what applications you use and how long you use them for. Kind of a Last.FM meets IUseThis.

MIKE PIONTEK // software / mac os x / delivery status 3.2.3

Beautiful OS X Dashboard widget to track package delivery.

Panic - Coda - One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X

Panic’s newest app is aimed squarely at web-devs, attempting to roll “all” the stuff you need to build a website into one app. Looks interesting — I’m definitely guilty of needing about 7 windows open to do web development (a couple of TextMates, Firefox, Safari, a terminal or two). It’ll be interesting to see if this can bring it all together for me.

Correo - a new mail client for OS X

An attempt to mould Thunderbird into a more Mac-like mail client.

iusethis mac software: applications used by rodbegbie

Up-to-date list of the software I use on my Mac.

Slife Labs

App which tracks what you’re browsing/reading/writing/working-on over time. Kind of cool to build up a picture of your day.

Apple - Boot Camp

New refresh of Boot Camp - now with official support for Windows Vista.

Products > Remote Buddy

Tool to enable use of the Apple Remote in more apps than just Front Row on OS X. I hooked my old PowerPC Mac Mini up to a USB IR receiver, and can now control VLC with the Apple Remote that came with my MacBookPro. Hoorah! Well worth €10.

Billable: Simple service and invoice tracking for Mac OS X.

Nicely-done OSX app to help you keep track of your hours and invoicing when doing freelance work.

We just got xvid working on the Apple TV

So simple, it barely counts as a “hack”. If this is for real, then I’ll buy one in a heartbeat. Guess the Apple TV really *is* running OS X.

DockArt

Replace the iTunes icon in the dock with the coverart of the currently playing track. Nice.

Capture a Screencast with a Mac

Tools to help you create a screencast in OS X. Some of them also look like they’ll be handy when doing a live demo.

Package Tracker - Monkey Business Labs

Package tracking widget for OS X’s Dashboard. Saves you wearing out the F5 key when you’re waiting for something shiny.

Screencast on Quicksilver's "Comma Trick"

Didn’t know you could do this with QuickSilver. Those Windows apps that try to clone just the program launching part of QS are really missing the beauty of the app.

A faster way to speed up Mail.app

Since Apple Mail uses the opensource sqlite for its data repository, you can speed up Mail by running a SQL vacuum on the index file.

Dream Recorder

Sleep analysis tool for Macs, using the built-in iSight and microphone to work out when you’re in “deep sleep”. I think Joy would kill me if I started sleeping with my laptop, though.

Bill Gates on Vista and Apple's 'Lying' Ads - Newsweek Technology - MSNBC.com

Bill Gates trolls the Apple fanboy. “Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.” I had to double-check this wasn’t some “Fake Steve”-style spoof!

CrashPlan

Impressive looking network backup software. Straightforward to set-up, you can either pay CrashPlan to backup to their servers, or use local or friends’ hard drives for free. Lots of nice touches, like using Bonjour to discover local backup destinations automatically. Once the Linux client is ready, I’ll be in heaven.

Wormux

Open source Worms-a-like. Far too many of my student hours were taken up playing “Worms 2” against my flatmates. Admittedly, most of that time was taken up by giggling as we named our worms things like “Sean Is A Virgin” and “Jim’s Cock”, but I think the game was fun too.

Vienna

Open-source newsreader for OS X. Looks to be worthy competition for NetNewsWire.

macosxhints.com - Take iSight snapshots during invalid login attempts

Nice security hack to find anyone trying to get into your laptop.

DarwiinRemote is released! (Hirolog)

Use your Wiimote as a mouse on a Mac.

Parallels Desktop New Coherence Feature

The latest beta of Parallels Desktop for OS X allows you to seamlessly display windows from, erm, Windows on your OSX desktop. This is very cool stuff. Makes me wish I had an Intel Mac to try it out on.

Mac Favicon | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation

A “theme” for Firefox on OSX which adds Favicons to the bookmarks toolbar, where they belong. Hurrah!

Ben Ward » Twitgit for Twitter

Nice unobtrusive non-interrupty Dashboard widget for tracking and posting-to Twitter.

Boing Boing: Apple to add Trusted Computing to the new kernel? (July 2005)

Cory Doctorow’s spectacularly pant-pissy and, with hindsight, almost 100% inaccurate flameout about Apple including a TPM module. I wonder if he’s had the tattoo lasered-off yet.

Trusted Computing for Mac OS X

Really interesting article on the TPM “Trusted Computing” chip inside some Intel Macs. Explains in detail that TPM != Microsoft’s evil Palladium scheme, and that the chip (which is not in newer Macs) can’t even be accessed without special device drivers.

Disco - Mac Disc Burning

CD burner for Mac. Fairly boring idea, sure, but the UI is a gorgeous example of minimalism.

Adobe Labs - Adobe Soundbooth

Beta of a new audio-editing app from Adobe.

TubeSock - Rip videos from YouTube

OSX app which downloads YouTube flash videos, converts them to MPEG4, and loads them onto your iPod Video.

Apple - Apple - Mac OS X - Leopard Sneak Peek - Time Machine

Most of the Apple stuff announced today was fairly unexciting. Nice improvements, but not revolutionary. But this, their constantly rolling system backup looks brilliant. The UI, if it works as advertised, is genius too.

Adobe Labs - Project: Lightroom

Adobe’s Lightroom photo-processing beta is now available for Windows in addition to OSX.

The Tao of Mac - The Unswitch Saga: Get The T-Shirt

“I nearly switched to Ubuntu when Mark did…” hee.

PhillRyu.com - The Top Ten Most Beautiful OS X Apps

A smattering of free/shareware OSX apps with to-die-for UIs.

visor

Cunning OSX hack to enable an instantly-accessible Quake-style terminal window.

Peanut Gallery - The Online Interactive Multi-User Movie Theater Simulation

Genius! Watch movies with your friends across the internet. Social software so you can heckle and chat as you watch DVDs.

MacSaber: Turn Your Mac Into A Jedi Weapon

Hah! Using the motion-sensor built-in to recent Mac laptops to synthesize lightsaber noises. Genius!

JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3™

Cross-platform mountable network file-system storing your precious data with Amazon’s S3 service.

blakeseely.com » Mugshot

Excellent wee Flickr organizr for OSX. Easily sift through your photos, sets, contacts and groups. The author is now working on Aperture for Apple.

DOSBox, a x86 emulator with DOS

Tool for running olde DOS games (Soundblaster emulation and all) in Windows/Linux/OSX. I’ll have to try getting “Jones In The Fast Lane” up and running with it.

Apple - Boot Camp

Well blow me! Apple have made available a tool to help you install Windows XP on your new Intel Mac. Strikes me that a MacBook Pro is the best Windows laptop you’re gonna find at the moment.

XScreenSaver

jwz’s awesome screensaver collection is now available for OSX. Windows users are still SOL. “There is no Windows version of xscreensaver, and there never will be. Please stop asking. Microsoft killed my company, and I hold a personal grudge.”

Orbicule | Undercover

Mac laptop “anti-theft” app. Interesting feature set, although I’m cynical about how many times the “thief” turns on the laptop and connects to the internet, rather than the poor sap who buys it from them on Craigslist.

Hamachi

To be tried-out: Cross-platform app that creates VPNs between computers — even if they’re behind firewalls. Downside: Requires connecting to a centrally-run server to initiate connection, which will soon be charging $$$.

Tunatic: free music identification software

Shazam-a-like “hold a microphone up to a speaker and identify the tune” service that runs on your PC. Neither codebase or database is open, sadly.

How To Install Apple’s Front Row

Install Front Row on any Mac, not just the new iMacs.

Celestia

Wow. An amazing free space “simulator” for Windows, OSX or Linux. Tip: Select “Demo” from the Help menu to get an idea of what it covers.

the electric sheep screen-saver

My screensaver-of-choice — Collaboratively generate frames for gorgeously-trippy animations.