In a similar style to an old post discussing tweaks, here’s a few applications that I seem to be installing on all my machines, because they’re just fantastic:
RocketDock – Yes, I know it’s a copy of the standard OS X dock, but it works really well. I used to find myself moving and minimising windows until I got to the desktop icons to open an application… now, all I need to do is move the mouse to the top of the screen and the dock pops up in front of anything that’s open. It’s especially handy on my laptop, where I have docklets showing my Wi-Fi and battery life replacing the ones in my system tray. Plus all icons look prettier at high-res. Oh, and it’s free – check it out.
UltraMon – A program that’ll handle a multiple monitor setup much better than the standard NVIDIA control panel. The main addition is additional taskbars on each monitor, just displaying the windows on that screen (which makes a lot of sense). It’ll also handle multiple wallpapers, screensavers, and a lot more… including custom theme support. Unfortunately, it’s $40 to purchase, but there is a limited free alternative (that I haven’t tried) called MultiMon.
DropBox – Backups and syncing files between computers can be hard sometimes, especially if you get confused and wonder which file is the newest version. Dropbox integrates itself right into Windows Explorer (or OS X), and then all you need to do is drop a file into the folder located in My Documents. It’ll upload the file onto the web server (2GB storage for free), and then download / update the files on computers linked with that account. You can share folders between people pretty easily as well. What I like is the two special folders – upload something into the ‘Public’ folder to instantly get a URL for the file, or upload a folder of images into ‘Photos’ to instantly create a web gallery to share with friends. I think it’ll be replacing my USB stick for work next year, to be honest.
