9 Programs Worth Buying for OS X

Here some of the software I have spent money on and that was well worth worth the cost. Most of these deserve their own post and screencast just to show you how truly useful they are, but for now, here is a high level overview of each program.

• 1Password - I owned this software for about a year before using it. It was part of a MacHeist packaged deal. I didn’t think I would ever want to use a password manager. (Real men keep their passwords in their head right?) Grant mentioned that it was a must have piece of software, so I finally decided to try it out. It really is incredible. I’ve been blown away by how much time I was wasting dealing with passwords. If you deal with passwords for multiple clients, this really is a lifesaver. All of your passwords are protected and encrypted by a single strong password on your machine so your single password gives you access to all of your sites–even though they all have different randomly generated passwords. It will also act as a bookmark manager for sites that require a login. A single click will open the site and log you in. It can generate secure passwords and handle filling out forms with multiple identities and credit card information. There are plugins for pretty much every browser so if you create a password in Firefox, it will still work when you need to login from Safari. There is also a way to sync between multiple computers.
• JungleDisk - This piece of software lets you use Amazon S3 for storage and mounts it as a local disk. It also has a fairly good backup mechanism so you can schedule backups. You pay Amazon for your storage. JungleDisk also offers a $1 per month service that gives you some nice features like resuming downloads and updating only the changed portion of a file during backup. This handles the backup of important folders that I need to keep backed up, even when I’m on the road and not near my TimeMachine disk.
• ForkLift - This allows connections to SCP, SFTP, FTP and S3 storage locations. The big draw for me was the ability to quickly put something up on Amazon to make it downloadable without putting the strain on my server. (This is how I serve up the ambient sound files.) The ability to stay in the same program and deal with all my hard drives as well as any storage I have on servers or Amazon S3 has really made my life easier. The interface is very much in the style of the OS X finder which helps keep things easy to use. It also support quicklook and icons for images which makes it easier to navigate and find what you are looking for on the server.
• DevonThink Pro Office - This is where I put all my pdfs. Probably the best thing about DevonThink is the auto-categorization. It looks at the text of a document and then figures out where the other similar documents are and suggests the folders to move it to. You can literally categorize 100 documents in 3 to 5 minutes. DevonThink uses its own database, but you can easily export all of your documents out to the filesystem preserving the database hierarchy. Hopefully future versions will let you keep everything directly in the filesystem and just use DevonThink to manage it.
• Skype - I didn’t buy the program, but I did pay for the package that gives you unlimited calls in the US. With all my contacts in OS X, it means I can call someone by typing a few letters from their name and a single click. It is amazing how much time this saves over the course of a busy day of telephone calls. If you use Skype on a Mac, don’t forget that the audio in is a line in not a microphone input. You will need some type of amp or a USB headset to get decent sound (I use a Plantronic MX500I and it works well).
• Acrobat Professional - If you are trying to go paperless, there are some things that you just aren’t going to be able to do without Acrobat. Preview is very handy, but there are some features that just work better with Acrobat. In particular you can’t add your signature to documents with Preview and the markup and editing capabilities of Acrobat go well beyond most anything else I’ve seen. The workflow features is particularly nice because you can set it up to do something (like OCR or compress) a whole directory of documents at once and then just let it run overnight.
• Contactizer Pro - This piece of software does a few different things. It integrates with your AddressBook and iCal so if you add a contact it shows up in your AddressBook and vice versa. The program includes some basic project management features and you can do things like setup a process that gets populated with tasks every time you need to replicate the process. The key thing I use it for is for its mail merge functionality. It can merge to Word, Pages, and email.
• OmniFocus - I use this for keep track of tasks. The biggest plus to using this is that I can take an email, select the relevant text and tell it to create a task in OmniFocus. My assistant has a copy as well and I can put items in her OmniFocus so if I think of something while I’m gone I can tap out a note in my Blackberry and send it to her OmniFocus inbox. I believe they have a version for the iPhone and you can sync between the desktop and mobile versions.
• TextMate - A great all around text editor. It is simple enough to not get in your way and it is powerful enough to handle most anything you might need. It can do some tedious things very quickly for example, taking a list of items in a text file and wrapping each line with an html li tag to make a list. Another big plus is the fact you can use regular expressions in search and replace boxes.

Three Things You Didn’t Know About Excel

Excel is really a “swiss army knife” type tool. I have used it for all kinds of odd things including HTML for long lists, creating a checkerboard, analyzing server log files, projecting cell phone usage and analysis whether people preferred live or telecast music at a church overflow room.  Excel has so many hidden little features that it is easy to overlook some of the capabilities that let you do a complicated task quickly.

This video demonstrates three capabilities of Excel that the average user does not know about.

Three Things You Didn’t Know About Excel from Productivity501.

(If you have trouble seeing the video, turn on HD.  You’ll have to go to Vimeo, but you can watch it in high resolution that way.)

The three items covered are:

1. Transpose copy function
2. Validate entries to a list
3. Named regions

None of these things are very earth shattering, but knowing these tools can turn 20 minutes of boring Excel work into a two minute simple job.

Please let me know what you think of these videos and if you’d like to see more of them in the future.

Buying Software

Quick Tip: Don’t avoid buying software when it will save you time.  I found a $150 piece of software that automates a task I was paying $1,000 per month to have someone else do.

Mindnode - Mind Mapping Software

If you have OS X 10.5 and are looking for a simple free mind mapping program, take a look at Mindnode.  It is very basic, but that helps keep things very simple. If you want a good introduction to the mind mapping process, you should take a look at this book.

Photo Editing Options

Adobe recently launched a free online version of Photoshop.  it appears to share the name of their regular photo application more than anything else.  From what I’ve see it is kind of like Flickr with some image editing capabilities aimed at the home user.  If you need a more powerful image editing, but don’t need the full version of Photoshop, Photo Elements ($99) is a good choice for Mac or Windows. On Mac, there is a nice program called Pixelmator ($59) that I’ve been pleased with.  Serif Software also has a basic Windows photo editing program that will do what many people need.  They have free and paid versions ($10 to $79).  Also the Gimp is worth checking out.  It is open source (and free) and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux.

When to Buy a Faster Computer

Computers are so closely tied to our efforts to be productive that it is valuable to take some time and think about how to maximize our use of these complex devices. There are many factors that impact one’s productivity with these machines.

• The speed of the computer. (the raw ability of a computer to do tasks)
• The configuration of the computer. (settings, memory, physical placement, etc.)
• The software being used. (wordprocessor, spreadsheet, email, etc.)
• The training of the user. (informal, formal, software training, etc.)
• The maintenance performed by the user. (removing spyware, keeping things organized, doing backups, etc.)

Each of these areas deserve their own post or two, so for now I’m going to concentrate on the first–the speed of a computer. For most users, this is the least important aspect of productivity. This is because on almost any computer purchased in the last 4 to 5 years, if everything else is equal the speed of the computer and has the least impact on productivity for most users. Obviously, this isn’t what you are going to hear from anyone who is paid a commision to sell computers, so let me say it again. For most users, the speed of their computer is the least significant factor in their productivity.

Today users who feel their computers are slow are more likely to be suffering from spyware or lack of ram instead of too little processing power. That being said, there are times where the speed of the computer becomes a hinderance and that is what we are going to be looking at here. Just keep in mind that these issues only impact a small number of computer users who work with processor-intensive applications like video editing, digital audio, graphics and some types of software development.

Applications that require a lot of computing resources often require you to wait sometimes for hours while it does a bunch of calculations.

For example, if you are editing a movie, when you get to the end you’ll probably need to render it before dumping it to tape. The rendering process goes through and calculates how to display each pixel correctly for each frame and creates the movie file. This can take several hours for even a short 30 minute film.

Obviously, waiting for something to render for two hours slows you down, but since it is something you can plan for, it doesn’t result in 2 hours of wasted time. Very few people are going to sit around and watch the computer “think” for several hours. Instead they will work on something else, use a different machine, catch up on sleep or go to dinner.

The place where computers can slow you down is when you can’t batch it all together. When the computer has to pause for 30 seconds or 2 minutes at a time, you’ll see a significant drop in what you are able to accomplish because it interrupts your train of thought. A pause of 3 to 5 seconds might be somewhat annoying, but when a piece of software stops to think and it makes breaks you out of your flow of work, that is where you need to start looking for a faster tool.

Sometimes a faster tool means different software. For example, Photoshop will allow you to work with large images in a reduced quality mode that keeps everything working quickly even if you are working with a 50 meg photograph. Once you are done working with the image, it will take the time to render everything out a higher quality while you go get some coffee. Many of the cheap digital photo programs don’t offer this option.

Modern operating systems (Windows XP, OS X, Linux) allow you work on more than one thing at a time. This means that even if your video editing program is busy rendering your feature length movie, you can still play a game of solitare or browse the web. In fact, this is a good test to see if your computer is slowing you down. If you find yourself using other pieces of software for short periods of time while your main program completes, it is a good indication that your productivity is suffering.

Computers are designed to multi-task. This means that they can act like they are doing many things at once by taking a bunch of tasks and spending a short interval doing a small part of each of them in rapid succession. While this works for computers, it is a very inefficient way for humans to work because it breaks your train of thought. If your computer is forcing you to multi-task, you need to find a better way to accomplish your work.

Originally published on October 10, 2005.