Here is a quick rundown of 5 useful Mac Apps – Snagit EverNote ScreenFlow Reeder and DaisyDisk. All of these Apps are pretty useful to me in one way or another so take a quick peek. All are available for a Mac and a few are available on both Mac and Windows.
5 Useful Mac Apps
(In no particular order)
- Snagit Mac/Windows $50 – While slightly pricey, I do prefer Snagit over the free app Skitch. It is integrated very well in an non-annoying fashion compared to most UIs. That said for $50 I would recommend trying Skitch and the trial version of Snagit first and weigh the two options. While Snagit is nice, Skitch is free. But nothing is free, its a gateway drug to Evernote subscriptions. Both Skitch and Snagit capture video.
- Evernote – 60Mb free or Premium with 1Gb of storage is $5 per/mo, $45 per/yr Mac/Windows/iPad/iPhone/Android/Ubuntu(sorta). I am a huge Evernote fan, I use the free version and probably average around 30Mb a month. They have recently added in new features which would drive storage up that would gateway people into needing more than the free 60Mb per month.
- ScreenFlow – $99 Mac Only Pricey yet makes video editing really easy. I do a lot of screen capturing for nerding out and ScreenFlow has almost all the things I want readily found. They have a free evaluation so it is worth taking a look at. It leverages APIs to Youtube and other sites that you can log in and even set meta data from the App such as description, category and tags. You can upload to Youtube from Snagit but the extra options like meta data is not available. Its nice to click upload and walk away knowing you don’t need to do any extra editing on Youtube or Vimeo to the video posted.
- DaisyDisk $10 Mac Only– Daisy Disk presents a very unique user interface (UI). It presents storage in a pie chart on steroids. You can drill down into the file systems quickly and find large files taking up your disk. Normally I would be appalled at spending $10 on a GUI file utility but the UI makes it worth it. Thats not something we get to say very often anymore. You can also scan any filesystem you have mounted on the machine you have installed. While it is l33t to use ” du -a /var | sort -n -r | head -n 10 ” sometimes a GUI has it’s place in efficiency this is one.
- Reeder $5 Mac/iPhone/Ipad – Last but far from least, Reeder. Reeder is a Google Reader client. I love Google Reader but it epitomizes why fat clients are far from leaving our lives. While the service is free and great the UI sucks compared to a good old fat client like Reeder. Hey Gmail is great too, but I still POP it into Outlook because web UIs are far from being good enough for me to ditch the flexibility I get not being strapped with the constraints of web programming.
Evernote is great at free but Reeder is amazing at $5. So it is a toss up between the two.
- Below is a quick video only screencast of about 30 seconds in each one of the Apps.
Love to hear what other folks do for managing and archiving information from web pages and other sources. Thanks for stopping by!
Thanks for reminding me that I meant to buy Reeder. I’ve heard good things about it from many people. For simply catching up on my RSS feeds as quickly as possible, though, nothing comes close to newsbeuter (yes, I’m a huge CLI geek).
Regarding Snagit and ScreenFlow, have you used Camtasia for Mac? I’m curious how they compare (especially since Snagit and Camtasia both are from Techsmith). I loved the Windows version of Camtasia but was sadly disappointed when they came out with the Mac version and I tried it (although, in their defense, it was a 1.0). I did purchase iShowU HD Pro (for Mac) a couple years ago but, for $60, was a little disappointed with the inability to do any “post-production” editing. I simply wanted to add a little five-second “intro slide” (“title”, in Camtasia terms) but was unable to do so.
Anyways, thanks for the comparison. I might have to spring for ScreenFlow if I can motivate myself to start making videos again!
Heya pal, You know I haven’t tried Camtasia. In Snagit it mentions that as the video editor and offers you a friendly link to go buy it 🙂 Snagit is nice for screencaps.
Reeder is pretty awesome, rofl @ newsbeuter. Did you post that using Lynx? 🙂
Cya!!