MacOS X Utilities

Not every Mac user needs these tools, but for some they are indispensable. All of the utilities listed below are safe, well designed, and perform as advertised. Some are free, some are cheap and some are full commercial products. Our emphasis is on their usefulness for the given task, and they all score high marks by that measure.


Carbon Copy Cloner

Make a bootable copy of your OS X drive.

Deja Vu

A nifty backup utility.

XPostFacto

Make OS X work on officially unsupported Macs.

TinkerTool

Change a bunch of settings.

DragThing

One of the better alternative dock things.

Little Snitch

Find out what your Mac is doing behind the scenes.

  Add trackpad tricks to your older Mac
Screen Spanning Doctor

Your iBook or iMac can span screens just like the pro Mac models.

A Better Finder Rename

For batch renaming of files.

Snapz Pro

A powerful screen capture utility that can also record motion.

Disk Warrior

Still the best tool for recovering a corrupted drive.

Tech Tool Pro

Best tool for comprehensive hardware tests.

File Salvage

Recover files even after they have been deleted.

Rember

Mac OS X memory test utility.

 
Super Duper

A great backup utility.

 Teleport
Teleport

A very cool virtual KVM switch.

 
iStat

The best System Statistics utility.

 
Omni Disk Sweeper

Erase sensitive data.

 
Audio Hijack Pro

Grab that sound file.

SoundSource

Free! Control all your sound inputs and outputs.

AirFoil

Unleash your Airport Express!

 
Text Wrangler

The successor to BBEdit Lite.

Monolingual
Get rid of the languages you don't speak.
XSlimmer
Get rid of the PowerPC code on your Intel Mac

Ars-Technica does a good review of the numerous dock substitutes and enhancers