OS X Tools

MacOS X Utilities

Not every Mac user needs these tools, but for those of us who manage labs or do other technical work, some of them 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. My emphasis is on their usefulness for the given task, and they all score high marks by that measure.

iStumbler	A handy 802.11 WiFi scanner that also sees Bluetooth devices.
Super Duper	A great backup utility that makes a bootable copy of your drive.
Carbon Copy Cloner	Another great backup utility that makes a bootable copy of your drive.
Deja Vu	A nifty backup utility.
XPostFacto	Make OS X work on officially unsupported Macs.
TinkerTool	Change a bunch of hidden system settings.
DragThing	One of the better alternative dock things.
Little Snitch	Find out what your Mac is doing behind the scenes.
A Better Finder Rename	A nice utility for batch renaming of files.
Snapz Pro X	A powerful screen capture utility that can also record motion.
Disk Warrior	A very reliable utility for recovering data from a corrupted drive.
Techtool Pro	Best tool for comprehensive hardware tests.
File Salvage	Recover files even after they have been deleted.
Rember	Mac OS X memory test utility.
Teleport	teleport lets you use a single mouse and keyboard to control several Macs.
iStat Menus	A full-featured System Statistics utility.
Omni Disk Sweeper	Erase sensitive data.
Audio Hijack Pro	Grab that sound file.
Airfoil	Airfoil lets you send any audio source from your Mac to your Airport Express.
Text Wrangler	The successor to BBEdit Lite.
Monolingual	Get rid of the languages you don't speak.
WinClone	Use WinClone with Boot Camp to create/deploy an image to the Windows partition.
rEFIt	EFI Utility adds a nicer interface to the Startup Disk options.
BootCamp	Boot Camp is Apple's utility for running Windows on your Mac.
iDefrag	Defragment your Mac OS X partition. Works great, but takes hours!
iPartition	Great for resizing a partition without erasing it. Ideal helper for Boot Camp!