Essential Mac OS X Utilities

Mac OS X is built on top of BSD Unix, and that means it adopts Unix's multiuser permissions model. That's great for security, but it can be a pain sometimes.

Say you're logged in as an ordinary user, but you need to do something that requires administrative rights. Well-behaved applications (such as the Installer) will generally ask for an administrator's password -- but not all applications are that well behaved. And switching between user accounts takes time. What to do?

Enter Pseudo, which is designed to address this very issue. Simply drag any application to the Pseudo icon, and Pseudo will let you run that application as if you were some other user. Presto -- problem solved!

Home page: http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/pseudo.html
Developer: Brian Hill
License: shareware (US$15)
Open source: no

Growl is a nifty little program. It pops up notifications to let you know about things like getting e-mail or receiving a chat message. For most applications, you can customize which events you want to know about.

Most popular applications support Growl notifications, and if your favorite application doesn't, you can write a plugin for Growl or use Growl's command-line utility to customize Growl to your liking.

Home page: http://www.growl.info
License: freeware
Open source: yes

If you're doing anything at all with images on a Mac -- from casual digital photography to high-end graphic design -- then you need GraphicConverter. Apple has bundled this program with certain computers, so you may already have it. But if you don't, get it! Although GraphicConverter has a rudimentary set of drawing tools, it isn't primarily a drawing program. Rather, it's designed for other sorts of manipulations. It reads and writes an astounding number of image formats, and will do just about anything to your images, from resizing and recoloring to applying Photoshop-like filters. Once you pay the shareware registration fee, it will even do fairly sophisticated batch operations without the need for complex scripting.

It's hard to overemphasize the utility of this program. I encourage anyone who thinks they might possibly have use for it to get a copy and play around.

Home page: http://www.lemkesoft.com/content/188/graphicconverter.html
Developer: Lemkesoft GmbH
License: shareware (€29.95/US$34.95); registration enables batch-processing feature
Open source: no