Force Eject 1.0 can be used to eject any removable disk that the system will not eject. It’s freeware, and can also be found on Apple’s site.
Spotless 2.0.1 is not free, but is fairly inexpensive at $16.95. It does only one thing: it enables and disables Spotlight content indexing with the click of a button. If your Mac is sometimes very sloooow, particularly after plugging in an external drive, it could well be Spotlight indexing. The ability to turn it off, and then back on before I go to bed, to let it index all night, is a real time-saver.
“Various tweaks and incantations for fixing [Spotlight Indexing problems] are floating around the Web, but the solution I’ve settled on is Fixamac Software’s Spotless [...], which gives you per-volume control over Spotlight indexing.”
~ Dan Frakes, editor of the MacFixIt web site, columnist for Macworld Magazine and author of Mac OS X Power Tools, Second Edition.
Another useful utility is Dragoman. It will batch-convert “thousands of images in one scoop”. Dragoman handles the widely used image formats, including PDF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF and GIF.
It also converts audio files, and archive files (RAR, ZIP, Stuffit, etc) using drag and drop. It is quick and easy. A trial is free, purchase is $39.
Xslimmer 1.5.3 is a good solution if you are running with minimal storage… that means your hard drive is too full. In this day and age of cheap storage, I don’t buy that excuse, but if you do, Xslimmer will remove the code from Universal Binary applications not used by your Mac’s architecture. It also eliminates unwanted application localizations… all those languages that you never use.
The Xslimmer site has a lot more info than I will include here, but Apple’s page has a few examples of what this little utility can do:
- Audio Hijack Pro 2.6.7, from 12.7Mb to 9.6Mb (3.1Mb, 24%)
- BBEdit 8.5, from 33.6Mb to 23.5Mb (10.1Mb, 30%)
- Google Earth 4, from 101Mb to 52.8Mb (48.2Mb, 47%)
- Photoshop CS3 Beta, from 246Mb to 144Mb (102Mb, 41%)Your Mac, on a diet!
Then there’s SuperDocker 2.2.1. Customize your Dock, use transparency on hidden application icons, add separation in the dock… the list is way too long for me to put on this already-long post. The above link leads to Apple’s page, as the developer’s page is in French. SuperDocker is freeware.
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