Two things make my life easier as a designer. Firstly, the smoother my Mac runs, the faster I can work. There’s nothing worse than trying to push work out as fast a possible and then upon the simplest of actions, opening Finder for instance, your little color wheel cursor appears…spinning and spinning… for no apparent reason other than to test your patience. It’s called a cursor for a reason – I have a special name for mine. The second thing that helps me is having the right combinations of tools that enable me to work as efficiently as possible. Below is a list of useful (and free) apps that I use consistently to help me as designer and web developer to work more efficiently and get my Mac running fast and smooth.

1. App Cleaner

AppCleaner is a small application that allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps. Installing an application distributes many files throughout your system using space of your hard drive. When you uninstall these apps, many of these bits and pieces are left on your hard drive, needlessly taking up space.  AppCleaner finds all these small files and safely deletes them. Simply drag and drop an application onto the AppCleaner window. It automatically finds all the related files specific to that app and adds them to the AppCleaner window for you to review. You then have the option of deleting all the files, or keeping the ones you think you may need at a later stage, should you reinstall the app. You then simply click the delete button. No more orphan files on your disk!

2. Monolingual

Monolingual is a program for removing unnecessary language files from Mac OS X, in order to reclaim several hundred megabytes of disk space. As designers, we usually have huge files which can very quickly eat away at your hard drive space so getting rid of any superfluous files is sometimes very necessary. Having a fair amount of freed-up space on your hard drive for Photoshop to use as a scratch disk will help you work on your files will less drag, especially if your RAM is limited. If you’re running out of hard drive space, this is the app for you.

3. Quicksliver

Quicksilver is an application that lets you reach any program, folder or file in a few keystrokes and is aimed at increasing user efficiency. It allows you to use the keyboard to promptly do things like launch applications, manipulate files and data, run scripts, or send email. You don’t have to go searching through your files to find something and you don’t have to worry about how your folders are arranged. You can customize its search options to include your address book, iTunes, and recent email addresses. Set this application to load at start up then customize a quick launch key so it can be at your fingers when you need it. This is the fastest way to find files and open applications.

Alternate: Namely

4.  Growl

Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X. It allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications so you know what’s happening on your computer at all times. Growl installs itself as a preference pane and is added to the Mac OS X System Preferences. Users are able to fully control notifications by going to this pane. Here the interface will allow you to enable and disable Growl’s notifications for certain applications in their entirety, or select specific notifications for each application. The display options of the notifications can also be fully customized from small non-intrusive floating icons in the corner of your screen, to larger ones with sound.

5.  Teleport

Teleport lets you use a single mouse and keyboard to control several Macs. It allows you to synchronize your pasteboard between computers (and limit the size of the pasteboard if you wish), so you can cut from one computer and paste in another. It also allows you to transfer files by simply dragging them from one Mac to another (although this tends to work better with smaller files).

Teleport will need to be installed on all Macs you wish to link up. After installing you can find the program in the System Preferences pane. You will need open up two ports on your firewall they will be saved as “trusted hosts” under the security settings.

6. OnyX

OnyX is a multifunction utility for Mac OS X (PowerPC and Intel). It allows you to verify the Startup Disk and the structure of its system files; to run miscellaneous tasks of system maintenance; to configure the hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock and of some of Apple’s own applications; to delete caches; to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome and much more…

Alternates: Deeper and TinkerTool

7. MagiCal

MagiCal is a menu-based clock and calendar. It features a huge range of configuration options for how the time and date are displayed, and can operate either in conjunction with, or as a replacement for the built in system menu clock. In addition to this, MagiCal features a handy drop-down calendar that can be torn off and placed anywhere on screen.

Alternate: MenuCalendarClock

8. FileZilla

FileZilla is an open-source, cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. It is available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Features include a message log, site manager, local and remote file and folder view, and a transfer queue. FileZilla also allows you to perform multiple file transfers simultaneously.

Alternate: Cyberduck

9. Aptana Studio

Aptana Studio is a top IDE for web developers. It offers integrated language support for HTML, DOM, JavaScript and CSS. Customize your Studio with additional plugins for PHP, Jaxer, Ruby on Rails, Python, Adobe AIR, Apple iPhone and Nokia S60 development. For Java support, plug Aptana Studio into Eclipse. Also available for Windows and Linux.

Alternate: TextWrangler

10: Disk Inventory X

Disk Inventory X is a hard drive analyzer for Mac OS X 10.3 (and later). It shows the sizes of files and folders in a special graphical way called “treemaps”. If you’ve ever wondered where all your disk space has gone, Disk Inventory X will tell you which folders and apps are eating away at your hard drive space. New features include a finder context menu plugin with an “Open in Disk Inventory X” command for folders (this needs to be installed manually in the preference window) and a new selection list which can show all files or limit them to a list of a specific file type.

Bonus App. Adium

Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X. It can be used to connect to any number of messaging accounts on any combination of supported messaging services, including, AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, AOL, GTalk, ICQ, Facebook, LiveJournal, Bonjour, MySpaceIM, Skype, Twitter and more. The latest version includes support for file transfers, and for the Growl notification system. Adium is highly customizable and allows users to alter the appearance of dock icons, contact list styles, message windows, and emoticons.

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