You should back up your hard drive. You’ve heard it a million times, but most people don’t do it. So we’re going to make it easy: CrashPlan is the best backup tool. It’s what you should use to back up your data, both on-site and off-site.
The Mac is a lucky platform because it has so many great ways to quickly upload files with a simple drag and drop or stroke of the keyboard. Among all the options, Dockdrop is our favourite thanks to its simplicity and versatility.
Hotkeys can save you a lot of time, especially when they’re customised to do your specific bidding. Although there are many ways to add custom global keyboard shortcuts to OS X, Quicksilver is the best thanks to its speed and versatility.
Mac OS X has a great built-in address book and a number of useful third-party alternatives, but out of all the options Cobook is our favourite. It’s a very new app, currently still in beta, but its intelligent search and social media integration make it very easy to love.
If you don’t like the way your keyboard is laid out, a keyboard remapper can change it. There are only a few for Mac OS X, and the lack of development on many of your options makes your choice pretty easy. Regardless, KeyRemap4Macbook would rise to the top thanks to numerous remapping options, customisability and helpful bonus features.
Mac OS X already offers a means of capturing screenshots with a few keyboard shortcuts, but if you want to do a little more you have to grab a third-party tool. Of the many available, Skitch is our favourite for its many annotation tools and instant-sharing options.
Mac OS X is full of ways to record your screen, with a tool built in to Quicktime Player and a vast number of third-party apps. Among the many tools, Screenflow is easily our top choice. It’s fast, feature-rich, handles everything about the screencasting process from start to finish, and doubles as possibly the best simple video-editing application on the Mac.
StreamToMe, our top choice for streaming and live converting video on Mac OS X, is an easy choice for the category because it is, essentially, the only choice. But with its great performance, thorough video and audio format support and $0 price tag, it will likely beat out any competition for some time to come.
There are a handful of good image editors on the Mac, but Photoshop has long been the king of them all. It’s our top pick, but that’s not to say there aren’t other apps that can get the most common tasks done for (a lot) less money. Here’s a look at why Photoshop’s the best and plenty of alternatives that might work just as well for you.
