Mac: Flexibits, creators of Lifehacker's favourite calendar app Fantastical, has released its command-line approach to contacts with Cardhop. This new contacts app is oriented around actions rather than your contacts database; you mainly use it by writing commands, kind of like talking to Siri. It's a potentially compelling interface -- if you can remember to use it.

iOS: Your favourite artist dropped a new album at midnight, and you wish you could be right next to your best friend to listen to it track-by-track and freak out over how great the music is, but unfortunately you're both in different places. Normally, you'd think the solution is to put the phone on speaker and just have a listening party that way. But there's a better solution for that: An app -- several, actually.

Your Mac comes packed with a perfectly fine calendar app, but it's lacking advanced features, multiple ways to view your calendar and external service integration. For all that and more, we like Fantastical.

Mac OS X already comes with a solid system monitor, but it's not that great to just glance at your overall system health. For that, we like Monity, which sits in your Notification Center for easy access to a wealth of information.

Your photo library is a mess. Your downloads folder is a mess. Your music folders are riddled with so many duplicates that you can't tell what's new and what's left over from Napster. We all have too many duplicate files on our computers we don't need. To get rid of them on your Mac, we recommend Gemini.

Over the years, Macs have had lots of options when it comes to app launchers. Alfred is our pick because it manages to balance features with usability. Anyone can pick it up and start using it, and there's plenty of room for expansion if you want to dig deeper into automation.

Email clients come in all shapes and sizes, but when it comes to the options available on the Mac, we feel that Airmail is the best email client for most people. It's easy to use, supports a number of different email providers, has a solid search function and more.

When you think of image editors on any platform, your mind goes straight to Photoshop. For most of us, paying Adobe's high costs will get us an app that does more than we really need. As a result, we feel Pixelmator will win the hearts of most users on the Mac. It handles just about every image-editing task you'd think to throw at it for less than the cost of two months of a Photoshop subscription.

While it's relatively unlikely you'll run into malware using the Mac, it's not impossible, and you may want to consider an antivirus tool to protect your Windows-using friends from any malware you might inadvertently send their way. We think that Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac is the best choice, and it's free.

Reading a lot of blogs can be tough to manage without an RSS news reader, which consolidates everything you read in one place. While there are plenty of news readers on the Mac, Reeder wins our hearts thanks to its beautiful and simple interface, thorough integration with social features, and fantastic customisability.

Word processing apps are one of the longest-established categories of software, but developers are still finding new ways to make them better. While traditional word processors opt to pack in as many features as possible, smaller developers aim to perfect the simplicity and ease of writing so you can get more done. That brings us to Write 2, our new favourite word processing app for the Mac.

Finding excellent free software for your Mac is increasingly tough. In our fourth annual Lifehacker Pack for Mac, we're highlighting the best free downloads for better productivity, communication, media management and more.

Even if you have plenty of space on your Mac's hard drive, it's good practice to do a check every once in a while to see what's taking up disk space and spot anything unusual. Disk Inventory X provides a useful colour-coded map as well as a drawer-based list to help you see what files are taking up the most space on your Mac.

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.