A very clever app, offering dozens of options to optimize your system, run maintainance tasks, configure hidden parameters of Finder, Dock and other apps, clean caches and remove outdated files, etc.

From the website: “Monolingual is a program for removing unnecessary language resources from Mac OS X, in order to reclaim several hundred megabytes of disk space.” For the records – on my more or less new system, I just saved 2.8 Gigs (!!).

Quicksilver once was hyped beyond believe in the Mac universe, as a revolutionary, optimized way of interacting with your operating system. Ignorant as I am, I only use it as launcher – just hit CTRL-ALT-APPLE (or whatever key combo you assigned it) and start typing the applications name, and hit enter to launch it.

Yeah boooring, I know. One of the major annoyances for me is how Apple supports (or actually does not care much about free support for) additional codecs for Quicktime. VLC comes to the rescue, with all important codecs (and dozens more) compiled into the app, to play whatever audio or video format you encounter during those nightly easynews sessions…

Another Mac mystery – for reasons unclear to me, I can mount an FTP server into Finder, but only as read-only. I don’t know why I thought Fetch is the only option for a good FTP-client on the Mac – I just started using Cyberduck, and so far I’m pretty happy with it. Also supports WebDAV, Cloud Files and Amazons S3 (if you are hip enough to need that…)

Seems the defacto-standard for a personal firewall on OS X. Runs for a limited amount of time until it has to be restarted manually, unless you buy a license. Highly recommended!

Good multi-network IM client, all in one – although I find myself using Meebo as online-replacement more and more often.

A good password manager, with plugins for all major browsers, secure notes etc. Can autofill passwords and other form fields on web pages, sync with your iPhone/iPod touch or Palm (does anyone still use Palms??). A single license is $39.95, but I got it with a MacHeist package, so I did not compare it with any other free password managers that are undoubtedly out there.