ImageOptim is a free and really simple to use image optimizer that works well to quickly reduce the file size of PNG, JPEG, and GIF image files. The interface doesn’t get any easier, you just drag and drop images into the app and they’ll be optimized, whether it’s one picture or 15 it works the same.

The app works by finding the most suitable compression parameters for the image file type, and then it further reduces file size by removing unnecessary color profiles, EXIF data, and comments from the image itself.

Check it out! Optimization works well and it’s a lot faster than opening something like Photoshop.

There’s nothing that kills productivity more than distractions, and while it’s hard to minimize some, there’s tools available to help prevent some digital distractions. Social networking sites, email, Twitter, Google News, there’s endless things that can distract your focus and waste your time if you don’t stop them.

SelfControl is a utility that aids in just that, using an adjustable predetermined amount of time, it blocks access to all outgoing and incoming mail servers and also lets you modify a list of websites to block. Have a deadline and can’t pull away from Facebook? No problem, set the website in SelfControl and set the timer.

Once SelfControl is started, it can’t be undone (even if you delete the application or restart!) so you are forced to do the task at hand. A bit extreme perhaps, but sometimes extreme distraction requires extreme intervention… check it out if you think this would benefit your workflow.

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Even with SelfControls restrictions, I prefer it to the Freedom tool, which prevents distractions by disconnecting you from the Internet. Many people do work that requires them to be online, but they just need to thin out the distraction herd, and SelfControl does this.

Dateline is a nice little utility that places a transparent linear calendar on your Mac desktop. It’s pretty customizable so if you want the dates to be horizontal or vertical, or the text color or their background colors to be different it’s just an easy couple of tweaks away. Perhaps the best part about Dateline though is that it integrates with iCal, so double-clicking on a date will launch iCal and show you your calendar for that day. It’s free, it’s lightweight, and it requires Mac OS X 10.5 or newer.

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If you’re a writer, developer, designer, musician, anyone that needs to have complete concentration to create freely, this app just might be your saving grace. Freedom forces you to pull away from the ubiquitous distractions of the online world by disabling your Mac’s network interface for a set amount of time, up to 8 hours. When the time is up, Freedom automatically reenables your Mac’s networking capabilities and you’ll be back online again as usual. How’s that for serious concentration?

You’d be amazed to find out how easy it is to concentrate on something when you can’t really do much else. As a student I used to unplug my computers ethernet cable when I had to really focus on a project, which is proof of concept really.

Freedom is a great app and is now an essential part of my Mac productivity arsenal, highly recommended.

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Freedom is free to download and is donationware. If you use it often, consider sending the developer a donation.

NameChanger is a free solution to quickly and easily batch rename files in Mac OS X, using it is very easy and it has all the features you’d expect in a batch renaming app. You can replace occurrences of text in filenames, use wildcards, append, add dates, make files sequential, and remove characters, just select your options and you’ll see a live preview as to what the new names will be, when you’re satisfied click “Rename” and away you go.

It’s fast, free, and incredibly easy to use, which makes it my preferred choice for renaming a ton of files in Mac OS. If you’re happy with NameChanger, throw the developer a couple bucks, it’s donationware.

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And yes, we did a prior post on software to batch rename files in Mac OS X but the developer decided to turn the once donationware software into a paid solution. For now though, NameChanger is still free.

ShrinkIt is a handy little app that greatly reduces the file size of Illustrator generated PDF’s. Created as an internal tool, the developers over at Panic realized that PDF files saved from Adobe Illustrator were loaded with loads of extra nonsense metadata, even patterns, preview bitmaps, swatches, creating enormous PDF file sizes when they should be much smaller. The solution? Process the Adobe bloatfile through Apple’s PDF processor. You can do this yourself through Preview, but it’s a pain to open and re-save tons of PDF files, thus the creation of ShrinkIt. Now you can drag and drop your Illustrator PDF’s into ShrinkIt and you’ll save a whole lot of space (the original file is always kept, just renamed).

ShrinkIt is for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard only.

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“I use Visio frequently at work in an all Windows environment, but I really don’t want to have to install Parallels or Boot Camp on my new MacBook just to run Visio. Is there some kind of alternative like Visio for Mac OS X?”

This is a great question, and I think you’ll be quite pleased to hear there’s an excellent Visio alternative that runs natively in Mac OS X, it’s called OmniGraffle. Omnigraffle is a excellent application that lets you quickly draw beautiful charts and diagrams that are perfect for presentations, project specs, documentation, or any other visual communication need. It’s interface is very intuitive and it’s actually much easier to use than Visio in Windows, yet somehow it’s just as powerful. If you want seamless Visio interaction, you’re best bet is to go with the Pro version where there’s a ton of built-in Visio support documents seamlessly within Omnigraffle.

If you need a Visio alternative in Mac OS X, I’d highly recommend Omnigraffle, it’s a fantastic program. They have a free 14 day trial so you can check it out yourself,

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So you need to run Internet Explorer on your Mac and you don’t want to bother with a full Windows install in something like Parallels. What are you left with?

Try WineBottler, it runs off of Wine and ‘bottles’ various Windows apps into launchable .app files that sit in your Applications folder like any other Mac app. There’s several packages included in WineBottler but the ones you are interested in using are Internet Explorer.

Download Internet Explorer for Mac

Downloading Internet Explorer for Mac directly can be done with IE5, but as we mention below Microsoft stopped supporting it officially after this version. Later versions of Internet Explorer can be downloaded and run through the WineBottler app within Mac OS X, the instructions below will walk you through this process with versions 6, 7, and 8.

Here’s how to get Internet Explorer running on your Mac using WineBottler:
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If you are trying to view invisible files through the Mac FTP client Transmit, stop looking around in the Preferences and View Options because it won’t be there. Instead, pull down the ‘View’ menu and scroll down to ‘Show Invisible Files’ to enable this functionality.

I love Transmit, it is by far my favorite FTP client for Mac OS X and I’ve used it on a near daily basis for years. This is one thing that’s always bothered me about Transmit though, the ability to view invisible files isn’t part of the File Preferences as you’d expect, instead it’s stuffed somewhat awkwardly in the View menu. This makes sense on a per-view perspective, but I want to always be able to see invisible files which makes it more of a preference in my mind.

Apparently I’m not the only one with this frustration, a friend of mine sent me a really peeved instant message cursing Transmit saying it was crippled and he couldn’t even see the .htaccess files on his webserver, and then he felt stupid after I told him it was just under the “View” menu. And yes, that instant message is the reason for this post, he’s a smart guy and couldn’t find it, surely other people have this problem.

Unfortunately I missed the Transmit official beta signup, otherwise I would attempt to make this a feature request.

I’ve long been looking for a good MySQL manager for Mac OS X since I’m not a big fan of phpMyAdmin and the other tools out there. I came across SequelPro recently and I think it might fit the bill. With it’s beautiful interface, you can easily connect to local or remote MySQL servers, easily run queries in it’s awesome query editor that’s complete with auto-completion, and everything else you’d expect. Development is ongoing so this already great app is only going to get better.

The best part? It’s totally free and open source. SequelPro may just be the best MySQL database manager for Mac OS X, if there is a better solution I haven’t found it yet!

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