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.

Developer home
Download SelfControl now

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.

Dateline developer home
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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.

Freedom developer home
Download Freedom now

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.

Developer home
Download NameChanger now

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.

ShrinkIt developer home
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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, website mockups, page layouts, documentation, or any other visual communication need.

If you need a Visio alternative in Mac OS X, I’d highly recommend Omnigraffle, it’s a fantastic program. The OmniGraffle interface is very intuitive and it’s actually much easier to use than Visio in Windows, yet somehow it’s just as powerful if not more so. If you’re doing professional quality work and need seamless Visio interaction, you’re best bet is to go with the Professional version.

OmniGraffle is offered in two versions, both are available for immediate download on the Mac App Store:

• OmniGraffle for Mac – $99
• OmniGraffle Pro for Mac – $199

Check out the 5 star ratings and reviews on both the Mac App Store and Amazon.

Speaking of Amazon, you can buy Omnigraffle 5 Professional from Amazon and sometimes get a discount from the Mac App Store price, the downside is that you have to wait for the app to ship to you.

Dare I say that OmniGraffle is better than Visio for the Mac? Try it out yourself, it rocks.

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?

Update: You can download Internet Explorer and Windows virtual machines for free that run within Mac OS X. That method works for IE7, IE 8, and IE9, although they run within a VM rather than as an app like the below method.

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:

Download and Get Internet Explorer 6 for Mac
* Download WineBottler
* Launch the WineBottler app
* Click on ‘Install Predefined Prefixes’ on the left column
* Select “Internet Explorer 6.0″
* Click ‘Install’
* Select the folder you want Internet Explorer 6.app to be installed into (Applications)
* Wait a few moments while IE6 gets installed, you may be asked about installing DCOM98.EXE from Microsoft, which is a required part of IE. This goes through Wine.
* When the Installation is finished, locate the newly created Internet Explorer 6.app located where you specified earlier and launch
* You are now running Internet Explorer 6 on your Mac!

Download and Run Internet Explorer 7 or 8 in Mac OS
* Installation and setup instructions are the same as above but click on “Internet Explorer 7 or 8″ in the package installer. See screenshot below for installation reference.
* You will then look for the newly downloaded and installed “Internet Explorer 7.app” file within /Applications

Stability of running IE for Mac via WineBottler
If you are looking to install Internet Explorer 7 or 8 be aware that the developer of WineBottler warns both IE7 and IE8 are not particularly stable. I can confirm this, both crashed during testing the app but IE8 was particularly problematic. If you want to run Internet Explorer 7 or 8 in Mac OS I’d highly recommend just installing Parallels, VirtualBox, or VMWare with Windows, it’ll be far more stable.

You can download WineBottler from the developer.

What about Internet Explorer 5?
IE 5.2.3 was the last supported and released version of Internet Explorer by Microsoft for Mac OS. You can get Internet Explorer 5.2.3 for Mac OS X if you are interested in running this older version.

Why would you run Internet Explorer in Mac OS X?
Well, there’s a bunch of reasons you’d want to use IE on your Mac, but most are developers looking to insure cross-platform and cross-platform compatibility. Again, if you are looking to use IE6, IE7, or IE8 frequently in Mac OS X, it’s probably best to use something like Parallels, VMWare, or VirtualBox. I am partial to VirtualBox because it is a free download. In this case you will need to have a Windows install within the virtualization software to be able to run Internet Explorer on top of Mac OS X.

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!

Developer home
Download SequalPro now

If you have a bunch of files you need renamed on your Mac then Name Mangler is where it’s at. You can easily batch rename tons and tons of files just by dragging and dropping them into the application. Name Mangler goes beyond just renaming something from file1 to file2 though, there are many more advanced batch renaming capabilities including:

* Find and Replace (find all instances of Blah in filename_Blah and replace with Wow)
* Number Sequentially (file1, file2, file3)
* Change Case (caps to lowercase, vice versa)
* Set an Extension (make all files .txt or the like)
* Add a Prefix or Suffix (Filename.jpg to Filename-trip.jpg)
* Remove or Insert Characters
* and more in the advanced settings…

Name Mangler is free to download and use. It’s donation wear so if you like it enough, let the developer know with your wallet. Name Mangler was free to use and used to be donation wear, but now the developer is charging $10… thank you to treks for pointing this out. You can still download a free trial though.

Name Mangler developer home
Download now

Have you ever wondered what your mouse is doing when it’s moving around all day as you work?

IOGraph is a really cool program that runs in the background and tracks all of the movements and pauses of your mouse (or trackpad) as you use your Mac. You can then export the mouse tracks into an image file with either the movements overlayed on your desktop workspace or just as an individual tracking graph. It’s most interesting when you launch the app and let it run for hours while you go about your day, coming back to it later to see where your mouse has been most active. The black dots are mouse pauses and grow based on the length of the pause, but you can configure IOGraph’s tracking to not include this in the images it produces if you’d rather not see them.

So other than being cool and producing interesting images, is there a use for IOGraph? I would say yes, particularly for application, web, and GUI developers. Imagine having beta testers run IOGraph over your designs so that you can see how people interact with your app, and what works and what doesn’t? This is made possible across all platforms too, since IOGraph is available not just for Mac OS X, but also for Linux and Windows.

Even if you don’t use IOGraph for anything productive, it’s still fun to play around with, and it’s definitely fun to see what your mouses tracking behavior and movements are in relation to what you do on your Mac throughout the day.

IOGraph developer home
Download IOGraph now

[ images via Flickr ]

You can easily compare two versions of a Word document using Microsoft Word in Mac OS X.

* Launch the two documents you want to compare within Microsoft Word
* Go to the Tools Menu
* Select Track Changes
* Select Compare Documents
* Select the two documents you want to compare

You’ll be shown a side by side comparison of the files and the changes will be highlighted and easy to spot. If you’re a writer, researcher, or editor, you’ll find this feature very useful! As far as I know this comparison tool is not included within Apple’s Pages application (at least not in version 3.0 that I have), hopefully in a newer version it will be a feature, it is too helpful to not be!

If you’re looking for a more developer orientated version of file comparison, check out FileMerge.

Google Books is a pretty amazing virtual library filled with who knows how many books, magazines, periodicals, and whatever else you might expect to find in a brick and mortar library. Some of the books can be downloaded and saved as a PDF with just a click, others are restricted, but thats where Google Book Downloader comes in. Simply give the program a Google Book URL or Book ID, and Google Book Downloader will generate a PDF of that book (or at least the portion that is accessible via the web). This is so useful for anyone who wants a virtual copy of a book stored locally on their Mac (or iPod Touch, or iPhone, or even the iPad!). This is about as easy as it gets.

So you want to save a Google Book for later? First, find a book on Google Books

Now just paste the URL or book ID into the application and it will start the download:

Your Google Book is now saved as a PDF and it can be read or viewed from anywhere, independent of the web and an internet connection. Awesome! Google Book Downloader is free and open source, so if you feel like poking around the code it’s freely available on the developers site.

HacThePlanet: Google Book Downloader
Download Google Book Downloader now

There’s no shortage of DNS Server options out there, with Google DNS, OpenDNS, your own ISP’s, and the gazillion of others available to use. The question remains though, which of these DNS servers is going to be fastest for you? And how do you know which is fastest? NameBench is a free application that will run a set of benchmarks based on your web browsing history and tcpdump, and will report back the fastest domain name server for you to use. In some cases, switching to the suggested domain name server can be a considerably speed increase, with noticeably faster page loads. Check it out for yourself.

NameBench home

[via TechCrunch ]