This is currently my favorite launching app. Regardless of which launching app you use, you MUST use one! I only put my most used apps in my Dock to keep it clean. Instead of having a full dock cluttering up my screen, Alfred lets me have quick access to ALL my apps and more. It’s one of my all time favorite apps, and it’s really fast, much faster than using Spotlight as a launcher. It’s smarter because it remembers trends of what you frequently lauch. To use Alfred you:

1. Hit a keystroke (I set mine to Command–Escape and change or disable Front Row's keystroke).
2. Start typing the name of an app you want to launch (or webpage, address book entry, etc.).
3. Hit Return to lauch it!

Quicksilver is another great launcher app. I used it before switching to Alfred. Which launcher app you choose is a personal decision and I wanted to list Quicksilver because it’s still a great app. For more details on the type of things a launcher app does, read my description of Alfred.

Blacktree—the original creator—stopped working on Quicksilver so other people continued working on it on Google's code website. But once again Blacktree is hosting the latest version.

This is a must have for web designers. PNG, GIF and JPEGs exported from Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks can be shrunk even further without lose of quality. Just run them through ImageOptim and it typically reduces their filesize. Run several times until it no longer shrinks the files!

Be sure to read the instruction about installing PNGOUT which isn’t installed with the app, but can help reduce filesizes.

This is a must have for anyone that works in a cross-platform environment!

Apple’s built in Zip Archiver includes special Mac invisible files such as .DS_Store files. Mac users don’t see these files, but PC users do. YemuZip creates .zip files without these files, so Mac and PC users both get nice clean zip files!

This is a great FTP program that has an elegant, yet easy to use interface. It’s everything you want an FTP app to be: easy to use, and fast! It has the simplicity of the good ol’ versions of Fetch and it’s free, like Fetch use to be!

If you’re a digital photographer you know how useless the file names are once you’ve downloaded pics from your camera. This program renames them with the date (year, month, day minute, sec) that the image was taken!
TIP: Go into the Preferences and uncheck Confirm each file.

If you need to capture videos of your screen ScreenFlow is awesome. It not only lets you capture your screen, but it also lets you edit the captures, put various clips together, add callouts, audio and more. The video demos for all my InDesign scripts were recorded with Snapz.

If you take many screenshots, this is a “must have” app. You can choose the exact item (or items) you want to capture and preview the screen shot before you take it! You can even capture a window and SnapzPro will add a clean drop shadow around it to make screen captures a breeze.

This is a great app to rename files. You can search and replace for text in file names, sequentially rename files, and much more.

The multi-touch capabilities of MacBook Trackpads and Apple’s Magic TrackPad are great, but Apple doesn’t provide much control over them. BetterTouchTool lets you define gestures and disable gestures globally or on an app by app basis.