Punctuality, one of the most often praised qualities in individuals, is also one of those that most of us lack. But when trying to give a good impression and make things happen, it is probably best to be on ones best behavior, put the best foot forward, and not miss your appointment with your dream client, or that great job interview. Anyway you slice it, it’s better to be on time for things, than apologizing because you showed up late.

Well Pester is a nice little Mac Utility that attempts to help you make the best first impression possible. This app has a single purpose, to remind you about a single event (what ever that event may be) and then it is left up to you to make the most of that information.

Once you have entered in the event and when you want to be reminded about it Pester sits nicely in your dock, but always has a reminder of how long you have remaining until the anticipated time.

Then when the appointed moment arrives Pester can do a number of assorted actions to GET YOUR ATTENTION and make sure you don’t blow this.

It can jump in the dock, notify you with Growl, play an alert sound, display an alert dialog box, or speak a message using OS X’s built in text to speech engine.

Needless to say Pester takes away your excuses for your lateness. So download it today and arrive on time.

Download Pester

I know what you’re thinking, why should I care about Regular Expressions? I failed in math and don’t like Simple or Advance expressions, so why would I care about regular ones? Well now is your chance to learn something, and it doesn’t really have anything that you will recognize that deals with math… well maybe.

Anyhoo, Regular Expressions or Regex for short, are snippets of symbols that represent the type of content you would like to find within a given body of text or string. They can be very handy, and are extremely useful for developers that are trying to parse content out of a mass of other content. But while they are useful (at least for me) they could be a pain to try and figure out what expression will get to your specific content so you can get on with conquering the world. I’ve used a myriad of online tools to help me with this process, but it is always a seeming inconvienience to have to remember where “that” website is to work out my regex statement.

But no more, a great little app is available called Reggy, this little app gives you the ability to insert a segment of content and then play with your regular expression until you get it to grab exactly what you are looking for. Brilliant if you ask me, I just don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. hehe. So take a look at this very simple but powerful tool that should speed up your development workflow.

Reggy Project Homepage

Download Reggy

Ok, so you’re using your mac with all it’s apple goodness, and attempt to connect to another computer using the built in ScreenSharing capability. Your computer prompts you for a username and password to authenticate with the remote computer with a neet little login window. You put your login credentials in to the provided boxes and hit “connect”, immediately a little spinning wheel appears along with a “Connecting” message. You wait, and wait, and nothing seems to be happening. You attempt to connect again and you get right in to your screensharing session, but that “Connecting” window just keeps hanging around, and even when it’s not in focus it is still overlaying all other windows on your computer. It becomes rather annoying, and finally you shut off your computer out of desperation and restart. Whew the infamous box has been removed, but you also have to reopen all of your programs and documents to get back to a productive state.

I’ve been there myself many times, it is both annoying and frustrating. But there is a sure cure, besides restarting your computer. This little window is the “NetAuthAgent” and can easily be terminated from the Activity Monitor. Here’s how to do it.

From GUI:

1. Launch the Activity Monitor program (in Applications/Utilities).
2. In the Process Name list, look for “NetAuthAgent”. It may show as “Not Responding”.
3. Select NetAuthAgent, and then click Quit Process (the red stop sign button at the top of the Activity Monitor window). Then, click Force Quit.

From Terminial:

1. ps ax | grep NetAuthAgent
2. kill <pid-of-the-process-found-above>

or the Single Command From The Terminal:

$ killall NetAuthAgent

And there you have it, now you can get back to work and share screens all day long!

Visit the: Original forum post that gave me the lead I have just posted about

Unlike most of the other screenshot apps or widgets available out in the interwebs, Paparazzi! takes screenshots of websites. The cool thing is that it will take a single screenshot of the entirety of the web pages contents. That’s right, wether the webpage is 600 pixels long or 50,000 pixels long, it will take a picture of the whole page.

Now I know what your thinking, you could have probably used that on a previous web development/design project, or maybe when you were researching a topic. Then you can put the full contents and layout/design in your archive for future reference. What a liberating thought.

Additionally you can choose a minimum size for the screenshot to be, an optional crop size for the screenshot, a delay to wait before taking the screenshot (in case you want some interactive content to do something before taking the shot).

Additionally you can access your Safari and Firefox favorites/bookmarks, interact with a page (insert content, press buttons, etc…) before taking the screenshot.

You can also process urls or files as a batch, to take care of lists you want to archive without maning the keyboard and mouse.

All in all, this is one slick little utility.

Developers Site

Download Paparazzi!

Deeper has been around since OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and has seen a new version released along with each new version of the OS since then through Lion 10.7.

With Deeper you can change the general look/feel/actions of the basic system interface, Different options that area available in the finders menu, the look and feel of the dock, how Quicktime handles the playback of movies, add information to your login screen, etc… you get the picture, and the list goes on.

The point is, with all this little app allows you to do, and because of its price point (FREE), it seems silly to avoid loading it on your mac and playing with your own user experience.

Developers Site

Download Page (MacUpdate – Lion)

Onyx has been around and free since way back in the good ole days of OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), and has released a new version of the software specifically to address certain issues with each of these different releases from Apple. It will clean out your old caches, trim your library files, rebuild your fonts cache, perform routine maintenance on your hard disks, and resetting basic parameters. In the world of mac users, Onyx is like a dog, that is because it is a mac users best friend. 

Many simple errors that users experience can be handled/thwarted with the use of this simple tool. Now honestly does it do any magic? The answer there is NO, it just does all the silly little things that you could do yourself to keep your mac running properly. But the fact is that you don’t do most of those things, and those that you do do, you don’t do regularly. So Onyx provides that nice simple interface that ensures you get the fixes made, and reminds you of some of the things that you forgot to do yourself.

So check it out, it’s FREE, and the worst case scenario is that you will actually have a slightly more efficient mac.

Developers Site

Download Page (MacUpdate)

I’m sure you’ve been there, working away on your next development project, pushing to meet a deadline for work, or writing that ever elusive thesis paper. And suddenly you notice that you have new emails, or that your friend has just tweeted some new nonsense, or that someone has just decided that they need to IM you about something, or… you get the picture. When you notice that distraction, it derails your train of thought while you direct your mental energies to reading/responding to the distraction. Then when you return to the business at hand you find that you take a little while to get back into the groove.

This is one of the never ending problems with our individual productivity, there are a million different things that are competing for a chance to distract us from being productive.

This is where Think comes in. This handy little app tries to do the same thing as Spirited Away (that we reviewed previously), but throws a new twist on it. Instead of hiding your unused applications, Think allows you to bring one app into focus and hide all other applications behind a covering of darkness… or some other covering if you so choose.

So the basic effect is to Black/White/some other color OUT everything else on your desktop, (icons, applications, etc…) so that you can focus on the application at hand, as illustrated in the screenshots below.

Select an Application

Use an Application

Think is a very simple easy to use application, it gets serious about what it does… keeping you productive.

And although Think is not Open Source, it is a Free Gift from Freeverse.com so you have nothing to loose but your distractions. Check Think out today.

Think App Homepage

Download Think

You’ve been there before, working hard on a project, opening lots of different windows for different applications, and pretty soon you cannot see what you are working on for all the other windows that are hanging around.

With Spirited Away you can avoid getting distracted by focusing on the application that you are currently using, and it alone. How does this litte app get this amazing feat done you ask?

Spirited Away pays attention to the apps that you are using, and the ones that you are not. After a predetermined amount of time (user defined, 60 seconds by default) an idle app is hidden from view. You can also select specific apps that you would like to be exempted from this “hiding” behavior by clicking the ghost icon in the menu bar. So don’t get carried away with yourself, stay focused and productive with Spirited Away.

Spirited Away Homepage

Download Spirited Away

The default forms of information that GeekTool supports are Files, Images, and Shell Commands. This allows you to display the realtime information from any file on your Mac, like Log Files or maybe a ToDo list and similar files. With the Image Plugin you can display any image from your computer or from a URL out on the internet. And with the Shell command, you guessed it, you can display any information that you can Script, AUK and/or GREP from your command line.

Each of these text information sources can be modified to be any size and use any font, style or colors that you would like, Below is a screenshot of how a couple of users use of the text and images to create an amazing way to display information on your screen.

Along with the default content display options, there are many additional “geeklets” or Geektool Plugins to expand and enhance your desktop viewing pleasure.

And best of all this little tool is Open Source, so dive in, Download Geektool, and get started Geeking out your desktop.

Geektool Homepage

Download Geektool Or pick it up on the Mac App Store

Geeklets 

When you are switching through your apps using the “cmd-tab” keystroke, it can be frustrating that after selecting the application that you want, you still have to figure out which window is the one that you are hunting for… Well not any longer. While switching through your applications, simply press the “Up” or “Down”  arrow keys on your keyboard to reveal the Exposé display for the application that is currently selected. Then Boom, you have immediate access to the window you are searching for.