Some great applications don’t belong on the Dock. Only needed on special occasions, just a Spotlight search away, I prefer them hidden away. Today, I’ll briefly mention my favorite undocked applications.

Firefox

Not for everyday use. Great for development. After my work on the PLOW, I know more about Firefox internals than I care to. No Firefox installation is complete without Firebug.

Keynote

I absolutely love preparing Keynote presentations. The UI is non-intrusively good. The little things just work right. For instance, when you paste from one slide to another, the new item is positioned in the same location.

OmniGraffle

When your Keynote presentation needs a diagram, OmniGraffle is the tool for the job. OmniGraffle: the epitome of a powerful Cocoa application.

OmniOutliner

OmniOutliner does for outlines what OmniGraffle does for graphs: a powerhouse application. For my uses, I’ve favored OmniOutliner over Pages as a word processor.

Acorn

Not the fanciest image editor for the Mac nor the most ”professional”, but it suits me well.

Pixen

Though a dying art, regular image editors aren’t suitable for sprites. Pixen gives you just the sort of pixel perfect precision you need.

Scratch

Scratch is the very best interface to date for getting kids into programming. Scratch provides the perfect combination of ease and flexibility, simplicity and power.

TourDeFlex

A sample code cookbook essential Flex and Flesh development.

Address Book

Clean and simple. I’ve tried Preferences > Synchronize with Google though I find the UI feedback decidedly lacking. How can I tell whether or not I’m synchronized?

Dictionary

The MacBook comes with an excellent extensible dictionary application. It has the New Oxford American Dictionary and Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus built-in.

• Preferences
  • Contextual menu: Opens Dictionary Panel — Quick dictionary access from by right clicking on a selected word. Good for many Mac apps.

GrandPerspective

Serviceable visualization to find those files and directories eating up your DropBox space.

SQLite Database Browser

More and more applications choose SQLite for persistence. (Anki is an example.) I sometimes like to check out what’s going on inside.

Gitbox

Though just a preview release, Gitbox saves you the trouble of typing common git commands (log, status, commit, checkout, diff). Gitbox hands off diff display to Apple’s handy FileMerge tool. Less fuss than the command-line without any overblown bloat.

coconutBattery

Helpful little utility for gauging the health of your battery. coconutBattery will let you know whether your invocation of the Apple battery calibration rite did any good.

CandyBar

I can’t explain why, but I find the Finder face to be very upsetting. Enough so that I’ve been swapping the icon for something else, anything else, since OS 10.1. With each major OS update, the face comes back. Often the mechanism for replacing it changes. So I’m happy to let CandyBar do the tinkering for me.

Next Time?

I’ll show you where I found the icons I’m using with CandyBar right now.