Legend:

• Open source
• Free (as in beer)
• Commercial (costs money)
• Advertisement ridden (costs free will/screen estate)
• F+C means there is a free version, but paying will get you more

Mac OS X

• Quicksilver (O) (Plugins)

  Quicksilver is not a launcher. Quicksilver is a very interesting concept in that it treats your data as structured information, creating a sort of semantic use of what is usually just bits and text. The author explains it best.

  Example uses (The example key sequences include the full name, but the first couple of letters usually do the same):

  • Call someone: Enter the first letter of the contact, use the right key to pick which phone, tab to pick the ‘Large Type’ action. If you have installed my QSQRCode plugin, use ‘Show QRCode’ to send the phone number or contact to your phone.

    Complete key sequence: eric → mobile ⇥ show QSQRcode ↩

  • Set a short timer: Press " or . to enter text mode, type a label for your reminder. Tab and pick ‘Large Type’, but press Control+Enter, pick the ‘Run after delay’, and tab to enter the delay 5m for 5 minutes.

    Complete key sequence: . Pasta ready ⇥ Large Type ⌃↩ Run after delay ⇥ 5m ↩

  • Create a folder somewhere on your hard drive. Use the control+enter to create actions, and “Save command to file” in that folder. Now create a trigger with that folder as the source, and ‘Show Contents Menu’ as an action. You can now use a global shortcut to run any command in that menu. I have a folder with actions like ‘Current Selection’ -> ‘Move To…’ -> ‘Documents’. When I want to move a file, I simply use my shortcut, and pick where to.

  • Create thumbnails of pictures by browsing to each picture, use comma (,) to pick multiple images. Use action ‘Scale Image’ and enter the new size (eg: x64 to make them 64 pixels high and whatever is appropriate for width). When the action completes it preselects the converted images, ripe for the ‘Move To…’ action.

    Complete key sequence: Pictures / FirstImage , ⇣ , ⇥ Scale Image ⇥ x64 ↩ Move To ⇥ Pictures / Thumbnails ↩

• Adium (O) Multi-protocol chat client

• MenuMeters (O)

  This is a nice way to check your internet/cpu use, but the real sugar of menumeters is in the dropdown menus of the items. For example the disk activity icon has uptodate free space information, eject and force eject actions, the network use graph has copy IP to clipboard

• BetterTouchTool (F) (Also checkout BTTopia for presets) Makes your multitouch trackpad do kung-fu. YMMV

• Caffeine (F) Quick toggle for keeping your Mac awake, eg: when watching youtube

• DiskInventoryX (O) Find whats using up disk space

• Choose Wisely (F) If you use more than one browser

• RCDefaultApp (F) Change file associations. Why this is not built-in is a mystery.

• RemoteBuddy (C) Makes the apple remote useful

• Fresh (C) Displays recently touched files

• PathFinder (C) Finder replacement would be an understatement

• LittleSnitch (C) Per-app firewall. Find out who is talking to the internet

• OmniGraffle (C) Nice drawing and diagram app

• Yep (C) Organises PDFs. Think iTunes for documents

• xScope (C) Great tools for web design and GUI development

Advanced

• Gitx (O) Great GUI for Git

  The link is to the branch I use, but you have to compile it. Compilation didn’t work out of the box for me, I had to run

  ln -s /Developer/usr/bin/gcc-4.2 /Developer/usr/bin/gcc

  If you don’t want to compile it, google for a binary.

• MacPorts (O) Package manager

• Visor (O) Drop down terminal

• Lingon (O) Simple GUI for launchd plists

• fseventer (F) Displays file system events

• TextMate (C)

  I don’t think anyone needs an introduction to TextMate, but what most people need is a link to the one bundle that rules them all:

  cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
  svn export http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Review/Bundles/GetBundles.tmbundle GetBundles.tmbundle
  osascript -e 'tell app "TextMate" to reload bundles'

Windows

• Everything (F) File search that works, like an up-to-date locate
• Taekwindow (O) Window placement a-la-linux, from anywhere
• ZoomIt (F) Nice tool to zoom in on the screen, and draw on it, great for debugging UI’s and for presentations.
• WinRAR (C) Without contest, the finest compression tool
• AWicons Pro (C) Great icon editor

Advanced

• SnippetCompiler
• Process Explorer (F) Sysinternal’s usual quality applied to a process manager

Cross-Platform

I only really mean ‘at least Windows and Mac OS X’ by cross-platform. Sorry Linux users.

• VLC (O)

  Video playback and conversion. But it reads everything, no more codecs and bundles.

• µTorrent (F)

  Minimalist torrent downloads. Nice because its light, and helps out M-Labs

• Prism (O)

  Create an application dedicated to browsing a website, such as G-Mail. This is the way web-apps were intended to be used, use your browser to browse.

• 1Password (C)

  Useful specifically because it is cross-platform, including Android and iPhone equivalents. Keep your passwords with you.

• Antidote HD (C)

  French spell-checker. This is how a spell checker should be done, simply amazing quality.

Advanced

• Git (O)

  This is a distributed version control system. The learning curve is very hard, but well worth it. GitCasts is a nice place to start.

Android

• ZXing Barcode Scanner (O) Market QRCode QRCode scanner
• ConnectBot (O) Market QRCode SSH client with tunnel support
• handyCalc (F) Market QRCode Great calculator, unit and currency converter
• DialerOne (O) Market QRCode Dialer and contact list replacement
• LauncherPro (F+C) Market QRCode Smooth and functional homescreen
• httpmon (O) Market QRCode Monitor server status via HTTP
• MapDroyd (F) Market QRCode Offline maps!! My problem with google maps is that its abroad that I’d need it, but roaming internet is out-of-this-world expensive.
• Phonalyzr (F+C) Market QRCode Interesting statistics about your calls and sms
• Prochain Départ (F) Market QRCode Shows the next departure of Paris, FR public transports
• SL4A (O) (not in the market) Android Scripting engine, supports JavaScript, Ruby and others.
• SMS Popup (F) Market QRCode Nice SMS notifications, even above the lock screen, with preset responses
• TalkMyPhone (O) Market QRCode Remote control your phone via Jabber/Google Talk, great for sending sms with a real keyboard
• Transdroid (O) Market QRCode Manage your bittorrent client from your phone, with search of popular torrent sites. Works great with connectbot.
• Tricorder (O) Market QRCode A fun tricorder like tool, with sound FFT and much more
• SwiftKey (C) Market QRCode Very smart keyboard, with dual language support
• Thinking Space (A) Market QRCode Mind Mapping

Development

Online

• Networking

  • open.zorinaq.com Site accepting HTTP on every port
  • wolcenter.com Site to wake devices behind a WOL proxy

• Text processing

  • String Functions Various escapes and substitutes
  • ASCIIflow Text diagrams with ditaa export
  • TextMechanic Text oriented operations eg: line numbering etc
  • RXBuild Regexen - shameless plug: I eat my own dogfood

• Web development

  • Fiddles: Javascript TinkerBin SQL
  • CSS3 converter CSS3 please
  • subtlepatterns Google web fonts
  • SMTP diagnostics

Linux

• SystemTap Kernel resource monitoring in user-land