Bittorrent Clients

PS: If you do not know what Bittorrent is, go here.

There are lots of Macintosh Bittorrent Clients, and I've tested them all. Here is my lowdown - all are free, of course ;)

Azureus - Simply the best. A CPU hog (it is in Java), but it gets all the torrents the other clients can't. Seems to be the best for speed too, IMO. Highy configurable and a pleasure to use for power users.

Bits on Wheels - This one would be my best overall choice. Very low CPU usage, great user interface, good customization, interesting '3d view' of peers and seeders, and efficient most of the time, except for those torrents that only Azureus manages to start downloading somehow.

Transmission - Some people swear by this program because it is small and simple, but I find the CPU usage of it growing steadily, even more than Azureus when I am downloading 3 or more files, and the speed is inconsistent. Very few options, I don't really like it but lots of people do. Usually gets the job done anyway.

Bittorrent - The official client. Not bad CPU usage, not very good speeds, a so-so client. Not worth getting, if you hate Azureus, get Bits os Wheels instead, though maybe this is the most stable client of all them - not a big issue since we Mac users don't have to go resetting our computers all the time ;)

Tomato Torrent - Seems to have problems with a lot of torrents that should work, so I didn't test this one very much.

Bitpump - Small program, just released, shows big potential (from what I've seem from the Windows version screens, the Mac one is still kinda rough) but now it is still too bugged.

Please warn me if I forgot any client and happy downloading ;)

SnapperHead

Still on the screenshot topic, SnapperHead is a nifty utility that I've used many times to show a friend how a design was becoming or just how my desktop looked like. The bastards My PC friends can't believe that a 5-year old iMac G3 400 can run a system (Tiger) smoothly and much more good-looking than any Windoze version on a 3Ghz Pentium IV.

Back to the point, the lil' program, when turned on, opens up port 2000 and shows your IP. There's a built in copy function, so you send the address, for example, 160.134.132.104:2000 to a (reliable, non-hacker) friend and if he enters this add in any browser, he will see a snapshot of your desktop! Of course the party is over when you quit the program, and it warns you of every snapshot taken. I heartily recommend it.

Paparazzi!

Paparazzi! is a funny utility, though someone may find a use for it. You enter a URL and it takes a screenshot of the web page. And I mean, the WHOLE web page. I got a screenshot of this site and ended up with an image of 800x25007 pixels. Worth taking a look at.

NicePlayer

NicePlayer: as the devs say: Quite simply, the nicest media player for Mac.

This 600k or so app has a VERY pleasant interface and plays any Quicktime movie and codec-related (Divx, 3ivx, etc), besides DVDs, in any size you want, including full screen. It only lacks a volume control but since you can access the system volume easily by moving your mouse all the way up, I did not miss it.

And do not forget to install the Xineplayer plugin for better Divx compatibility ;)

Multiple Desktops

A great way to enhance your productivity is by uncluttering your desktop and taskbar, as there are programs that you do not need to see running all the time, such as your e-mail program or some utility that does backgroud work.

A cheap (or free!) solution to that is by enabling multiple desktops. Just imagine having four desktops. In one of them you keep your word processor and web browser, in another you keep your e-mail program, an antivirus in the third one, etc. And you can exchange between them with 1 click. It may take a while getting used to, but it definitely improves your usage of the computer when you do it.

There are many utilities that can do it on Mac, but I heartly recommend the freeware Desktop Manager. It's very powerful, I just tested it and it allowed me to created 100 desktops! Ok, usually I only use two, but it's a sweet app anyway.

FinderCleaner

FinderCleaner is a small application that will clean the mess the Finder makes. Useful when you're working in a mixed OS environment. It removes the following items from a folder or volume:

.DS_Store files.
.Trashes
Resource forks
FBC files.

safeThis

safeThis is a great freeware that allows you to do what only paid applications allowed you to before: create an encrypted disk image so you can store sensitive data. Another one of those 'I can't believe it is free' apps!

WhatSize

Wonder where all your disk space has gone?
The solution is Whatsize, a great utility to help you see your disks and folders and orders them by size so you can see and delete the files that are eating up your disk.
A great app to delete all thos pron documents that you forgot about a long, long time ago.

Abiword, Openoffice and NeoOffice/J

Abiword is a fully featured, open source and very Word-compatible Text editor. It also has a beautiful interface (screenshot).

And if you are looking for a replacement to Microsoft's Office, check out OpenOffice (though I find Abiword much better than Openoffice's text editor). It requires X11, but if you don't have it you can try NeoOffice/J instead, which is based on version 1.1.2 of OpenOffice (which is at 2.0 now).

AppStop

AppStop is an awesome utility and I recommend it to every Mac user. It's a Menu Bar item that allows you to freeze an application, so that it does not consume CPU cycles. And why is that so great? Because if you are like me and do a lot of stuff in the computer, like using Dreamweaver, then Fireworks, then back to Dreamweaver, then BBEdit, and other heavy applications that takes ages to open, you can just freeze them with AppStop and unfreeze when you wanna come back to it. One of the most creative and impressive utilities I've ever seen.