Ghost is an excellent little utility that can work with hidden files in OS X. Ghost’s ingenious system for hiding and unhiding your own files is so obvious that I’m not sure how everyone else missed it. All you do is drag a file into Ghost, and check or uncheck to hide or unhide, respectively. Ghost also has an option to show or hide all hidden files in Finder, which is much faster than running the lengthy “defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE” command in Terminal over and over. This app is a must-have for people who need to work with hidden files on their Mac.

Rating: 5/5. Works fast, drag and drop is perfect, and the icon is awesome.

Developer site:
Opt-6.com/Ghost.html

iChm is the first nice CHM reader I’ve ever seen. It absolutely destroys the previously reviewed app, Chmox, in terms of ease of use and user interface beauty. It supports a lot of nice features like tabbed browsing, finding/searching, text zooming, and of course, a nice print feature. Overall this app is the first impressive CHM reader I’ve seen to date, and is definitely worth a try if you have any CHM files.

Rating: 5/5. Finally, a nice CHM reader!

Developer site:
RobinLu.com/Blog/iChm

Preferential Treatment is a simple tool that goes through all of your preference files, and alerts you to anything suspicious or corrupt. From there you can delete the preference file, or do what you want with it. It uses the UNIX tool plutil to search for these inconsistencies. In the rare occurrence that some sort of bug or virus exists in your preference files, you’ll be the first one to know with Preferential Treatment!

Rating: 4/5. Old-looking interface, but nice enough functions.

Developer Site:
John8.com/HTML/PT.html

Xee is a lightning-fast image viewer for Mac, by the creator of The Unarchiver. It can read a ton of formats, and even do some animation. Must-have for people who do lots of image-editing, and need a quick viewer to see what they’ve got.

Rating: 5/5. Couldn’t be better.

Developer site:
Wakaba.C3.cx/S/Apps/Xee.html

OSx360 is a useful tool for burning Xbox 360 games to DVDs. Note that it’s intended for “test purposes only”, at the moment. This app looks great from my initial view, and is very impressive. It can also verify your games’ ISO images to make sure that everything is correctly formatted. Mac OS X Tiger and up.

Rating: 4.5/5. Nice app, great speed. Shows a lot of information, as well.

Developer site: NukedSoftware.com/OSx360/Index.html

NOTE: The intended use of this application is for legal purposes–burning games to DVDs. It is NOT intended for pirating games. It’s currently only used for testing, according to their site.

BetterZip Quick Look Generator is a great Quick Look plugin that lets you look inside a zip file without unzipping it. It can be really nice for when you have a huge file, but only want to see what’s in it. The plugin is also very well laid out. Great job, developer!

Rating: 5/5. It couldn’t be better in any way!

Developer site: MacItBetter.com NOTE: The product “BetterZip” is shareware and costs $20. The Quick Look Plugin is FREE.

Hide Folders is a well made app that lets you make files or folders completely invisible. The only problem is that to unlock the hidden folders, you have to open up the app and drag whatever you hid out of it. Still a cool idea, though.

Rating: 4/5. Can be hard to unlock files, but is good nonetheless.

Developer site: AltoMac.com/Hide_Folders

Chmox is a popular CHM viewer for Mac. CHM is not exactly a common file format, but when you need to see a CHM file, Chmox is the way to go. If you’re concerned about disk space when you’re not using it, it’s only about 350 kilobytes. Definitely the best CHM viewer (if not the only) for Mac.

Rating: 4/5. Useful at times, but hasn’t been updated for a while (needs better Leopard support, maybe Quick Look compatibility).

Developer site: Chmox.SourceForge.net

Skim is a great PDF reader and note-taking app for those of us who deal with PDFs regularly. You’ll be amazed at how easy it is to work with PDFs using Skim. Great for anybody who works on their computer.

Rating: 5/5. What more could I possibly want out of a PDF reader?

Developer site: Skim-App.SourceForge.net