Free Mac App A Day > Utilities

GeekTool is awesome. It’s essentially a Terminal window, but it’s on your desktop. So, while doing other work, you can see the output of Terminal (whether it be from a UNIX program or from a system output log). For all you UNIX geeks out there, this is your calling. By the way, it says it works on Panther and Tiger, but it also works on Leopard (in a nice little preference pane!).

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GrandPerspective is an awesome utility that can inspect your filesystem and graphically show you what’s taking up room. It’s extremely useful for cleaning out your Mac, and finding the chunky files on your hard drive that are just taking up space. Unfortunately, GrandPerspective is unable to reveal or delete files within the app–you have to find and delete them yourself. However, a 1.0 release is imminent, so we may see some additional functionality soon.

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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.

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DiffMerge is an awesome file comparison tool that lets you select two sources, and compare them. You can compare folders, individual files, or even several files at once. Once compared, you can merge them (which works quite well, I might add), or choose from a few other options. Overall it’s a great app with awesome performance, and is definitely worth a glance if you need to merge several items. As an added bonus, it comes with an equally awesome command line tool.

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PackageAssistant is a very new, nice little app that Apple should have included with Leopard. Essentially it checks your package receipts to see what Installers (.pkg or .mpkg files) you have run in the past. From here, you can verify that they’re installed correctly (represented by a green dot) or have been altered (represented by a red dot). Then, if you want, you can uninstall straight from PackageAssistant. While this app is in its early stages, I can see a bright future for it.

Rating: 4.5/5. Window is non-resizable, but the app itself functions great.

Developer site:
Code.Google.com/P/SourApple/Wiki/PackageAssistant

Locker is an extremely simple app that lets you lock or unlock files or folders. It works as advertised, and is dead simple. It also supports batch locking/unlocking. Keep in mind that locked folders or files can still be opened, just not modified. While you can do this from the Get Info pane, Locker is easier and more intuitive.

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