Magnifique is a is a nifty app that allows you to theme your Mac with a completely revamped interface. Many themes (which you download and apply with Magnifique) are available for free, and are for the most part very well-designed. It’s intuitive and effective, and an excellent app to have if you’re getting bored with the Mac OS X UI (or just want to get rid of those nasty Aqua elements!). My current favorite theme is “Disinmaso”, which is a mashup of two themes by interface designer Susumu Yoshida called “Disingenuous” and “Umaso”.

WARNING: As of this writing, Magnifique is NOT compatible with Snow Leopard. It is only compatible with Leopard. A Snow Leopard-compatible version is being planned, but will likely require a rewrite of the entire application, so it may be some time before it’s available.

Rating: 5/5. Easy, functional, and has a bunch of awesome themes available for free download.

Developer site:
MagnifiqueApp.com

One of the more frustrating aspects of dealing with USB-based connectivity is that there’s no standard for deciding how devices are dealt with when plugged into your computer. Cameras by Flexibits takes an ultra-simple approach at filling this software gap by providing one place to specify what should happen when you plug in a camera. Within its pane in System Preferences, you can choose what you want to happen when certain cameras are plugged in. It supports an unlimited amount of cameras, and even iPods. It will only ask what you want to do (in the form of a popup dialog) once, but your decision can be changed within the aforementioned pane. In summary, if you have a lot of USB devices, Cameras can help you sort out the actions so you won’t be overwhelmed when plugging them in.

Rating: 4.5/5. Very simple, and has a very nice icon, but I’ve had trouble getting it to pick up my Canon Rebel T1i.

Developer site:
Flexibits.com

AddressBookSync matches your Facebook friends to your OS X Address Book contacts. It then adds profile avatars, birthdays and location info to your contact cards. Obviously, it can’t sync that information if your friends didn’t fill in those fields on their profile. AddressBookSync also allows you to manually match a Facebook friend to a contact that it doesn’t recognize. This is helpful for friends who, for example, only have their last initial and not their full name on their profile.

Rating: 5/5. This app works exactly as advertised. It is the perfect antidote to birthdate forgetfulness, and a great way to add contact photos to your address book.

Developer site:
DanAuclair.com/AddressBookSync

I was recently contacted by a certain Tiffany of TuneUp Media. After giving me a brief insight into her company’s product, I was sold. TuneUp for Mac is an excellent iTunes plugin that fills in the blanks in your iTunes library, so to speak. TuneUp will examine your music and fetch album artwork, fix the ID3 tags, and add even more information. It can also tell you about upcoming concerts for the current artist. It’s really a nice piece of software, and is perfect for anyone with a less-than-optimal iTunes library. The free version will fix up to 500 songs and add up to 50 sets of album artwork for you. An unlimited version (TuneUp Gold) is available on the developer’s site (listed below) for a very reasonable $20.

Rating: 4.5/5. Awesome program, but the user interface looks more like a website attached to iTunes.

Developer site:
TuneUpMedia.com

Dockless is a convenient little Mac app that can keep an application’s icon from showing in the Dock while it runs. It has a simple interface that presents you with a clean checklist, and it automatically finds applications for you. This app is fully functional in that it even lets you make Apple’s applications (like Spotlight) show up in the Dock while they’re running.

Rating: 5/5. Works as promised!

Developer site:
Homepage.Mac.com/Fahenbra/Programs/Dockless/Dockless.html

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!).

Rating: 5/5. Awesome.

Developer site:
Projects.Tynsoe.org/En/GeekTool

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.

Rating: 4/5. Works well, but I prefer the abilities of Disk Inventory X over the speed of this app.

Developer site:
GrandPerspectiv.SourceForge.net

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

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.

Rating: 4.5/5. Really nice app (and easy to use!), but the user interface is a little aged.

Developer site:
SourceGear.com/DiffMerge

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