Today, I found two great utilities for the Mac. One which reminds me of the One Ring from LOTR and another which is just neato.

The first is LaunchBar from Objective Development. I used to have a lot of icons in my dock that were nice to have there, but I only kept there because it was a pain to find them from the Finder or even to Ctrl-Click my Favorites or Applications folder which I also have in my Dock. This little gem allows you to simply type a partial name of any program, document, email, or any number of things and get what you want right away. The developers have apparently made this better by paring off some features that were outside the core usefulness. This simpler version is now a lot smarter and easier to use. It learns which programs you like to use by watching what you select for a particular key combination. Now it does favor people who can type pretty fast, like myself. It uses a delay mechanism to figure out when you are trying to find something new. I can now launch NetNewsWire by simply pressing NNW or launch Emacs by typing EMA. It’s great because now my dock can go on a diet of persistent icons. This may be the first piece of shareware on the Mac that I will actually pay for.

FetchArt is a utility program that enriches the iTunes experience. Many a track has been ripped, imported, and otherwise found a home in my music library. I’ve even paid a couple bucks for some Missy Elliot rhymes from the iTunes Music Store. Apple p0wnz me, what can I say? Well, I’ve wanted to have album art for a lot of these tracks when I do play them on my iBook rather than the iPod. FetchArt makes that happen. Although, it doesn’t download cover art from the iTunes Music Store which would seem easier, it does manage to find them at Amazon. I’ve been able to add cover art to over 80% of my library now. Fun little utility and it’s free.

Here’s another program I’m looking at using. BootCD from CharlesSoft apparently lets you make an OS X boot CD. This kind of tool is invaluable when you really need to diagnose your computer. I’ve been using Disk Utility from the Apple install cds, but that is a little tedious. This program gives you a finder, dock, and any other programs you want. Pretty cool. Well worth using a CD-RW disk.

Apparently, there’s a list of useful cheap programs from Macworld.