Modding my Mac (and yours too)

Almost as long as I remember myself Apple Macintosh were part of my household.
It started when my mum got a computer for her graphics works back in 1988: Mac SE, stacked with 8″ monochrome screen, internal HD and 4mb RAM.

Later I received my own first computer with the 1st generation Power PC (PPC 7200 with system 7.0). At that point I started learning about modding my Mac. SuperClock! was the first addition (back then the OS didn’t come with a built in clock). Kaleidoscope was the second, a utility panel to change the looks of the Finder.

I don’t remember the rest of the stuff that I installed (it was more then 10 years ago), but even now, when I’m working on PowerBook With OS X Tiger on it, I still like to mod my mac.

For the benefit of other Mac users, I’m writing about the plugins I likes the most, and of which, I think most of the users should look at.

First, we’ll look at the Menu Extras and some other Finder helpers.

Objectpark’s MenuCalendarClock is a replacement for the clock originally resides in the Finder. It adds a date and a pop-up calendar and is compatible with your iCal or Entourage. It makes life a lot easier, and checking the date doesn’t involve pressing on the clock and there are a lot more features to it. (Advanced features $18.95, basic features for free).

MenuMeters, created by Alex Harper, is a control panel for those of you who like to be in control of what your Mac is up to. It adds a CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools to the menu. It helps to see if your network is online or if you are using all of your memory. (Free / Donation).

Colin Henein’s SlimBatteryMonitor is a replacement menu item for the normal Apple laptops battery menu. It gives the option to control the look and color of the different symbol (charged, charging, battery power, etc.) and can take less space on the menu. It is great for those who have too many items in the menu. (Free / Donation).

Ejector is a small menu item that adds an ejector button to the menu bar. You can eject any disk (e.g. iPod, external hard drive, .dmg or CDs/DVDs). (Free / Donation).

Quicksilver is an amazing application and you can do a lot with it. You can call any application with just a press on a key, or control iTunes with the keyboard from any application. You can check for a contact’s phone number, search the web, you can trigger any application to do anything. It is the best companion for the Finder and the Dock, and it can even replace them altogether. (Free / Donation).

Growl is becoming a standard notification system for the OS X. With Growl you don’t have to go to the Mail app in order to see the new mail. Growl will notify from whom the new mail has arrived with a short description. It also works with Quicksilver, Skype, Adium and iChat (with Chax). (Free / Donation).

More apps and handy plugins, later this week.

On my menu bar I have (from left to right): Quicksilver, Ejector, Amua, Menuet, ShuttleXpress, Salling Clicker, SlimBatteryMonitor, MenuMeters (Network, Disk, Memory, CPU), Airport, Bluetooth, Langauge, MenuCalendarClock, Spotlight.