Welcome to a new tag on RogersMJ.com…”Mac Apps.” For some reason or another, I’ve avoided posting much about my experiences using Macs and my discovery of cool software and tricks over the last 11 months, but the initial reasons escape me now. Aside from being really slick computers with a really slick OS, there is a huge abundance of awesome applications out there for the Mac…for some reason, I seem to have discovered a lot more high-quality apps for Mac OS X in less than a year than I did for Windows in nearly 15 years. Maybe it’s the focus on cohesive, intuitive user interfaces that really grabs me…after all, I’m a UI designer by nature. At any rate, I’ve found so many cool applications that I decided I need to share them. And if you don’t have a Mac to use these on…consider getting one. They’re more affordable than ever, and you can now run Windows on them too in case you can’t cut the cord cold-turkey.

To kick off Mac Apps, I’m starting with one that helps you manage all your other apps. It’s called AppFresh and, like many of the applications I’ll be focusing on, it’s completely free.

AppFresh scans your Applications folder (which, for the uninitiated, is typically where your put all of your programs on the Mac) and then goes out onto the Intertubes and checks for new versions of every application, plugin, dashboard widget, and preference pane you have installed. Now of course, like Windows’ Automatic Update, Mac OS X has a built-in Software Update as well…but that only handles Apple stuff, like the iLife (iTunes, iPhoto, etc) apps and OS X itself, just like Windows Update only updates Windows itself. AppFresh handles everything else. When you get upwards of 50 or 100 applications installed on your computer, this is very handy. Many of these apps will check for updates on their own when you run them, but then that takes time and resources at the moment when, ideally, I just want to use the app. AppFresh does it all at once. It’s amazingly efficient, only occasionally presenting you with a web page for the application, asking you to click the download link if it can’t find it on its own. Other than that, everything is done automatically. I’m usually fairly good at keeping my stuff up to date, but even so when I ran AppFresh for the first time on my work-issued PowerBook it found about 20 things that had new versions out, full of bug fixes and new features that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of.

One thing you have to watch out for is that it will pick up new versions of software that you will eventually have to buy, not just incremental free updates. For example, I have Adobe Illustrator CS2 on my PowerBook. AppFresh detected that Adobe Illustrator CS3 is available and offered to download and install it for me. That, however, would be a time-limited demo and would cost several hundred dollars to purchase once the demo expired. Luckily, with a single command you can tell AppFresh to ignore certain applications, so when I run it in the future it will no longer present me with Illustrator CS3. Very neat.

If you’ve got a Mac, give AppFresh a try. After all, it’s free. Granted, it’s not the most exciting thing in the world, but it’s very useful and well-executed. If you don’t have a Mac…well, this just the beginning of my attempt to bring you over to the light side.