Included in the bundle are CloudMounter, Commander One, Elmedia Player, SyncMate, Folx, FlexiHub and two of my favorites—PhotoBulk and Uplet. Unlike many other Cyber-sales this year, this bundle includes the latest versions of the apps… and they’re actually all USEFUL apps, not one good app with 5 or 6 other junk ones thrown in.

When you want to show off your app or other visuals meant for specific devices, it’s always best to show them in the context of how they’ll be used. PlaceIt takes your images and app screenshots and places it within an environment for a final photo that can be used as marketing collateral. There are tons of environments, or stages as they call them, you can place your image in, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, outdoor boards and more.

You simply choose the stage you want, upload your image to PlaceIt, and bam, you have a clean image showing off your screenshot as it will be seen by potential viewers.

The small comp images (400×300 pixels) are free, with larger images costing $8 to $80 depending on size and usage. That may seem expensive, but when you consider the cost of buying a stock photo, and the time it would take to mask out the image area and drop your image in, it’s well worth it.

Last week, I gave you part one of my list. Today I offer you part two of my list of OS X apps I can’t live without. Some I’ve used for quite a long time, some are a recent discover, but all of them have found a permanent home on my Mac.

Rename
There are plenty of file renamer apps available, but if you only need to use a tool like this once in a while, it’s a shame to spend $10 to $20 on it. Rename offers the most important features that more popular bulk file renamer apps have, and is free of charge. I don’t use it often, but when I do I’m glad I found this little gem.

AppCleaner
After all these years, you would think Apple could come up with a way to make it easy to delete an application and ALL its associated files. Until that happens, AppCleaner does the job extremely well – and it does it automatically. Drag an app to the Trash and AppCleaner pops up a window asking if you want to delete any files it finds that appear to be related to that app (prefs, configuration files, etc.) If you download and install a lot of different apps, AppCleaner is something you’ll want to have around, and it’s absolutely free.

TrashIt!
If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s when a file refuses to be deleted. The Finder somehow believes I don’t have permission, it’s in use, or whatever stupid reason. TrashIt! to the rescue. I keep the icon in the Finder window toolbar so it’s only a click away when I need it. TrashIt! simply asks for your admin password to delete any stuck file. It beats having to launch the Terminal and typing the command to delete a file. TrashIt! is free, and has saved me from throwing large heavy objects through my office window many, many times.

Apptivate
Get instant access to files & folders, or launch apps and scripts with a quick keyboard shortcut. There are tons of file launchers available today, but Apptivate is simple and works extremely well. I particularly like the ability to assign a sequence of key shortcuts to activate items in Apptivate. It also allows you to overwrite system shortcuts with a pref setting. Apptivate is free.

Yoink
Drag & drop is fantastic. I use it constantly. But if you use apps in Full Screen mode, have apps in separate spaces, or have a hard time motivating yourself to hold the mouse button down while you navigate from one place to another in order to drop the file in the right spot, then it’s probably not a lot of fun. I found Yoink to be a real life-saver, popping-up a window when you start dragging a file and allowing you to “store” it there until you’re ready to drop it somewhere else. I love it because I can drag multiple files into the window one at a time from various Finder windows, then drop them all at once in an email. Yoink is available in the Mac App Store for $3.99.

Worth mentioning:

Onyx
Onyx is the one-stop-shop for tweaking your Mac, and keeping it running smoothly. With the ability to run maintenance routines and customize the Mac OS, it offers something for everyone. It’s updated frequently, and best of all, it’s absolutely free. This is one of those apps that I can’t believe everyone doesn’t already have installed.

1Password
For creating, storing, and entering passwords for websites, there’s simply nothing better. And when you add in the ability to store credit card info, and software license info, 1Password is one app I can’t live without. $50 will get you a single-user license, while $70 gets you a family license (5 users). 1Password is available via the Mac App Store or directly from the developer.

Suitcase Fusion
Every designer needs a font manager. There are only a few options available, and Suitcase is the king of the mountain. Every new version brings useful features for designers, updates for new versions of Adobe’s Creative Suite are timely, and it’s been rock-solid for me for years. In particular, Fusion’s Quick Match feature is invaluable. Fusion costs $100, with upgrades priced at $50.

Tweetbot
There are a ton of 3rd party Twitter applications available, but none of them come close to Tweetbot – which strikes the perfect balance between features and usability. Tweetbot isn’t cheap. At $20, it’s not for the casual user. But if you spend a lot of time on Twitter, it’s worth every penny!

“When it comes to utilities and applications for my Mac, I must admit I’m a bit of a whore.”

I’ll date lots of them, and toss them aside just as quickly as I come across them. But there are some that just seem to stick around. I absolutely love them, and can’t imagine my Mac-using life without them. Here is part one of my list of OS X apps I love:

Default Folder
The definitive “must-have” app for Mac users since the mid 90s, Default Folder X is what the Mac’s Save & Open dialog boxes should be. Default Folder X offers custom keyboard shortcuts put your favorite and recent folders at your fingertips. Pop-up menus let you navigate your folders and open Finder windows. It also remembers what folder you were last in, and where you were in the list of files contained in that folder. Default Folder X costs just $34.95, and well worth it!

Copy
I used Dropbox for a few years, but after reaching the 18GB limit of free space, account security issues that seemed to keep popping up, intermittent sync speed issues, and the fact that the Dropbox app update system only seems to work half of the time, I decided to give Copy a try.

Copy is a service provided by Barracuda Networks, the network security experts. Copy works almost exactly the same way Dropbox does, but you start with 15GB of free space (instead of Dropbox’s tiny 2GB) and there’s no limit on the amount of free space you can earn via referrals.

They also offer something unique for users who share files with each other. Rather than 200MB file counting against both users’ storage limit, Copy splits the file space between the two users – so each of you only has 100MB counted against their limit.

aText
I love text-replacement capability. And even though it’s built-in to OS X, it’s quite limited. aText takes it much further with the ability to work in any program, and giving you the ability to fully customize your text-replacements with not only text, but images, Applescripts & shell scripts as well. There are other text-replacement utilities out there, but in my opinion they’re either too bloated, or too expensive. aText is only $5 from the Mac App Store.

Pixa
I reviewed Pixa early last year and loved it! If you have large collections of images for each client, or folders full of free images you’ve downloaded, it can be a real chore to find the perfect one for the design piece you’re working on. You could try to organize them in iPhoto, but let’s be honest; iPhoto ain’t that great for that. When I reviewed Pixa, I called it the most useful design-related app I’ve installed in over a year. That’s probably still the case. Organizing, keywording, searching and opening/placing images with Pixa couldn’t be easier. Pixa costs $30 and is available in the Mac App Store.

Palua
I love the function key features built-in to all Apple keyboards. The ability to control volume, Mission Control, brightness, etc. is awesome. But sometimes I want to assign other functions to those F-Keys when I’m using InDesign or Photoshop. You can check out my review of Palua here. Palua allows you to keep those built-in functions in some apps, and switch the F-keys to user-assignable in other apps. And it does it automatically. When I’m in the Finder or web browser, F7-F12 still control audio functions, but when I switch to Photoshop, Palua turns those functions off and allows me to assign other things to those keys via Photoshop’s F-Key preferences. Palua costs just 99¢ from the Mac App Store.

Worth mentioning:

Voila
Voila is my go-to app for capturing, editing and organizing screenshots and quick desktop videos. You can read my review of Voila here. Voila is $29.99, and $19.99 for students.

XtraFinder
I can’t say enough about this little OS X Finder add-on. If you want to customize your Finder windows, this the app to start with – especially since it’s free!

Bartender
If your menubar icons are cluttering up your screen, and you don’t like the seemingly random order they appear, Bartender is the app for you. It’s quite simply the only app that works as advertised. Bartender is only $15, a small price to pay for your sanity!

Keep an eye out for part two of the list of Mac OS X apps I can’t live without.

“People are stupid.”

Apigee has released the results of the 2013 Mobile App Behavior Survey of smartphone owners across France, Germany, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S.

Survey respondents reported some fascinating country by country differences:

• 18% of the French are unable to order dinner without using an app
• 32% say they can’t wake up in the morning without an app
• Some people use more than 50 apps per day
• Many use apps to impress people
• Surprisingly high numbers admit to using apps behind the wheel
• First smartphone? Germans say no age is too young

When asked the age at which it’s appropriate for a child to receive their first smartphone, 75% say somewhere between the ages of 12 and 16. However, 2% of Germans say a one-year-old child should have a smartphone, 8% of Americans say the right age is 10, and 6% of people in the U.S. and Spain say parents should wait until kids reach the age of 18 before giving them their first smartphone.

53% of drivers across the world admit to using apps on their smartphone while behind the wheel. Some countries have made more headway than others at curbing this behavior, but the numbers of respondents saying they do this is consistently high: Germany (64%), France (61%), Spain (56%), U.S. (49%) and UK (30%).

Interestingly, “pride” emerged as the top reason that people stay with the mobile platform of their choice. Americans emerged as the most proud of their chosen operating system at a surprising 37%. However, overall iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows users say it’s pride that keeps them from switching.

Spain ranked as the most app-reliant country with 93% saying they can’t go one complete day; while half (50%) of U.S. residents saying they couldn’t last just four hours without apps. And the amount of apps people say they use each day is significant: 72% say they use as many as 10 apps per day, and 2% in the global survey even claim they use more than 50 apps per day.

[zilla_alert style=”yellow”] Note: I received this information via an emailed press-release, and have NOT seen the actual report. But if what you see here is any indication, it’s got to be a great read. [/zilla_alert]

With Instagram, Facebook chose to allow it to live-on for now – but I suspect it will eventually get fully integrated into Facebook’s brand apps. Unfortunately, Google has not been as kind. They’ve made it clear that they have no intention on adding features to it in the future. It’s dead. And while Facebook only hired the developers and not purchased the apps themselves, they’re essentially dead as well.

I’m not suggesting that you should not buy apps from independent developers. They’re what makes the Apple community great. And I absolutely do not blame any developer for selling their company for large sums of money. They worked hard to create a great app or service and they deserve the rewards.

But you should take these recent acquisitions into consideration when you purchase your next app that may be a mission-critical one. Let me give you an example.

I love Default Folder X. I consider it to be my most important utility, and the first thing I install on a new Mac. I have no problem shelling out any upgrade fee the developer chooses to charge, because I know it isn’t going anywhere. Default Folder has been around since the pre-Mac OS X days. To my knowledge, they’ve never had to resort to drastic price drops or bundle promotions to sell the app, and the developer already has it ready for OS X Mountain Lion. And I can’t see any company outside of Apple wanting to buy the app because it’s such a niche app – for power-users only.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have an app like Toast Titanium that is on its third owner (currently, Corel owns it). While Toast has been around a long time, I wouldn’t recommend buying it anymore because there are plenty of other apps to burn optical media discs, including Apple’s built-in burner, and it appears that nobody has found it to be profitable or it wouldn’t have been sold yet again.

The cost of applications available on the Mac App Store are very affordable. It’s hard not to take a chance on a $3.00 application. But if you’re going to rely heavily on an application, you should probably think hard about the longevity of the app and the developer. Is the developer charging enough to make a living off the sale of the app? Is the app a “trendy” one that you think may go away or change dramatically in a short amount of time? Are there larger, more established companies selling an app that does the same thing? In the case of Sparrow – I almost saw this coming, which is why I never purchased the app.

One last thing to consider. Is the app based almost entirely on another service? I love Tweetbot – and can’t wait for the Mac version to ship. But something tells me it won’t be long before it dies, because it’s entire existence is based on Twitter allowing it exist in the first place. If Twitter decides they no longer want to allow 3rd party apps to use their APIs, Tweetbot and all the other 3rd party Twitter apps are dead.

If you have a lot of items in a music playlist and you want to check or uncheck them all, you can save yourself the time and trouble of doing it one-by-one simply by clicking the checkbox of any song in the playlist while holding the Command key down. Doing so will check or uncheck all the items in the playlist at once.

If waiting for all those startup utilities, helpers and applications annoys you every time you boot up/restart your Mac, rejoice in the fact that their is a simple solution.

While you could spend the time to set up an Automator Applescript to set the order and delay time between apps launching, it’s far easier to use DelayedLauncher to do the job.

Delayed launcher allows you to set the order your helpers, utilities and apps launch at boot time, as well as set a delay between each one. This can be quite helpful because OS X attempts to launch all the items in the Startup Items list (in your System Preferences/Accounts tab) at one time – thereby slowing the time until you can actually use your Mac down. In some cases, it can bring your entire system to a crawl until they’ve all launched.

I have no set criteria for deciding what stays and what goes, but for the most part the app has to serve a particular need, look good, and work as advertised. The following is not a complete list of what’s installed on my Mac, but it represents what applications and utilities have stood the test of time, and what I use the most.

My favorite apps are, in no particular order:

JustNotes

There are lots of note-taking apps out there, but when I set out to find one that was dead simple, had a Mac and web client, and synced with my iPhone – I found only one that worked for me. JustNotes uses the SimpleNote service and syncs with all my Macs, my iPhone. It offers a menubar item for quick access, a few keyboard shortcuts, and not much more. It’s exactly what I was looking for, and it’s free.

Note: SimpleNote offers a web client, as well as iPhone app by itself – so you only need JustNotes (or other compatible app) if you want a Mac client.

Evernote

Now you might wonder why I would need Evernote when I just told you I use JustNotes/SimpleNotes. The reason is simple. Evernote offers image, PDF and other file support. Evernote also offers the ability to create multiple notebooks to keep things organized. Like JustNotes, Evernote also offers a Mac client, an iPhone app, and a browser plugin. I use Evernote more as a web-clipping service than a notes app. Evernote offers a free version, and a paid subscription version that removes ads and increases storage.

DropBox

While the original intention of Dropbox was simply to share files with other people, it has turned into an indispensable app that many other utilities and services take advantage of. With referral bonus space pushing my storage limit to over 10GB of free storage, I have plenty of space for sharing files with printers. But Dropbox gets the most use from other utilities and applications to store their data files for syncing between my laptop and desktop Macs, a storage bin for article ideas, and a simple way to bring files home from my PC at work.

Spark

Though Mac OS X has the ability for the user to assign keyboard shortcuts via the System Preferences, it’s a truly half-hearted offering. Quite frankly, I find it useless. In searching for a utility to allow system-wide keyboard shortcuts for launching apps, opening folders and assigning events, I came across Spark. It’s not sexy, and doesn’t get updated very often, but it works perfectly and is absolutely free.

AppTamer

I use my MacBook Pro for work on the road. I carry it everywhere and don’t always have the ability to plug it in to charge, so preserving the battery is always in the back of my head. AppTamer is similar to Apple’s stock ActivityMonitor app in that it lists all running apps and processes and allows you to quit them at will. The advantage AppTamer has over ActivityMonitor is that it offers an AutoStop feature. AutoStop puts an application or process to “sleep” until needed. Though the battery charge savings aren’t significant, every little bit helps. You also get the advantage of saving a few extra CPU cycles and MBs of RAM by AutoStopping apps you aren’t using. AppTamer is $14.95 for a single-user license.

RipIt

Before I found RipIt (actually, the developer found me after I was complaining about not finding a great simple app to backup my DVDs on Twitter), I tried Handbreak, and a host of other apps that were all WAY too complicated. RipIt is just fantastically simple to make backup copies of your commercial DVDs, and for me at least has worked every time. You put a DVD in your drive, launch the app and click a button to make a disc image of your DVD which you can then backup to a hard drive or burn to DVD. There are a few compression options available, but the lack of “features” to decipher is what makes this app so great. RipIt costs $24.95.

SneakPeek Pro

When Apple introduced Quick Look into Mac OS X, I immediately took to it. It annoys me to no end to have to open a file just to see what it is. Unfortunately, Quick Look doesn’t always work with graphics files like InDesign documents, and it offers little other than a preview of the file. SneakPeek Pro not only works with those InDesign files, but also offers information about the file itself, such as a list of fonts used in the document, color plates, and more. SneakPeak Pro can be had for $19.95.

AppCleaner

Experienced Mac users know that simply deleting an application does not completely uninstall it. There are a load of preference files, frameworks files and more that litter the hard drive. For years I used AppZapper, or rather, I tried to remember to use AppZapper to more thoroughly remove an application. The problem was I had to remember to use it. AppCleaner automates the job by collecting those lingering preference files when you drag an application to the trash. You can also customize AppCleaner to protect default applications and create your own protected list so you don’t accidentally delete anything you don’t want to. The process is so seamless that I’ve forgotten that it’s not part of the default Mac OS X installation. AppCleaner is free.

Toast Titanium

With all the free apps to create CDs and DVDs, including Apple’s built-in burner software, I’m still amazed that I’ve been using Toast since the days of Mac OS 8 and 9 to burn CDs. I shouldn’t be surprised though. Toast is the by far the most comprehensive app for doing the job. It offers plenty of options to burn a CD or DVD in virtually any way you wish. Over the years, Roxio has added secondary applications to the app, such as a utility to catelog your CDs as your burn them for later searching. In the end though, I rarely use all the add-on apps – Toast does its job so well that I long ago stopped looking at alternative applications. At $99, it’s worth every penny for me – but if it seems a bit pricey, there is a $20 mail-in rebate available.

Adobe Creative Suite 5

Many years ago, I used a mix of tools for print design, which included Quark XPress, Macromedia Freehand and Photoshop. When Adobe released InDesign, I immediately switched to an all-Adobe workflow – and haven’t looked back. Having recently released Acrobat Pro X, Adobe has reaffirmed its dominance in the graphics and content creation market. While there are other cheaper alternatives out there, none even come close to offering the professional features that the Creative Suite apps do – and none are more widely accepted by printers and professional organizations. If you’re just getting started in the business, you might as well get the Adobe apps now, because you’re going to have to use them eventually. Pricing varies depending on which suite you purchase.

In part 2 of this article (which I’ll publish on Wednesday), I’ll share several more utilities and apps I use on a regular basis. Until then, feel free to share your favorite apps in the comments.

By far, the best site I’ve come across for iPhone apps is AppShopper. When you want to read descriptions, reviews, and price watching, AppShopper is the place to go. It’s also the best looking and most organized site of the bunch. The site also offers a free iPhone app to complete the mobile experience.

The original iPod/iPhone site, iLounge, is still one of the first places people go for news and reviews on all things iPhone. In particular, the quality of their reviews of various iPhone/iPod Touch cases cannot be touched by anyone!

FreshApps is another app review site. The site doesn’t have nearly the amount of content as some others, but the layout is clean and I like the quality of content so far.

iPhone Alley isn’t one of my favorite iPhone sites, but it does contain quite a bit of good content, so it’s worth bookmarking.

148Apps is one of the more popular iPhone sites around, and for good reason. App reviews contain useful ratings, reviews and screenshots. This is one site you’ll want to check out when you’re considering purchasing an app. In particular I like the Price Drops section, where you can quickly see which apps have lowered their price or gone free.