Extensis has released Suitcase Fusion 6 today, bringing compatibility for the font management tool with the latest versions of Adobe Creative Cloud, Quark XPress, and Apple’s Yosemite OS. I hope to be publishing a full review later this week or early next.

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!

Instructions for the update here.

Until December 30th, 2011, each purchase or upgrade of the Suitcase Fusion 3 font manager for Mac, designers get the font identification tool FontGenius ($40 value) for FREE.

Grab your copy of Suitcase Fusion and get Font Genius free!

FontGenius allows designers to:

Visit the bundle page for more info.

Extensis Web Font Plug-in makes using Web Fontss in your mock-ups easy

Most of the Foundries available in the WebINK service have made their fonts available for use in the Photoshop plug-in, and more are being added. The fonts are available in an easy to use Photoshop panel after signing-in to the service right in the panel.

To use the free Web Font Plug-in, you need to download and install the Suitcase Fusion font manager demo, and set up a free WebINK account. If you already own Suitcase Fusion, you can simply update the app. If you don’t want to use the Suitcase Fusion app to manage your fonts, the plug-in will continue to work after the demo expires.

This release updates Suitcase Fusion 3 for compatibility with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).

The new plug-ins automatically activate the exact fonts required for each file using the patented Font Sense™ technology to create a unique fingerprint for each font. Adobe Creative Suite auto-activation plug-ins now include:

• Adobe InDesign® CS3, CS4, CS5, and CS5.5
• Adobe Illustrator® CS3, CS4, CS5, CS5.1 (shipping with CS5.5)
• Adobe Photoshop® CS4, CS5, CS5.1 (shipping with CS5.5)

Existing Suitcase Fusion 3 users may obtain the new plug-ins through the Check for Updates features of Suitcase Fusion 3.

What started with admiring the very slick icon, ended up being complete surprise to me, and a shift in my thinking about my preferred font management app of choice.

FontExplorer X Pro 3 (I’ll call it FEX from this point forward) isn’t the “mostly glitz and little guts” type of alternative application you run into when trying to replace a big-name app. FEX is stable, fast, intuitive, and actually works as advertised. After about an hour of use, I began to think “this is nice, but at some point today this thing is going to do something to tick me off.” FEX never did.

FontExplorer X Pro's main window contains exactly what you would expect in a font manager

The main window of FEX is much like any other font manager, listing your fonts and font sets in a column on the left, with a preview of fonts on the right. And like other font managers, FEX allows you to create groups of fonts you use frequently, add tags to your fonts for easy searching, get more in-depth info about your fonts, and set up custom type previews of selected fonts. Being a Suitcase Fusion user, I felt right at home in FEX.

Most importantly (to me anyway), FEX’s Auto-Activation in Adobe Creative Suite applications works perfectly!

Auto-activation works perfectly in my testing of Adobe CS4 and CS5 apps, as well as Quark XPress; an important aspect of a font manager for those with massive font collections and lots of incoming files from outside sources.

While other font managers offer a similar feature, I love FEX’s way of displaying information about a selected font. The Font Info window not only displays a visual graph of all the characters available in the font, but also gives you a quick look at the HTML code and the keyboard shortcut for specific characters such as the Register symbol.

FontExplorer X Pro's Font Info window offers vitals for your selected font

The list of features available in FEX is pretty thorough compared to any font manager on the market, including the ability to import Font Agent Pro and Suitcase Fusion font sets – making it easy to start using FEX immediately. Displaying your font samples seemed much more intuitive than Suitcase Fusion, and the ability to export fonts from FEX (you can choose to store your fonts wherever you want, or let FEX organize them for you) takes the process a step further than other font managers I’ve tried.

You can simply copy the fonts to a new folder, have them placed in a single .zip file, or create a disc image with them. And if you’re exporting a lot of carefully organized fonts, you can export the entire font structure of your sets. It’s very slick! Of course you can also choose the image format of exported font previews as well.

FontExplorer X Pro's preferences offer plenty of customization

For various reasons, I had been restarting my Mac or logging in & out a lot while testing FEX (nothing to do with FEX). After about a week of doing so, I noticed something that absolutely made my day.

While using Suitcase Fusion, starting up my Mac always came with a thrashing of my hard drive, and a severe delay in other startup items becoming available. This is due to Suitcase Fusion having to load all my fonts from its internal database. In fact, sometimes Fusion’s Core pref pane wouldn’t run at all, forcing me to manually turn it on in the System Prefs, which also meant having to re-launch InDesign if it was already open.

With disabling Fusion and running only FEX, the hard drive thrashing and slow startup times disappeared completely. I also noticed a much improved launch time with InDesign and Illustrator when using FEX compared to Fusion.

Fusion is a great font manager, but I’ve been happily using FEX for several weeks now, and I’m not sure I’ll stop using it at this point. It’s been great!

FontExplorer X Pro 3 is just $79 ($21 less than Suitcase Fusion!). A downloadable demo is available.

The applications listed below contains some names you’ll probably be familiar with, but there’s a reason for that. They’re just superb at what they do, thus very popular.

Caffeine

If you work on a MacBook Pro, you no doubt have your LCD screen set to dim and turn off after a relatively short amount of inactivity in order to save battery charge. This is generally fine unless you’re doing a lot of reading or watching a DVD. Caffeine is a small application that lives in your menubar that solves this problem by preventing your screen from dimming and the computer from sleeping. A click of the coffee cup icon in the menubar prevents your computer from sleeping for a user-specified amount of time ranging from 15 minutes to 5 hours (or indefinitely). Caffeine is a free utility.

MailPlane

I’m a fan of Google’s free Gmail service, in fact I have more than one Gmail address – and each of those addresses has several other email addresses being forwarded to them. Apple’s built-in Maill app is great on the desktop, but I find it a bit clunky for laptop use – and I hate the webmail version. I use Mail on my desktop only as my main email app – and only use Gmail for reading on the road. Mailplane offers multiple account support, drag & drop image support, keyboard shortcuts, a menubar indicator, and a lot more in a simple-to-use desktop application. If you use Gmail heavily, the $24.95 is well worth it.

TextExpander

Apple built-in a text substitution service into Mac OS X Snow Leopard, but it’s really not very robust, and its features are limited. There are several similar applications available, but in my opinion TextExpander is the best. Allowing you to hit a few keys to expand into user-defined text and images can save a ton of time. I have to type the Graphic Mac web address quite a bit, so being able to simply hit the letter TGM and have it expand to the full URL of this site is a huge time saver. If you’re a web developer, writer, or simply type a lot of repetitive text, an app like TextExpander can save you a lot of typing for only $34.95.

Suitcase Fusion 3

My preferred font manager dates back into the early 90s. If you have a large font collection, you must have a good font manager, and I’ve stuck with Suitcase Fusion to do the job. Suitcase had a rocky start back in the day, but has seen many improvements over the years. Suitcase Fusion 3 offers stability, flexibility, font corruption checking, and a newly introduced feature called WebInk. WebInk allows you to use specific fonts in your HTML code – for beautiful web page design. There are other font management applications available, but I’ve found that Extensis keeps Suitcase Fusion up-to-date with new versions of Adobe Creative Suite for auto-font activation more so than other developers. And for large design firms, Extensis offers a server version as well. A single user license of Suitcase Fusion 3 will cost you $99.95.

Flip4Mac

Microsoft just won’t go away, and neither (apparently) will the Windows Media file format (.wmv). The Windows media file formats have never really worked very well on the Mac, and a few years ago Microsoft simply stopped making a plugin for Mac browsers to read the format at all. Thankfully, Flip4Mac came along and offered a way for Apple’s Quicktime app to read WMV files transparently right in Safari, Firefox, Chrome and more. Most WMV files look horrible, but if you absolutely need to view them, Flip4Mac does the job. Flip4Mac Player is free, but there are pro versions available that offer integration with Quicktime-enabled apps.

Perian

Speaking of media file formats not working with the Mac, there are a host of others besides WMV that don’t work. Like Flip4Mac, Perian strives to bring them to the Mac. Perian is an opensource software package that allows Apple’s Quicktime to display audio and video formats such as: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, VFW, and a host of other video and audio formats. The beauty of Perian is that it’s all seamless – you never know it’s there. If you find yourself not being able to view or listen to files on web sites, you need to install Perian – which is absolutely free!

Default Folder X

For the most part, Apple has made a fantastic OS. But one aspect of the OS that has defied explanation for decades has been their refusal to improve the Open & Save dialog boxes. They just seem so “unhelpful.” I mentioned earlier that I’ve used Suitcase for many years. But the utility with the longest tenure on my Macs is definitely Default Folder by St. Clair Software. Default Folder does so much that I won’t even try to explain it all here. Needless to say, it improves Open & Save dialog boxes greatly with features that Apple should have built-in years ago. Among those features are the ability to set keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch to specific folders (which also work in the Finder – not just dialog boxes), view previews of files, set Spotlight tags for files, and much more. Default Folder X is the very first app I install on any new Mac I get – it’s the best $34.95 I’ve ever spent on a piece of software!

1Password

No software list for the Mac would be complete without mentioning 1Password. With virtually every website requiring you to log in with a username and password, keeping track of them all is a daunting task. 1Password does just that and more. 1Password not only remembers your passwords, but auto-fills them on the sites you visit as well. Along with usernames and passwords, 1Password can keep track of your purchasing information such as mailing address and credit card info. Another feature I’ve just begun using 1Password for is keeping track of software licenses and serial numbers. It offers easy entry of the info, plus the ability to attach license files, PDFs and other text files pertaining to the software I’ve purchased (receipts, etc.). 1Password works with virtually all major web browsers, and also offers an iPhone app. 1Password costs $59.95. It’s somewhat expensive, but it’s one of those apps you’ll wonder how you did without once you use it.

Google Chrome

Few apps are as important nowadays than your web browser. For years I relied on Firefox due to all the available extensions. The problem with Firefox was that it just kept getting more and more bloated and slow. Safari is faster, and offers a clean interface, but even today offers little in the way of customization via extensions. Google Chrome offers the best of both worlds. It’s rocket fast, offers plenty of extensions, looks good, and is as stable for me as any other browser. That last part is surprising considering I use Developer Builds of Chrome (because I like having all the available features and improvements). If you’re looking to settle on a single browser, Chrome offers the speed of Safari, and the expansion and compatibility with web sites of Firefox.

Note: To download the Developer Builds, scroll halfway down the Chrome download page to the section titled Subscribing To A Channel, and choose the Mac Dev Channel link.

MacPilot

Because I don’t mind living on the edge, I’m always looking for ways to take advantage of every feature the Mac OS offers – even the ones Apple would rather I didn’t. At last count, MacPilot offers over 660 tweaks to the Mac OS and other applications you might have installed on your Mac. There are a ton of apps that customize various aspects of the OS for free (Onyx, TinkerTool, etc.), but none come close to the clean interface and amount of features that MacPilot does. If you’re looking to tweak your interface or functionality of your Mac, chances are that MacPilot can help you. MacPilot costs $19.95 for a single user license.

In part 3 of this series, which I’ll publish early next week, I’ll reveal the last 10 of the apps I love the most. In the meantime, feel free to list some of your favorites in the comments.