Welcome to the newest Helpful Tiger category! Here’s where you’ll find out about the utilities I’ve found most useful in my programming endeavors.
PDF Browser Plugin
http://schubert-it.com/pluginpdf
In-browser viewer for PDF documents. Uses Apple’s PDF engine, so not a full-featured as Adobe’s viewer, but certainly very convenient, and it gets improvements when Apple’s engine improves. So, for instance, on 10.3 it can open Postscript documents.
I’ve found this plugin extremely useful for looking at documentation that I may not need permanently, but is only available in PDF format, such as the Unicode code charts.
Despite the fact that it’s free and Shubertit’s Web site also features shareware apps the poor man actually gets paid for, currently his Support page is mostly about PDF Browser Plugin and very informative.
He also has another free plugin for Microsoft Word.
And, err, some other stuff. Go look at that, too.
SafariNoTimeout
http://unsanity.com/haxies
A free Unsanity “haxie” that removes Safari’s 60-second connection timeout limit. Very helpful with Apple’s mailing list search pages, which I’ve talked about most recently in this post.
What!?, you’re saying to yourself. Didn’t I spend all that time telling you how to bypass Apple’s search pages? Don’t I “eat my own dog food”?
Okay, I admit it! I am a filthy hypocrite. I do use my own downloaded archives. Honestly. But– Apple’s site allows you to search for unrelated terms in a way unavailable to the client applications that I use to search the archives. If anybody is aware of an application that allows such OR-style searching, let me know. (And I’m not talking about grep, helpful as that can be.)
Also, if you’re on a new machine without the archives for a particular mailing list handy, it’s much easier to download this than wait 8 hours for all the archives to download, eh? It’s nice to have both techniques available when you need them.
Pacifist
http://charlessoft.com
A $20 shareware utility to open Mac OS X .pkg package files and allow you to extract individual files and folders out of them, as well as many other features.
This one’s a bit more special-purpose than the others, but I’ve found it helpful in the past when I’ve dealt more with OS X installer packages.
Iconographer
http://www.mscape.com/products/iconographer.html
A $15 shareware icon editor, especially useful for OS X-style icons.
I’ve found Icon Composer, the editor included with Apple’s developer tools, wanting in several respects, and Iconographer is in my opinion the best alternative for the money.
Weaponized Fluff 