Apple News, Analysis and Podcasts

Apple opened the Mac App Store in January of 2011. Since then, several big developers have added their applications to the store like Omni Group and AutoDesk. Still many more big and small developers have yet to add their applications. While the Mac App Store application quality has improved slowly, there is still a long way to go before it is the main place to get all applications on the Mac.

Even if the Mac Apple Store does not have all the best applications, there are still a lot of great new and old applications to be found there. Today, we will look at two new and one old utility that can be found in the Store.

The Unarchiver: The Unarchiver is a free utility that has been around for awhile. I have been using it for 4 years now for uncompressing files found on the internet. It can pretty much uncompress anything thrown at it like RAR, zip, Tar, Stuffit, ISO disc images, and Gzip. Don’t worry if these compression formats may seem like a foreign language, since this application will be able to handle it. The Unarchiver also puts the archived file in the trash automatically after un-compression is complete, which saves time. This is something Apple’s own unZip tool does not do. It has several other useful un-compressing options as well. It is a one click, easy to install application that will be a welcome addition to any Mac.

Caffeine: I found this application the day the Mac App Store opened. It puts an icon in the menu bar (coffee cup) to turn it on or off. When it is turned on, (Coffee cup full and hot) it prevents the computer from going to sleep and turning on the screen saver. This can be useful for many tasks from watching movies to calibrating monitors. It only uses 8MB of RAM, which is nothing these days. This is another free, one click install application.

Disk LED: This application is a recent discovery. It also puts an icon in the menu bar, but this one displays the current state of disk activity. It has 4 states from no activity to intense activity. Since Macs don’t have any indicators for showing disk activity, this is a great way to see what the computer is doing without having to open up the Activity Monitor. It is a pretty simple tool that only takes up 9MB of RAM. One more free utility that improves that Mac experience with an easy one click install.

While the Mac App Store is still fairly small compared with the total number Mac applications available, it has become a good place to discover new applications for the Mac. We just looked at three free tools one can get. If you know of others, let us know in the comments below. Watch T-GAAP for more articles on other hidden gems from the Mac App Store.

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1 Comment

1. James ~ May 18, 2011 20:31
   Actually the Apple Archive Utility.app can move the archive being decompressed (or decoded) to the trash after finishing. It just doesn't do it automatically by default. To set this behavior, open the Archive Utility (you have to go to the System/Library/CoreServices folder and launch the Archive Utility.app). Then go to the preferences and choose "Move Archive to Trash" from the After Expanding Menu. From that point on, any archive being decompressed will be dumped into the trash after the process completes. Still, UnArchiver certainly supports a wider range of archive formats. Regards

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