A Great Mac Utility That Costs Too Much Money

What makes for a five star Mac utility that you don’t need but can’t do without? The utility makes itself indispensable through sheer utility, elegance, and clever implementation, right?

Usually that’s the case, and it is certainly the case with Smart Scoll, a Mac utility you don’t really need, but once you use, wonder why you didn’t get it sooner, or why Apple doesn’t have it built in to OS X.

I have more than my fair share of Mac utilities—dozens of them, most of them free, but many that I am willing to pay for because they represent some kind of unique utility that just does more than expected.

For example, I love SuperDuper! Yes, there are other back up software utilities which do a very good job, but few work as simply, accurately, flawlessly as SuperDuper!, hence the Alexis Seal of Approval™.

Backing up your Mac is serious business since our Macs are loaded with expensive files—music, movie clips, digital photos. $28 is peanuts compared to the value.

What about Smart Scroll? After all, our Macs already scroll just fine, right? We have a mouse with a scroll wheel or a scroll nipple. What else do we need?

Smart Scroll brings an iPhone-like experience to your Mac’s scrolling efforts. It’s smooth, easy, with plenty of features for trackpad or scroll wheel. Scrolling on a Mac becomes remarkably easier than Apple’s standard offerings in OS X.

Scroll from the keyboard with the Universal Scroll feature. Super Scroll is smooth and easy and more comfortable, leading to more efficiency in screen movement, and more productivity.

The Grab Scroll feature does more by moving scrolling from the mouse to the keyboard. What’s not to like? Smart Scroll, once you use it becomes nearly indispensable for those of us who consider ourselves power users.

If your mouse, regardless of scroll wheel capabilities, can be seen by System Preferences Keyboard and Mouse control, then you just got a bunch more features.

The preference pane is a breeze to set up and use. Super Scroll has settings to make the scroll wheel slower or faster, coast less or more, or, with a keystroke combination, make the scroll wheel even faster than fast.

If you have a huge Mac screen you’ll appreciate the finer points of scrolling.

Grab Scroll brings what feels like an iPhone’s screen right to your Mac’s screen. The mouse pointer becomes your finger which can be flicked and moved up and down for ultra smooth, yet quick and efficient scrolling.

Power users love the Mac’s keyboard, and Smart Scroll loves power users and provides keyboard short cuts of a different color, a new animal with different stripes. You don’t just hit a letter key.

The keyboard short cuts avoid the problem of keyboard keystroke conflicts with other Mac applications by letting you hold down a key and tap another key to make the screen scroll. It’s another way your finger makes the Mac’s screen behave like an iPhone’s scrolling screen.

Smoothly, effortlessly, Mac-like.

OK, so Smart Scroll is one of those so nifty little add on utilities that once you try you wonder where it was when you first started using a Mac? What’s the downside?

Price. $28 gets you the best Mac back up software on the planet, so good it’s pleasurable to use, always dependable, so much so that your Mac life is backed up so you sleep better. That’s a small price to pay.

On the other hand, $19 gets you Smart Scroll, a five star (or, 5 mouse) rating for a utility that makes your Mac do what it probably should do right out of the box—scroll in ways you like so much that you’re willing to cough up the cash.

Marc Moini has created a true Mac gem utility and dozens of Mac users give it high fives and five star ratings. But $19? What price value? Is it worth that much?

To some, yes, to others, perhaps not, though many Mac users who try Smart Scroll suddenly realize that Apple doesn’t give OS X enough sweet utilities. Smart Scroll is great, yes. And a bit too much money for most Mac users for functionality you’d expect Apple to give you already.

Do you have a special utility for your Mac, one that is so close and dear to your heart that you’re willing to fork over hard earned cash? I have my share. Share your experience in the Comment section below.