Who Has The Coolest List Of Mac Utilities?

Is there a more personal computer than the Mac? How do you cukstomize your Mac and make it personal?

You add cool utilities that do more than what comes with Mac OS X. Here’s a list of cool little tools that do more for less.

As part of Mac360’s Focus on select Mac developers, one newcomer hits near the top of our list with a growing suite of Mac products you’ll love.

Of their 10 Mac utilities, I use five. As you’ll see, Ecamm’s tools provide solutions and features not available in Mac OS X and not easily found in other Mac applications.

For example, I have and use the iSight camera sitting on top of my Mac’s 23-inch Cinema Display screen. iSight is a quality camera, but seems to need lots of light; more light than I have in my home office.

Ecamm’s iGlasses provides settings for iSight which Apple does not.

Brighten the video image, add effects such as night vision and sepia tone, even activate a macro focus in iSight.

iGlasses is a mature, nifty utility for iSight that just works where you need it to do more than Mac OS X allows.

I’m now a big fan of Skype on the Mac. It does nearly everything iChat does, but connects to more Windows users, and dials from your Mac to a remote telephone.

Ecamm’s Call Recorder lets your Mac record Skype phone calls and saves them as QuickTime movies. Basically, it’s just click and record your Skype conversation.

With Tiger I finally moved all my mail from Microsoft Entourage to OS X’s Mail. Mail is quite capable but misses one thing very important for someone who uses multiple email accounts. Notification.

All the Mail Dock icon does is tell me how many messages are in the inbox, not in which account. Ecamm’s Dockstar supercharges that simple notification function with up to five new-mail indicators in the Dock icon.

If you only have one or two email accounts, don’t worry about Dockstar. If you have three or more and use Mail to manage your email, Dockstar is a great tool.

Are you a digital camera owner? If so, you may have experienced some corruption on your camera’s flash memory cards. It happens. You shoot 50 or 60 photos, and the card becomes corrupted when trying to connect to your Mac.

Are your photos lost forever? No, not if you use Ecamm’s CardRaider. More often than not, the photos are not corrupt, just not visible to your Mac. CardRaider makes them visible again, even moving them automatically into iPhoto.

See? This is a Mac utility maker who, as Tera and Bambi have been so fond of saying, “gets it.” They understand Mac users, they know Mac OS X, and they publish utilities that make our Macs ever more personal, efficient, productive.