The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

• Developer: ManyTricks / Product page
• Price: €9.95 (free trial available; €6.95 cross-grade)

I’ve never been a huge fan of download manager applications — for my needs, I really felt that Firefox plus the Download Statusbar did everything I’d ever need relative to downloads. Then I spent some time using Many Tricks’ new lightweight download manager, Leech. Leech is really best for those who download a lot of files; if you usually only download a couple of files a week, then your browser’s built-in tools will probably meet your needs. But if you download a ton of stuff, you may find Leech quickly becoming an indispensable tool.

What does Leech offer that you don’t …

The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

• Developer: ManyTricks / Product page
• Price: Donationware

There are lots of utilities out there to help with batch file renaming, including Apple’s own Automator, which includes some renaming actions. One of my favorite tools is Name Mangler, which has a (relatively) intuitive interface, and some powerful renaming features. Using a drop-down menu, you tell Name Mangler what you’d like it to do — find and replace, number sequentially, change case, set extension, add prefix/suffix, or remove/insert characters. There’s one more option here, Advanced, that I’ll discuss in a bit more detail later.

The left half of the Name Mangler window shows the list of files…

The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

• Developer: iSlayer/ Product page
• Price: Free [donations encouraged]

For years, I’ve used Raging Menace’s free MenuMeters (Pick of the Week write-up) to keep an eye on my system. Although I’ve tried other apps over the years, this week’s Pick is the first one that has me seriously considering changing my system monitoring utility. As with MenuMeters, iStat menus lets you monitor various system activities via menu bar icons. Also as with MenuMeters, you can monitor CPU usage, disk space, me…

The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 8 out of 10]

• Developer: Patrick Stein/ Product page
• Price: €19.95 [free demo available]

Last year, I gave a PotW award to JollysFastVNC, a speedy VNC client. That product was actually a spin-off from ScreenRecycler, which is interesting in its own right. Just what is ScreenRecycler? A program that lets you use another computer — Mac or Windows — as an additional screen for another Mac. In other words, it’s a virtual second monitor. This is actually something that I’m asked relatively ofen: “Hey, I’ve got this old Mac, can I somehow connect it to my main Mac to use as a second sc…

The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 8 out of 10]

• Developer: Kent Sutherland/ Product page
• Price: Free (donations accepted

Kent Sutherland, author of Chax, has come up with another gem. Warp is a System Preferences panel that offers some new features that make working with Spaces simpler. First, you can switch spaces simply via mouse drag — you don’t have to be dragging a window; just drag the mouse to the edge of the screen, and after a user-settable delay, you’ll switch to the adjacent space. (You can optionally add a required modifier key to the mouse-drag, if you like.)

You can also have the cursor warp into the new space, which changes its position in the new space — it’s hard to explain but easy to understand whe…

The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

• Developer: Wooden Brain Concepts
• Price: $8.00 shareware

If you’ve ever wanted to modify a number of events in iCal, you’ll soon find it’s basically not possible. That’s where CaliBrate comes in, which I discovered last week when it was written up as a Mac Gem on macworld.com. I’d never heard of the program before, so I downloaded it and gave it a trial run.

Over the years, my iCal calendars have become something of a mess. There were near-duplicate calendars (Personal and Home, for instance), as well as calendars that contained events that I’d originally placed on one calendar but really wanted to have on another. …

The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

• Developer: Apple / Product page
• Price: Varies

This week’s Pick of the Week is somewhat unusual, but I think highly deserving. Instead of picking any one product, I’ve chosen to give the selection to Apple’s new iPhone/iPod touch App Store. After using the App Store quite a bit over the last few days, I believe it truly is a paradigm-changer for the mobile applications business — much as the original iTunes Music Store was when it opened years ago.

Prior to my iPhone, I owned and used a Palm Treo. One of my frustrations with the Treo was finding and installing software for it. Although there’s a huge universe of programs fo…

The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

• Developer: Apple/ Product page
• Price: $199 ($99 upgrade from older versions)

I just finished another video project for Macworld (an overview of Sun’s VirtualBox virtualization app for Macs), and as I finished the project, I realized just how pleasant it is to work with Final Cut Express — and that I’d never given it the Pick of the Week nod here on macosxhints.com. Yes, it’s relatively expensive, but if you have more than a passing interest in video editing on the Mac, it’s well worth the cost of admission.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve got no aspirations (nor skills to su…

The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]

• Developer: Grubby Games / Product page
• Price: $19.95 [Demo available]

A couple years back, I selected the original Professor Fizzwizzle as a Pick of the Week. In 2007, Grubby Games released Professor Fizzwizzle and the Molten Mystery (PFMM from here on), and it was just as addictive as the original. Given that I’ve been enjoying it for over a year now, I figure it’s time to give it a Pick of the Week selection.

Like the original, PFMM is all about puzzle solving, and moving the professor from point A to point B in the process. (You can read the original PotW write-up for a fairly detaile…

• Developer: Limit Point Software/ Product page
• Price: $10 [Free trial available]

Without fail, every few weeks it seems I’d get an email or iChat from a relative that went something like this: “Hey, I just shot a QuickTime movie with my digital camera, but I did so with the camera rotated. Can you use QuickTime Pro on it for me, and rotate it the way it’s supposed to be?” So they’d then email me a large file, I’d take two seconds to rotate it in QuickTime Pro, save it, and email it back to them. I figured there had to be a better solution, and after some web searching, I stumbled on TransformMovie.

This simple app lets you rotate — in any increment of degrees that you like — movies, as well as flipping them horizontally and/or vertically. You can a…