Part of what makes the Mac so great is the slew of utility apps to improve your productivity. Here’s a list of my favorites, most of which I have used for many years.

SizeUp is a window manager. I use it to put windows on the left or right half of my screen, or easily maximize them. This is usually the first thing I install on a new Mac.

Alfred is a tool that acts like Apple’s Spotlight: you invoke a hotkey and start typing. However, it does much more than Spotlight. I mainly use it to navigate between folders and quickly find files.

I was sceptical about CleanMyMac at first, but it really does find a lot of unused files on your system and offers to clean them for you in a reliable way. When you find yourself running out of hard drive space, you can also look at the free Disk Inventory X.

CloudApp instantly sends my screenshots to a web server for easy sharing. I also use it to share larger video files, like screencasts, via e-mail. I also find it handy to have an archive of screenshots online. I look at it sometimes and it really is a trip down (design) memory lane.

Talking about screencasts, Screenflow is my favorite screen recording software for the Mac. It’s not exactly a utility but I thought I’d mention it anyway.

Lastly, I use aText to save snippets of text, like my e-mail signature or my preferred way to handle CSS comments. For example, by typing ,sig1 my e-mail signature appears; and if I type ,lorem I get a bunch of lorem ipsum.