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Everything in the world is connected. This is especially true with computer stuff. There are servers talking to servers, and desktop machines, smart phones, and all manner of other electronic goodies that talk to one another. The wonder of it all is that for the most part, they each understand what the other is saying. There is one notable exception, of course: the lowly text file.

Even though the text file is arguably the least-complicated kind of file out there, they are not all created equally. Even though these files are just text, no pictures, no formatting, no fancy stuff, there are differences between text files, depending on where a given file was created. Those differences all come with the end-of-line character–the way that your computer knows that one line has ended and the next one begins.

In the Unix world, the end of a line in a text file is indicated by the LineFeed character (0×0A), in the world of the Mac (at least through OS 9) it's the Carriage Return character (0×0D), and in DOS and Windows, it's the combination of the two (0×0D and 0×0A). While some apps are tolerant of these differences, others aren't nearly so well behaved. Create some web server configuration file on your Mac and upload it to your Unix web server, and you'll see what a mess things can be.

The solution? It could be something as simple as Flip, a little utility app that you can download. It's just a console app–no fancy GUI here–that allows you to convert files from one format to another. You can use it on single files, or on a whole bunch of them. A command line argument tells it which flavor you want your resulting files to be.

Flip is available in versions for Linux, Mac, and Windows machines.

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The advent of the Universal Binary was a stroke of genius for the folks at Apple. During the transition period from the Apple-IBM-Motorola PowerPC chip to Intel's x86 line of processors, they realized that apps that could run natively on one platform wouldn't work on the other. This left them with the unappealing situation where every software developer who wanted to serve the whole Apple community would have to release two different versions of each application, one for each platform. Needless to say, it's hard enough to roll-out software anyway, but if you then had to maintain two separate but functionally identical code streams, everybody loses their minds. The Universal Binary fixed this problem.

In a Universal Binary file, both the PowerPC and Intel versions of an application are included. The computer figures out which pieces to use and simply ignores the rest. That's great for you getting your work done, but it doesn't save any space, since each program file is now something like twice as big as it really needs to be, since roughly half of the code in each program won't run on your machine. So how do you gain the abilities added by the Universal Binary but not lose the storage space? Slimtool is one way.

This app will strip out the pieces you don't need for your machine. You can put your files on a diet individually by dragging-and-dropping them into Slimtool, or you can turn it loose to find suitable targets on its own. As it turns out, there are also some Universal Binaries that will break if you do this "strip the other stuff out" routine to them, and for such files, there's a blacklist that prevents Slimtool from trying to tweak—and potentially break—them.

Slimtool is a free Mac application. Even though Universal Binary files can be run on systems running OS X 10.3.9 and later, you need to be using 10.5+ to
take advantage of Slimtool.

Download Slimtool

If you've ever had a roommate—or a partner, spouse, kids—who came into your bedroom at oh-dark-thirty in the morning and turned the overhead light on, you know what a pain in the neck—and the eyes—that can be. Your eyes are all used to the dark and all of a sudden, blam!, they've got to deal with regular light. You can run into the same problem with your computer as well.

When you use your computer during the day, you may have the brightness on the display turned up so that you can see the screen with all the ambient light around you. At night, though, the room lights may not be so bright, so you don't need your screen to be lit up like noonday either. And first thing in the morning when you're all squinty-eyed, you definitely don't need to be jolted like in the turn-the-light-on scenario outlined above.

F.lux is a tool that may come in handy here. Based on your location, it does a little calculation and makes its best guess as to when sunrise and sunset ought to hit for you, and dims your display appropriately after dark. You can choose from several different settings, with nighttime color temperatures ranging from 2700K up through 5000K, as opposed to normal daylight operation at 6500K. While it dims the lights automatically, you can disable it for an hour at a time, just in case you need things to stay extra bright.

F.lux is a free download. It's available for Windows (XP and Vista), Mac (OS X 10.4), and Linux.

Download F.lux

Back in the day there were web browsers. You used them to visit sites and, umm, browse the web. Then came Firefox. Sure, you can still use it to look at web pages, but with the advent of Add-ons, now you can do all kinds of extra stuff, from analyzing the structure of web pages to setting-up to-do lists, and more.

FireFTP is a full-blown FTP client that comes as a Firefox Add-on. Once you go through the install process, you've got a fully functioning FTP tool to use for file transfers to- and from your system. It supports both plain vanilla FTP transfers, as well as encrypted SFTP uploads and downloads. Even though the browser and Add-on are platform independent, you will need to go through some extra machinations to get SFTP to work on your Mac or Linux system. It's got enough options to let you customize its behavior in ways that make the most sense to how you work, including saving login info, default directories, and such.

FireFTP is a free download. Since it's a Firefox Add-on, you'll need the Firefox web browser (version 3 or later) to use it.

Download FireFTP

Windows' Recycle Bin and Mac's Trash are a pretty cool idea. Rather than having things go way when you delete them, à la UNIX, when you delete files on these systems they just go into a holding area that gets them out from under foot but doesn't really delete them, just in case you need to recover them later. Once you really are sure you're done with a deleted file or three, you just "empty the Trash", and they really go away.

When you mount a removable drive on your system—like a USB thumb drive—file deletion works the same way: delete really means "put it in the Trash." now fast forward to a situation where you want to pass your thumb drive along to somebody else, but you want to make sure that everything you don't want to share is deleted from that drive. As it sits right now, the only way to do that is to empty the Trash for your whole system. That may be okay, but if you've got files you deleted from your own hard drive, you may not be ready to chuck the whole pile at once.

Curb is a tool that can help you with this dilemma. When you want to clean up your USB drive, instead of emptying your system Trash, you just drag your drive—actually its icon—onto Curb and it automagically gets rid of those deleted files on your removable drive, but without messing with the rest of the files in our system's Trash folder.

You can download this app for your Mac for free. It runs under OS X 10.5 and later, on both Intel and PowerPC machines.

Download Curb

No doubt you use your computer under different lighting conditions; certainly indoors; maybe outdoors; probably day and night. So how can you make it so that you can always see the display? After all, if you can't see what you're doing, you probably aren't going to get much done.

Nocturne is a tool that makes it easy to switch your computer into night vision mode. Along with simply turning it on and off, it also lets you tweak your settings to make things even easier to see. Color correction and window shadow effects help clear things up, and the ability to black-out your desktop wallpaper makes you screen less cluttered. It's a thoughtful little app, too: after you've installed Nocturne and fired it up, it sits unobtrusively in your menubar, waiting on you to call on it to do its thing.

You'll need to be running a Mac under OS X to use Nocturne.

Download Nocturne

One of the cool things about Intel-powered Macs is the fact that they can also boot non-Mac operating systems as well. Instead of needing to have a Windows machine to do Windows-y things along with your Mac, you can get away with just one box. For that matter, even your older PowerPC Mac can run PPC versions of Linux along with official Apple stuff. This convenience, of course, doesn't come without complications.

You can avid some of these problems with QuickBoot, This tool lets you easily jump back and forth between OS X and Windows. Just install it, pick the OS you want to boot, and away you go. For Intel installs, you can choose "next boot only" to boot Windows just once, with subsequent restarts loading OS X instead.

QuickBoot is a Mac application. You'll need to be running OS X and have multiple bootable volumes on your machine to use it.

Download QuickBoot

There's no doubt about it: networking is a handy way to get things done. Whether it's a human network—your friends, family, business associates—or a computer network—your computer talking to your printer, your LAN, or even the Internet—working together is generally more efficient that working separately. With computer networks you can do all kinds of time-saving things, like sharing files between users. Unfortunately, that's sometimes a bit complicated. You've got user names and passwords to deal with, and then there's browsing through a foreign filesystem to get to the place you want to go. Maybe it's not so great after all.

DropCopy is a tool that helps you realize the savings and increased efficiency of working on networked systems. Instead of getting bogged down with the minutiae of it all, you get a simple dropbox. Now when you want to share a file, you just drag it to the dropbox and the transfer's as good as done. Less time spent fussing around and more time spent getting work done.

DropCopy is a Mac application. It's free for networks of up to three machines, with a modest charge for bigger installations. They've got versions compatible with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and later.

Download DropCopy

Whatever your opinion of Windows, one good thing about that platform is the "Start" button that gives you access to most of the apps on the machine. With your Mac, you can drag apps to the Dock to make them easy to find, but you do still have to locate them yourself, at least the first time. So how about adding a Start button to the system without having to deal with all that other Windows-y stuff?

Start Menu is a free tool that lets you do just that. Find it once and drag it to the Dock or drop an alias on the desktop, and now whenever you need to run an app, just click on its icon. It's already gone out and found all the apps on your system, so all you need to do is scroll through the list and click on the program you want to fire up. It's all pretty easy.

A free download, Start menu is a Mac app. It runs under OS X on systems using Tiger (10.4) or better.

Download Start Menu

Sometimes it's little dribbles of coffee. Other times it's food crumbs or just general office schmutz. Whatever the source, you've got to get it off your keyboard. Now taking a rag or brush and wiping it across your keyboard seems pretty straightforward, but what about unintended consequences? Just brushing lightly across the keys will take off the surface stuff, but if you have to apply any pressure at all, you run the risk of entering unintended keystrokes into your system. Yes, your could power down (if you didn't have a dozen windows open right now), or unplug your keyboard (unless you're on a laptop), but that's just not always convenient.

Keyboard Cleaner is a tool that lets you "suspend" your keyboard. Activate it and your system will ignore everything that hits the keys, except for [Command] + Q. Along with cleaning your keyboard, you can use this handy tool to cat- (or kid) proof your system. No amount of banging on keys will make bad things happen.

Keyboard Cleaner is a Mac app. It runs under OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later.

Download Keyboard Cleaner