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Intrigued by competition? Always want to be "the best"? If that obsession extends to your computer, you may be a candidate for Xbench.

Xbench is a benchmark tool that lets you see what your machine is capable of. Compare your system with others, or get the nitty-gritty on what your baby can really do. Armed with that info, you'll be able to go tweak to your heart's content. You can check your disk read and write speed, graphics and screen draw, memory fill and copy, and CPU performance, among others. It even supports multi-processor systems.

Xbench is a Mac application. It's distributed as a Universal Binary, so it works on both PowerPC and Intel Macs, and requires OS X 10.3.9 or later.

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Archive files are a good thing. Collect all your stuff and jam it into a single file. Easy to keep track of; easy to transport. Hey, with ZIP files, you can even share them across platforms. When you go from a Mac to a Windows machine, though, you can get a bunch of nasty looking Mac-only stuff. Don't freak out your Windows-using buddy—try YemuZip.

YemuZip creates ZIP archives, but with a difference. You can choose whether your intended audience is running a Mac or a Windows box. Archives created for Mac bring all the goodies along; those intended for Windows cut all the Mac-specific meta data out, so you get a nice, clean looking archive, instead of one that prompts a lot of questions.

YemuZip is a Mac application. It requires OS X 10.3.9 or later. It's distributed as a Universal Binary, so it's equally at home on PowerPC and Intel Macs.

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You're reading along in a document or web page and come across some numbers. You want to do a quickie calculation, but now you're stuck—do you start-up the ten-key sitting on your desk—you do still have a desktop calculator, right—or do you fire-up Excel? Neither of those is a particularly satisfying option. Wouldn't it be nice to have an on-screen calculator that would let you do that quick calculation without making a major production of it?

Calq is just such a tool. You can start Calq up when you need it, or add it to your start up items and call it up with a hotkey combination. Either way, you get a calculator that overlays the windows on your screen and lets you do calculations through the keyboard. It's so unobtrusive that once you're done using it, it even puts itself away—after several seconds of inactivity, it hides itself, just waiting for you to call it up again.

Calq is available for both Mac and Windows. The Macintosh version requires OS X version 10.4 or later. The Windows version wants XP or Vista.

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RapidoWrite is a cross-application text replacement tool. If you're constantly typing the same text into letters, forms, and so on, why not automate the process? Now instead of typing your whole address, just type "addr" or any other string of characters, and it will expand out to the text you've assigned to it. Use it for signatures, addresses, or even whole documents—it's up to you. It's easier and quicker for accessing regularly visited web pages than digging through lists of bookmarks.

To use the power of RapidoWrite, you just type your abbreviation and hit [Return], and that's it. It will automatically replace the abbreviation with your selected text, and you're on your way. It works with any application, so you don't have to use one tool with your word processor and another one with your web browser.

RapidoWrite is a tool for Macintosh users. It requires OS X version 10.4 or later. It will run on both PowerPC and Intel machines.

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Are you easily distracted? Do shiny things grab your attention? Maybe Isolator can help you.

You know the drill: you're sitting down at your favorite Mac, trying to get something useful done. You've got several windows open. You're trying to focus on your work, but there are things happening in those background windows. Even if you close them all, you've still got your desktop staring back at you. Time to turn it all off.

Activate Isolator and it covers everything up. You can still see your active application, but everything else—background application windows, desktop, even the dock—is hidden. Hey, it even supports multiple displays. No more distraction. No more excuses.

Isolator is a runs on your Macintosh. It's even compatible with Leopard (OS X 10.5).

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Your computer should behave the way you want it to. You're going to be most efficient when things make sense and fit with the way you work, so why shouldn't you have it your way, as the burger place says.

FinderPop integrates with Finder to let you stand your Mac on its ear. You can easily add items to context menus, so that you can get where you need to go with minimal effort. Command-click the menu bar and you'll get a process menu that lets you see what your machine is up to, listing both user apps and even background processes. Want to quickly see what volumes you currently have mounted? Shift-click on the menu bar and you'll see which drives you're attached to. Life is a lot easier when you're calling the shots.

FinderPop is a Mac app and requires OS X 10.4 or later. It's distributed as a Universal Binary, so it's good for your PowerPC or Intel machine.

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Probably the quickest and easiest way to share files with your friends or co-workers is to email them. Just attach a picture or a document to an email message and push the button. Unless you've got a large file.

Many email systems have limits on the size or number of attachments that they'll support. And of course if your recipient has a slower connection, it means that the day you send the big attachment is the day that they'll remember taking way too long to download their email. You could use an FTP server, but that can be a pain in the neck.

DropShare is an easy way to share your files: there's no configuration necessary. Install the app, drag and drop the file you want to share onto the icon, grab the resulting URL, and email or IM that web address to your recipient. Instant download. You can move individual files, or even whole folders. And you can even see when your recipient has downloaded the files.

DropShare is a Mac app, and requires OS X 10.4 or later. The publisher promises a Windows version soon.

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So just how productive are you? You're writing a blog post that has to be 150 words long. Maybe you're writing an AdWords ad and you need a 25-word title. Are we there yet?

Whether it's an online form that requires that you not be too long, or an essay that must be 5000 words in length, size matters. It's not always easy to know just how much you've written.

Word Counter can help with this. Whether it's characters or words that you're interested in, you'll know what you've accomplished. You can type text directly into this tool, copy and paste from other apps, or even drag documents into the window. Interested in a whole folder worth of documents? Just drag multiple files, or even whole directories in, and you're good to go. Along with counting words, you can also take a look at what words are there. Whether it's counting the number of times you use a particular word, or even generating a list of all the words you've used, it's all there.

As you'd expect, Word Counter can work with straight-up text files, but it also handles Word documents (both DOC and WORDML), RTF documents, and even HTML files.

Got a special rule you need to follow, like "ignore if, and, and but"? You can filter your results so you get the count you're looking for. Pretty slick.

Word Counter is a tool for your Macintosh. It's a Universal Binary, so it's equally at home on your PowerPC or x86 Mac. It requires OS X ver 10.4 or later.

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Got a pile of files to rename? It's no fun in the Finder, and writing a quickie little shell script for Terminal may not be your cup of tea either. What'cha gonna' do?

File List is a neat little tool that makes it easy to rename files wholesale. Need to number your files? Piece of cake. How about changing case or extensions? Easy as pie. It supports regular expressions, so you can build some pretty complicated rules for renaming files. In fact, it even has its own conversion description language ("NCDL"), that lets you test for conditions, and a whole host of other options. You can finally do something with all those digital photos you've got with the nonsensical names—what could "DSC01537 (Small).JPG" possibly mean anyway?

File List is a Mac application. It runs under OS X ver 10.3.9 or later.

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Do you like to cover your bets? Play both sides of the street? Use Boot Camp to run Windows on your Mac? Here's a tool that you can use to clone that Windows partition.

Setting up a new machine, it's easy to copy your XP or Vista partition and install it on that system, either on a separate drive, or on your OS X boot drive. That makes it easy to deploy a whole network full of Boot Camp-enabled machines.

With a simple UI, you won't have to work all day to figure out how to run Winclone. You can create your clone while booted from the boot drive, so you don't have to boot from secondary volumes or FireWire devices.

Everything runs fast, too. They claim that you can restore a 10GB drive in as little as ten minutes.

Winclone is a free download. It's a Mac app and requires Boot Camp.

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