It has come to my attention that some of my dear friends are still using MacPorts or (shudder) Fink to install UNIX packages on OS X.

Please. Stop that.

It’s hard to admit that I’m jealous of anything Windows. But I’ve been jealous of the subscreen partitioning feature in Windows 7. It’s really cool.

Apple’s built-in screenshot app is pretty okay, but it’s not quite seamless enough. When I want to file a bug report, or post a humorous screenshot to Flickr, or snap a screenshot to post on Technophobe, I turn to Skitch.

Don’t get me wrong, I still use Skitch for quick and dirty screenshots and annotations. In fact, I use it more than Layers. But Layers gets my vote for coolest screenshot app of all time.

Caffeine is a menu extra that does one thing, and does it well: it keeps your computer from going to sleep.

Do you get tired of wiggling your mouse to keep the screen from dimming while you’re watching a YouTube video? Do you ever wish you could close the lid of your MacBook without it falling asleep immediately? Wouldn’t it be great if you could keep your computer awake for an hour or two before power management kicked in? Want to easily disable or enable your screen saver? Check out Caffeine to turn your Mac into an insomniac.

Today my moving truck came, and I tracked it the whole way with Mike Piontek’s Delivery Status Dashboard widget.

This is one of the few widgets that I actually keep using. Maybe because it’s better than refreshing the UPS tracking page every five minutes. Maybe it’s because this widget updates me through Growl so I don’t even have to pull up my Dashboard. Yeah, that’s probably it. It’s slick, easy to use, and indispensable.

If there’s one utility that should be installed on every Mac, it is Growl. Growl provides a unified system notification interface. By itself, it does nothing. But it allows all other apps to interact with the user in a clean and consistent manner. Growl is inherently Maclike, as it creates a consistent, attractive and unobtrusive way to let you know what’s going on with your whole system.

One of my biggest problems with the “clipboard” paradigm is that it only holds on to the last thing I clipped. I’m forever forgetting that I just clipped something I wanted, and haphazardly replacing it by copying something new.