After installing various applications or services on your system, the computer may start these up at boot or login. OS X supports a number of different ways to automatically launch applications and services, some of which are a little more obscure than others and may result in applications launching even though they are not in obvious startup items locations.

If you dont want to spend the money for MobileMe just to be able to sync contacts and calendars among various Macs and iPhones, you can get the same results for free using Google.

The program is simply using OS X’s built-in PDF-processing features to strip PDF files of all the unnecessary bits: preview images, metadata, and the like. This feature is especially useful for PDFs created in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, which tend to be unnecessarily large because of program-specific components and other non-vital data these applications save inside each PDF.

Meerkat turns SSH tunnels — a fairly obscure and complicated concept — into a feature anyone should be able to use, and does so in a very Mac-like way.

Liberate your newbie friends with a Web2.0 suicide! This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alterego.

Address Book is a convenient program for managing the accounts central contacts database, that also provides the ability to quickly print envelopes, labels, and lists from the contact information.

One convenient Windows feature missing in OS X is the ability to quickly create a new text file in the current folder. By simply dragging a small Applescript-turned-application to Finders toolbar, this dream quickly becomes reality.