It seems like Part 3 is System Preferences time. Read on….

Growl - Its less of an application and more of a system preference and a hook. Growl allows other applications to display onscreen notices. For example, our previously mentioned app Transmission can show notices when it adds new torrents and when they are done downloading. Adium shows notices when you get an IM, when someone comes online. Other great apps like Cyberduck, Burn, Skype, iStumbler, Twitterific, Superduper and many more. It give you the chance to choose styles of notifications, change transparency of the notices, and many other settings. Give it a go and see how it can change your day?

Flip4Mac – Millions of years ago, a small software company in Seattle created a video codec. That codec was called Windows Media Video (WMV). And given the large use of Windows in the corporate environment, it became quite widely used. But that hinders us wisened Mac users. Luckily Microsoft made a video player, and God said “It’ll do” Lucky for us, someone else wouldn’t settle for it, so made Flip4Mac. Its a quicktime plugin that allows you to view WMV files through Quicktime, rather than the horrid Windows Media Player for Mac (ugh ugh ugh and a few more). It lets you decide if you want to display them in the browser, or load them in Quicktime, which personally I think is better as it gives you the chance to make the window larger. So go and download it, install, then hop into the System Preferences and set it up. Its free, and is now available from Microsoft, who deemed it good enough to remove the one hampster they were employing to keep WMP for Mac up to date.

MenuMeters – You might wonder after a while, how much is my processor being hammered? Or why is my computer going slow. Well install MenuMeters and you can find out at a glance. It allows you to add extra menubar items to your desktop. You can add them for processor speed, RAM usage, network traffic, disk usage. Its recently been updated to a Universal Binary and so it displays the CPU usage for each core on your Core Duo or Quad core Intel chip.

Sidetrack – Remember thosePowerbook, the pre-January 2005 ones before they added the scrolling trackpad? Well I have one, and some others do. Well this lets you scroll! Great! It converts the side of your trackpad to a scrolling section. Great!

MAMP – If you are looking to start your own blog, and have more control over it, you might want to give it a test run before you commit to a domain name and a host, you may want to download MAMP and try things out. It is a self-contained setup with Apache, MySQL, and PHP for Mac. So you can install WordPress, or Typepad, or anything you want to and run it in a test environment. Or even to test updates and changes. Great! I use it to run a local version of WordPress for when I actually bother to get my own domain. It gives you much more functionality than wordpress.com. And remember, its not just for WordPress.

Be sure to check out the original list, Part 1 and Part 2

Hopefully Part 4 will come sooner than this!