Extending OS X
Consider these utilities to extend OS X's own capabilities or provide better versions of what comes with OS X.
Audio management
Rogue Amoeba (www.rogueamoeba.com) makes a variety of utilities that enhance how the Mac manages audio. Audio Hijack Pro ($32) lets you capture sounds from any application or audio source on your Mac.
Battery monitoring
Although OS X shows you the state of your MacBook's battery's charge, it doesn't provide much information on how much charge your battery can hold (each time you recharge, you lose some storage capacity). CoconutBattery (free; www.coconut-flavour.com) and FIPLab's Battery Health (free; in the Mac App Store) gives you that precious information so you can see if your battery is working as it should. Figure 13.1 shows these utilities.
Figure 13.1
Left: The CoconutBattery utility. Right: The Battery Health utility.
Disk management
OS X's Spotlight capability to search all attached disks quickly by name, attribute, and content (see Chapter 5) makes it very easy to find files when you need them. But they have to be on a disk attached to your Mac. What if your files are on CD or DVD, such as client archives or deliverables? DiskTracker ($30; www.disktracker.com) solves that problem, maintaining a catalog of offline disks' contents so you can still search for them and know what disk, CD, or DVD the actual files are on.
File synchronization ...
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