There are numerous occasions when you want to listen to something other then your iTunes collection. Satellite radio such as XM and internet based audio stations provide a great alternative.
The hard part is launching multiple browser windows just to listen to a stream. Enter Radium.

In a neatly packaged menu bar application, Radium allows quick access to a multitude of internet radio stations including your XM account. A very fast search function lets you find a particular station or theme.

Radium updates on launch if preferred new stations and you have complete control on which stations you want to enable.

Growl notification support is included as well as keyboard shortcuts.
From within the drop down menu is a handy clipboard button to select the “Now Playing” selection so that one can paste the info into your app of choice.
This can come in handy when trying to find more info about a particular artist or to use in the iTunes Store.
You can select to receive higher bandwidth feeds for quality:

All in all, Radium is a very fast launching application that takes up very little real-estate.

Radium is a “Must Have App” !

Radium, from CatPig Studios

Once in a while I get to test a truly useful app. Most of the time I will try something that might just become a fixture on my dock. I hate clutter and only utilize applications that make my life easier AND launch and run quickly.

Itunes is great. No mistaking that, but to use it as a daily music player it is overkill. In the days of my misguided youth as a PC user there was Winamp. Used it all the time.

Well, now there is an app for OSX that replaces a quick launching, socially integrated, visually stunning music utility. EVERPLAY

It has integration for Twitter and LastFM ( both of which I use). If they added Facebook then I personally think it would be overkill. Too much fat.

It launches very fast on my Macbook of 2 years and equally fast on my first gen Intel iMac. No need to time loading times. Why. Who cares? When I want to listen to music, there it is. No extended yo yo dock bouncing.

Cover flow works very fast and I actually find myself listening to more of my music.

Support is great as there have been 3 updates so far and early crash logs were addressed in a week. Great support!

Playlists are quickly accessible from a drop down list, and there is a search function that works spotlight fast! Shuffle, repeat and jukebox mode are added features. Everything you need is there. Upcoming tracks and full screen mode.

This is definitely a MUST HAVE APP!

Everplay

axonic labs: “Ever wanted to hibernate on your Mac? Put it to sleep without using any power? DeepSleep will do the job for you. DeepSleep will put your Mac to sleep without using any power and wake up just like you left it.”

(Via axoniclabs.)

Balance: “

Balance is a simple and effective way to keep track of your personal finances. It is really as straight-forward as it can be. It offers your different accounts (checking, investments, savings, etc) and lets you list your deposits and charges/withdrawals. It also keeps a nice chart to reference quickly.

It’s always a good idea for every person to track their expenses for at least a month. Even if you can’t do it for longer than that, you should be able to see how your money is spent and where you could save better.

So grab Balance, Luca or Cashbox see what you can do to save a little money.

(Via FreeMacWare.com.)

A better and cheaper ($4.95) alternative to QuickSnap is:

SnapNDrag

lets you take a screenshot by just clicking a button and dragging the resulting screenshot off.
For example, to email a screenshot, you would drag the screenshot from SnapNDrag to the Mail application. It is that simple. No hard-to-remember key combinations, no file conversion to deal with, no file dialog boxes to navigate, no temporary files to erase later on.
Multiple Formats
Supports PNG and TIFF for times when image quality cannot be compromised. Or use JPEG with adjustable quality for smaller file sizes.
Go Pro
SnapNDrag is a fully-functional freeware. It is our way of giving back to the Mac community, and getting our name out at the same time.

If you like SnapNDrag, consider upgrading to SnapNDrag Pro for even more features:
Ability to scale down screenshots
Global hot keys for quick access
Option to turn off sponsor’s message

TechTool Pro by Micromat is truly one of the more robust and full featured maintenance utilities offered to the OSX masses. It has such a complete suite of repair, maintenance, and repair utilities that one’s Apple computer should always be running at the peak of its performance threshold. TechTool Pro also offers the ability to construct an emergency bootable partition containing TechTool Pro which is useful so long as your main drive works. You can create this drive elsewhere, but what if you wanted something portable?

Yes, you can run the CD/DVD but you risk scratching the disc, and of course these drives are a tad on the slow side. With the current Intel Macs, booting from a USB and Firewire drive is a great option and so using portable large capacity flash drives, portable USB/Firewire hard disks, or your old iPod provide worthy alternatives.

Protogo, once installed, walks you through creating an “OSX profile” of varying sizes depending on your destination drive. We had an old 20 GB Firewire iPod lying around which provided a perfect test bed to use Protogo. We really were not using it anymore due to its battery life and it was collecting dust. Why not use it for those odd occasions that a Mac user might find themselves in when their system behaves oddly? A perfect solution to help fix a fiends Mac. All you have to do is bring over your iPod (or whatever you decided to use as your portable device) and run the suite of maintenance utilities to restore nirvana.

When first creating your specific profile you can choose from the default ones which range from a “Full OS X Copy” to a “Mac OS X Minimal Profile”. Obviously due to space limitations, we chose a “Basic” profile which created 1 volume with default applications.

These included TechTool Pro, DiskStudio for partitioning, and OS X system utilities such as DiskUtility. You also have the option of adding your own apps so long as they can function by simply copying them over during your profile creation. Safari works, Textmate works, but BBEdit froze. Of course you will have to either re-register your shareware apps, or lose your bookmarks and preferances which was the case with Safari.
The option of adding your own programs such as a web browser is very useful because it allows you to have a working bootable drive that you can surf the web to find solutions for a particular problem.

The only thing missing is Finder. You cannot browse your hard disk. This is very inconvenient and should have been addressed by the inclusion of a finder replacement such as XFolders (which is what we added). We were able to browse our main drive and launch apps which ran fine from our root partition. (as noted, some apps do not work).

All in all, Protogo provided a very convenient and straight forward approach to OS X and disk maintenance, and resurrected our old iPod to become a worthy portable rescue utility.

Please note, that when using an iPod, it cannot be used to play music and becomes relegated to a disk drive. You can restore it from within OS X to function with iTunes again.

From Micromat:

Powered by ScribeFire.

Macworld: Mac Gems: Skim 0.2: ”

Features:

Viewing PDFs
Adding and editing notes
Highlighting important text
Making “snapshots” for reference
Reading in full screen
Giving presentations
Reading bar
AppleScript support

(Via skim-app.)

ABGmerge: “

Never go without contact information again. With ABGmerge you can keep your Mac OS X Address Book and Gmail Contacts synchronized. This isn’t anything fancy, just an Applescript that can interface between a Gmail CSV file and your Mac Address Book. But if you use Gmail and your Address Book, you might like the convenience of having all your contact information in both places.

(Via FreeMacWare.com.)

Tesseract Software: “Flash Video Downloader is an application which allows you to easily batch download and save streaming flash videos from most streaming video sites (e.g. youtube, google video, dailymotion, etc)”

(Via tesseractsoftware.)

NeoOffice® 2.1 for Mac OS X Released: “Santa Clara, California, USA – Planamesa Software and the NeoOffice.org community are proud to introduce NeoOffice 2.1, a significantly-enhanced version of the Mac OS X-native version of the…

(Via MacMegasite.)

VacuumMail:

“Apple Mail Slowing Down? VacuumMail Can Probably Help” VacuumMail, which can be used as a regular application or automated through the included LaunchAgent for use with Launchd. I also took a few minutes to document the script and provide some information about Launchd and how to manage LaunchAgents and Services. The download package has three files: VacuumMail, the launch agent (which is just a .plist file), and a page of documentation.

(Via musingsfrommars.)

The Filter software ships for Mac: “iTunes users on the Mac gain a free and powerful music recommendation tool developed by a UK software firm.

(Via Macworld UK.)

Many Tricks · Service Scrubber: “Wouldn’t the services menu be much more useful if it weren’t overcrowded by services you never even thought of using? With Service Scrubber, you can:
• restructure the services menu
• change service keyboard shortcuts
• disable services”

(Via manytricks.)

Norrkross MorphX:

“Use Norrkross MorphX for calculating images or movies where one image transforms into another. Simply drag 2 images to the document window, drag a few lines to indicate similar areas and Norrkross MorphX calculates images so that it looks like the first image magically is transformed into the other. You can save the morph as as still image snapshot or as a full animated QuickTime movie.”

morph.mov

(Via norrkross.)

IceClean

IceClean is a powerful Finder and System Maintenance and Optimization Tool using ONLY built-in System Tasks to help your Mac stay healty and to keep it running smoothly

.

(Via macdentro.)