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The default Mail app on Mac may or may not your idea of what a desktop mail client should be. Whether you use it because you like it or because it’s free and already on your system with Apple’s seal of approval, whenever you open it to send an email or switch from one folder to another, the spinning beach ball tells you you’re in a for a bit of waiting. If you’ve got a slower system, then switching to the Mail app can take even longer. QuickMailer is a simple Mac app available for $0.99 that lets you send emails form the menu bar. The app uses the primary account you’ve configured with the Mail app, supports auto-complete for recently emails contacts, lets you type in all basic email fields – subject, body and attachment – and send the email from the menu bar. You will need to keep the Mail app running in the background, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be open or active.

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Do you favor apps that will add icons to the menu bar as opposed to the Dock? If yes, then no doubt you save plenty of precious space on the Dock and trade it out for a little clutter on the menu bar. For many users this isn’t a bad trade off, but what can be a little annoying, to downright counter productive, is the order these app icons appear in. Every time you start your system, all apps that you’ve set to start at login rearrange themselves on the menu bar. It is makes it utterly pointless to remember which icon was where, and means you will need to take a good squint-eyed look at the menu bar each time you want to launch an app. MenuBar ReArranger is a very useful Mac app available for $4.99 in the Mac App Store that can solve this problem forever. The app does what you would expect to be native behavior in Mac (but isn’t), and lets you re-order the icons on the menu bar to suit your needs.

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Keyboard shortcuts add convenience to how we use an app and our system as a whole. Many users, who need to work on different projects and use multiple apps at the same time, will use a combination of  mouse and trackpad gestures and keyboard shortcuts just to get things done faster. It is for this reason that many of us have a soft spot for app that support keyboard shortcuts and get butterflies if we can edit a shortcut to our own liking. While these shortcuts are great, they sometimes end up conflicting with other apps and more power apps might even conflict with universal shortcuts. ShortStop is a simple Mac app available for $2.99 in the Mac App Store that allows you to toggle between apps and their enabled shortcuts. You can set the system to ignore shortcuts that are associated with an app, and enable them as per your requirement.

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Looking for a tool that can help you easily work with text in all applications? What you might need is an universal text assistant that can perform numerous text-related operations without having to use exhaustive hotkey combinations. PopClip is small, menu bar application that comes with a variety of text-related options to help you compose emails, change file/folder names, type text, open mail links, search the web etc. The application has been developed to prevent you from doing lengthy text-related tasks, such as copying and pasting text from one app to another, searching the web, opening file and email links, and correcting spelling mistakes. It provides a small, on-screen menu with text to perform all the related operations with a click. For instance, if you want to compose an email, just select the email address, and click the @ button to open default email client for composing mail. Read past the break for more.

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There are a multitude of apps that let you control and/or access your Mac from your iPhone. For the true Apple fan, uniting an iPhone with a Mac must be something like an Apple device marriage. Regardless of your sentiments for the concept, it is pretty useful, to say the least. Air Media Server is a free Mac app that lets you access all files on your Mac from your iPhone. You will need to install the iOS app which costs $1.99 in the Apple App Store. Both iOS device and Mac have to be on the same Wi-Fi network for you to be able to view the files. The files aren’t just a preview, if you have the correct app installed, you can modify them from your iOS device, as well.

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Do you often keep duplicate files on your system on purpose? Some people might do so to ensure they always have a copy of a file in its original format while they play around with the duplicate. Others might just accidently end up downloading the same file again and again and saving them to a different folder each time. Clutter creating habits aside, even the best of us end up with duplicate versions of the same files, and it is hard to track them down. Gemini is a Mac app worth $4.99 in the Mac App Store that is a superb duplicate finder. It doesn’t automatically remove files; rather, it allows you to decide which ones to remove. The app can detect duplicates based on the name, and even if a file name is appended with (1) to avoid overwriting an old version, the app treats it as a duplicate as such.

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Spotlight search in Mac is plain amazing. Even if you advocate actively for Windows PCs and insist that the Start Search is possibly one of the best features to have come to Windows, you will still be blown with the search results from Spotlight. While it is amazing and all, it does have a few limitations, or, as some might say, slight complications. The file type search isn’t as conspicuous as it should be, and the iFileX utility reviewed earlier was one way to make it easier. SearchInFiles is a Mac app that is free for a very limited time (just a few hours), which lets you search text within files and display the results by line number. The app works with TXT, RTF, HTM, CSS, XML, C, M and Java files. PDF files are not supported.

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You may, or may not, have heard of creating  vRAM disks and making your system faster. A Virtual RAM disk can be created using the internal hard disk memory, or you can just buy one. For those of you that know what RAM is meant to do, understand that a vRAM disk is a virtual disk that can can read and write to files faster than to your hard disk. The simplest reason (and there are many other complex ones) to the added speed is that a virtual drive isn’t a separate machine component that requires actual moving parts to read and write information. For the truly tech savvy who know the ins and outs of creating RAM disks, there is an entirely different world of information out there. For simpler users, more specifically, Mac users, there is iRamDisk, an app worth $1.99 in the Mac App Store which allows you to create virtual RAM disks and mount them as regular drives.

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