OmgItsTheSmartGuy

This app has gotten a lot better in the last year or so. When it was first released, it was really not that great at all-- it could only support Gmail accounts, the interface looked like junk, etc. Recently, however, AirMail has entirely replaced Sparrow (which was discontinued last year) as my desktop email client of choice. It's rapidly improving, and I can only expect things to get better from here.

I'm generally not a big fan of these types of "shoot first, ask questions later" extensions (case in point: NoScript and co.), but in the last few months, I've actually found Flashblock to be surprisingly useful. For starters, it's not particularly annoying to use--enabling Flash on a case-by-case basis is quick and always just one click away. Unlike in the case of NoScript, it doesn't actually break any websites; instead, disabling Flash with Flashblock simply lets you speed up the loading...

Reeder 2 is finally out-- with iPad support! Huzzah!

Back when I used an iPhone, Reeder was pretty much my favorite app in the entire world. Ever since I've switched to a Nexus 4, however, I've found Press to be pretty much just as good.

Which is convenient, because I really can't stand the Feedly Android app.

It was ridiculously easy to implement Disqus on my blog in Blogger. I just added the widget to the blog, and everything else worked immediately. I didn't have to do any configuring whatsoever, and I even managed to import all of my old Blogger comments in a single click. Awesome.

I've recently noticed that Chrome loads large webpages much slower than Safari in Mac OS X. While the difference isn't large enough to notice in most day-to-day browsing, Chrome tends to stutter and lag out on my Hackintosh when it attempts to load extremely large pages, such as long Wikipedia articles or forum threads.

Meanwhile, Safari can load anything pretty much instantaneously. I love Chrome (and there's no chance that I'm giving up all of its extra features for Safari), but this...

Cinch is nice and simple (and looks good), but at $7, that's a tough sell when you have competitors like BetterTouchTool.

Unlike its competitors, BetterTouchTool is free. That's enough justification for me to put up with its clunky setup interface.

I was surprised at how well this actually worked. Normally, I have pretty low expectations for these sorts of apps, but this addon really pulled through. In the two times I've tried it so far (both on Monoprice.com), I've already saved $10 with minimal effort. Sure, stuff like RetailMeNot has always existed, but who can remember to check for coupon codes everytime they buy anything? Download this addon now.

I love the interface of this app. Simple and clean, without any over-the-top themes or whatnot. Essentially, what every Windows app should look like (in my opinion).

However, the app itself doesn't work as well as I'd hope. I tried compressing an 83MB PDF file, but it somehow only removed 18KB in terms of file size. Granted, the PDF was already compressed beforehand, but that's a disappointing result regardless.

I don't know how Screenflow gets away with charging $100 for its application. I mean, it's a good app (probably the best recording app I've seen for Mac OS X), but $100 is just ridiculous. Maybe I'd pay $20 for it, but that would probably be my limit.

Xtrafinder does everything that TotalFinder does (and more), and it's free. It's hardly even a contest.