Since its an application that runs in the background, you can leave it running and it does the file updates on the machines seamlessly.

Subscribe and get the Smart Interface Design Checklists PDF delivered to your inbox.

For this post we tried to digg deep to find the best selection of free and open source mac applications that will help you be a more efficient designer.

Were covering from application launchers, GTD (Getting Things Done) to design utilities that can help you focus on whats important: create.

For this post we tried to digg deep to find the best selection of free andor open source Mac applications that will help you be a more efficient designer.

You may also want to take a look at the following related posts: 30 Must-Have Tweaks For Your Mac Mac Hacks: 17 AppleScripts To Make Your Life Easier Why Web Developers Dont Need A Mac 1.

The application was written back in 2007, and two years later it still proves to be a strong contender.

You can customize a hot key combination so a launcher window shows and lets you choose either a Launcher window or go to the Launcher Menu.

If you have an earlier OS X such as 10.3, you need to update to version 10.3.9 to use an earlier version of the application.

Adobe Kuler Adobes Creative Suite 4 applications Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Fireworks and Flash have an Extension panel that connects directly to Kuler, the web-hosted application for generating color themes.

Not many designers take advantage of a powerful tool like this one.

App Called Cafienne Download Them As

Logging into Kuler.com with your Adobe ID, you can create color swatches themes from a color, share, rate and search the community color schemes, and upload or use a Flickr image to extract color themes so you can download them as an Adobe Swatch Exchange file thats compatible with Adobe applications.

But you can also access the Kuler site from its own standalone application to get more flexibility.

Also there is a Dashboard widget to help you browse through your color schemes and the communities.

To install Kuler Desktop you need to have Mac OS X 10.4.11 or Mac OS X 10.5.4 and up, with Adobe Air and Flash Player installed.

Name Changer Name Changer is a very straightforward and simple tool that will help you rename batches of files without the hassle of Automator or Photoshop batch change the latter can get a little too technical for some users.

This application saves you the time of naming each file manually.

Name Changer gives you a wide variety of options that go from select text replacement to fully customizable text replacement.

Designed for OSX 10.5, NameChanger is a Universal Binary, so it runs on both Intel and PowerPC macs.

If you have a OSX 10.3 or 10.4 Mac, theres a version that you can use too, so those Macs with earlier OS can still use the application.

App Called Cafienne Zip Files An

YemuZip YemuZip is a more powerful Zip-archive application that with a simple drag and drop interface, makes creating zip files an easy task.

YemuZip lets you choose between a PC-compatible format and a Mac format that preserve all the Mac-specific metadata.

The tool lets you choose the destination of your zip file (same as source, Desktop or Documents) and can attach the file to an email message for easy sending.

Runs on OS X 10.4 or later and it is an Universal Binary.

Dateline A subtle replacement for having the date shown on the Menu bar, Dateline gives you a linear calendar on your desktop within a transparent window.

One very useful feature is that it has direct access to iCal when double clicking on a day.

The background and text colors are fully customizable along with transparency to make it blend seamlessly with your current desktop.

This application requires Mac OS X 10.5 and higher.

DropBox DropBox is by far the easiest way to share files if you are on a low budget and do not want to be bothered with server side issues when sharing files with clients.

App For Mac Called Cafienne