MORE GREAT ALTERNATIVES

Replace Calculator, Activity Monitor, Preview, and Time Machine!

soulver

Calculator’s instantly recognizable interface is nice, but it limits flexibility for complex calculations. By contrast, Soulver ($12, acqualia.com) is weird at first but far superior once you grasp the basics. You enter calculations in plain language and it extracts the numbers and does the math. Line totals become tokens that can be used in later lines, everything updating as figures are changed. Calculations can be saved, or exported to other formats.

PDF Expert

Preview is great for opening PDFs, adding annotations, and moving a few pages around. Spend some time with PDF Expert ($60, readdle.com), though, and you’ll see it’s like Preview Pro. If you regularly organize pages, PDF Expert’s page thumbnail preview makes it a cinch to drag pages to reorder them. To merge PDFs together, just use the app’s Merge Files command. With accessible annotation tools too, PDF Expert is a worthy Preview replacement.

iStat Menus

If you run a lot of apps and background utilities, it pays to keep an eye on your Mac’s resources. Apple’s Activity Monitor kind of gets in the way, so iStat Menus ($18, bjango.com) puts resource monitoring in the menu bar, where tiny graphs detail how your Mac’s doing; click one and a drop-down menu provides extra detail. It’s also a great replacement for the menu bar clock, with a configurable world clock, sunrise/sunset times, and a world light map.

SuperDuper

With Time Machine, Apple provides a way to safeguard data from disaster. Rather than just backing up data, though, SuperDuper ($28, shirt-pocket.com) clones your drive, making a bootable backup that can be used to start your Mac and have you up and running again in minutes. SuperDuper’s also useful for “archiving” an old Mac’s final state. Still, since Time Machine backups are more regular, we recommend using it and SuperDuper together.