ZipZapMac is a small developer team based in Prague that has made a name for themselves by offering a handful of extremely useful apps that solve some of the glaring headaches that OSX and MacOS users come to experience. I ran across them when I picked up their Memory Cleaner app bundled with a handful of other utilities being offered by Boing Boing, and while I can’t see myself using their paid apps (they tend to focus on surveillance tools, presumably because Eastern Europe), some of their free tools are quite excellent! (Disclosure: No one has compensated me to write this review. I found these applications on my own, and I simply wanted to share them!)

Clear your RAM and free up memory with Memory Cleaner

I’m still rocking a 2010 13″ MacBook Pro as my daily driver, so it stands to reason that I run into the Spinning Beach Ball of Death every so often. I did upgrade the RAM to the maximum compatible with the logic board, but I’m usually running memory pig applications like Chrome, Firefox, and Final Cut Pro more often than I am not. Because I’ve only got 8GB to work with, I need to keep an eye on usage lest I get bogged down in rendering my latest YouTube offering! Memory Cleaner sits in the Menubar and keeps a display of my available RAM. I can click the readout for a breakdown of the greediest applications or I can run a quick cleaning to free up a couple gigabytes that might have been tied up in a cached process! Memory Cleaner will also automatically run at a specified threshold, so you’ll always have enough memory for your application!

Immediately open a Terminal window with Go2Shell

Terminal work is undoubtedly quite powerful, and for developers, it’s essential. The problem with Terminal is that navigating the folder structure can be quite a pain, especially when having to type long file names that incorporate version numbers and the like. Go2Shell solves this problem by adding an “Open In Terminal” option to Finder’s right-click context menu. Just install the application, point it to your Terminal emulator, and install the action to Finder. Never again do you have to type cd cd cd cd to get to the correct folder from Home!

Get usable text in one click with Get Plain Text

Copying and pasting text in OSX and MacOS is too smart for its own good. When Apple’s OS copies, it copies everything–formatting included–to the clipboard. When you want to drop this text into place (such as when quoting for an article or shortcutting some Terminal commands), the copied formatting often screws up the established formatting of the working document, leading to headaches and pixel hunts trying to get all the new characters to match! Get Plain Text lives in the menu bar (but can be hidden if you prefer your bar tidy), and offers a context option as well as a keyboard shortcut to remove all formatting from the clipboard!