Macs allow you to use a variety of keyboard layouts. When writing Portuguese, my favorite keyboard layout is USInternational. Ukelele allows you to create your own custom keyboard layouts. If you’d like certain keys to be in a certain place, create your own layout and have it your way.

Hex Color Picker adds another panel to the standard color picker so you can easily work with hex color codes. (See the screenshot below.) This is great for artists and webdesigners who need to work with color codes regularly. It integrates right into the Mac OS X color system.

0xED has a horrible name (how do you pronounce this), but it’s actually a slick application for its class. 0xED is a hex editor. This means it can edit files at the “byte” level — byte by byte. You may not know why this is useful until some website or situation calls for it. But if you ever find you need a hex editor, 0xED is a great option.

If you use SSH, SSHKeyChain may become your new best friend. Like JellyFiSSH, it brings Mac OS X ease of use to a the Unix utility SSH.

SSH is used to connect to another computer to operate it or to copy files. You can save SSH “keys” so you don’t have to type your password, but these keys usually sit in your home directory with little protection. SSHKeyChain brings security and convenience to the mix, intregrating the SSH keys into the Mac OS X Keychain. It can also remove the keys after a set amount of time or after the screensaver turns on. SSHKeyChain makes it much easier to work with SSH, a must for any Mac programmer.

It can also manage SSH tunnels.

JellyfiSSH is a GUI frontend to the ssh utility. In the Terminal, ssh allows you to connect to and operate other computers. With JellyfiSSH you don’t need to memorize all the command line options; you can choose them within JellyfiSSH and then launch a Terminal session. With JellyfiSSH you can also create ssh tunnels. A couple of uses of ssh tunnels are to relay mail through your server even if your hotel network blocks outgoing mail and to control another computer with VNC over a secure, encrypted channel.

ThisService “lets you turn any command line script or AppleScript into a system service, accessed from the Services menu.”

The developer took the request from John Gruber and ran with it. He “built a tool to easily turn any command line script (shell script, script written in Ruby, Perl, Python or PHP) or any AppleScript responding to a certain handler into a full-blown first-class service, complete with name and keyboard shortcut. ”

Don’t worry, he has some example scripts for you to play with.

If you are going to take the time to run a site you’ll want to be sure it all gets kept up nicely. You’ve got to watch out for broken links and moved pages. Integrity will help you out. Feed it your home page address (url) and Integrity will follow all of your internal links to find your pages, checking the server response code for all internal and external links found.

So take some time and check out your site. Just be ready in case you have some site-maintenance work ahead of you.

There are a lot of tools out there to keep your mac running smooth and effective, IceClean is a good option. Download the app and take it for a spin. There are a lot of different tasks you can do.

(Another similar option (and my favorite) is MainMenu. I love that it sits up in my menu bar ready to answer to my commands.

iColors is a simple tool for working with colors and color codes. Designers might use it to manage a bunch of colors, like a virtual palette. Click in the large box to bring up the color wheel, then choose a color to see its hexadecimal code. You can also use the magnifying class to pick any color from the screen. iColors saves a history of all the colors you’ve worked with.

What once cost money is now free. With Site Studio you can create web sites. It comes with several themes and templates for various web pages, and you can publish with .Mac or by FTP. Site Studio is more convenient than powerful, so for simple sites it should work just fine.

Don’t be confused by the “shareware” notices; Site Studio really is free (now). If you click the “Purchase” button you’ll find a free license code you can enter.