Running a business can get pretty expensive, including all the pricey software tools that you need to keep on top of all your administrative tasks. Entrepreneurs sometimes have to spend a ton of money to get basic business tools that are needed to have a business running smoothly. Here are five business tools that will help you keep track of your business if you are a Mac user:

If you are one of the growing number of Apple users, you have likely come across a strange looking robot guy in your Applications folder. For a long time I ignored this application. It looks pretty confusing when you open it up. All that is on the screen 3 columns; one with application names, one with actions and the last is a big blank window to drag the scripts to.

This can be very intimidating if you have absolutely no idea what yo do next. Sure you can randomly drag actions into the window then hit run to see what happens. Odds are you will get an error or nothing will happen. After a few times of trying without success, most people give up and tell people on Twitter it sucks.

The first step in the process is to decide what you want automated. The example below is very simple. Batch Image Scale is something I use all the time. I have a couple different image scale scripts for different sizes. Setting multiple versions up may take you a few extra minutes initially, but it saves a lot of time in the future.

If you’ve been a student before, you must know the feeling of overwhelmed by all of your assignments at school. As if having to finish all of those ’slacking time’ killers is not awful enough, you also have to keep track of everything and not drawn in the ocean of deadlines.

Some students just accepted everything as part of their life and moved on (while mumbled red-penciled words along the way), some thought that they’ve had enough and tried to make their points by protesting the authorities, but some others tried to find the way out and came up with these free applications.

There are only few applications so good and useful that people mistakenly thought it’s a native part of the OS. For Mac OS X, Quicksilver is one of the few. With the correct plugins, this application launcher can be expanded into almost anything that users need; from text editor to clipboard manager.

But despite the popularity, the developer has decided to let it go and move to another project: Google Quick Search Box (QSB); which promises to do even better than its older siblings.

I personally think that keeping the promise would not be easy because it’s very difficult to surpass the greatness of Quicksilver, even for the creator himself. Many have tried without any significant result. But if Google is at your back, almost anything is possible.

There are great applications that can do many things, and there are also other great applications which can only do one thing but do it best. Growl falls into the second category.

I’ve installed this great app a long time ago and totally forget about it. Yet it works flawlessly in the background while I began to accept that all the pop-up notifications were naturally part of Mac’s native features.

Then one day, when I was going through the list of things in my Mac’s System Preferences, I rediscovered Growl and realized that there are many customizations available to adjust it to each user’s preferences.

One of the internet activities that I love most is downloading. The feeling of about to get something new from the Internet reminds me of the nostalgic feeling of waiting for the postman to deliver a package from my overseas penpal.

Thanks to the RSS technology, you could get automatic notifications of some regular downloads that you do – such as TV shows, manga series, podcast and other kinds of casts – if the provider of the content support RSS, that is.

Automate the RSS Content Download

And then I found Automatic. This small application for Mac which reside in the preference pane takes the pleasure of using RSS one step further by allowing users to automatically download the content in the background.

The world of videos is the perfect example on how impossible it is to monopolize a format. This is of course a good sign of open market. The problem is, there are too many cases that users have to go few extra miles just to be able to watch a video on their chosen gadget. There are also many cases that users failed to do so just because of the differences of the formats.

It seems that a good video converter is already a necessity for every computer. And while I was out on the quest of finding one, I stumbled into this free application from The Little App Factory called Evom. (The name is the backward spelling for the word ‘move’, maybe they deliberately gave the app that name to make it memorable.)

In my personal opinion as both Mac and Windows users, iTunes is the best music player I’ve come across. The simple yet intuitive interface alone is enough to make me ditch other players out there. And there are many other powerful features which hides behind the simplicity of the appearance.

One of the iTunes features that I like most is the rating system. Users can tag any song with one to five stars based on their preferences, and users can sort or filter the playlist based on the rating. A quick glance at someone’s iTunes display and you can clearly tell which songs he/she likes and dislikes.

The rating system really is a great idea; but, and this is a big but (no pun intended), the bigger the song list, the more difficult for users to give rating to each and every song. Can you imagine editing 2376 songs one by one? That’s the size of a tiny part of my current song list. (And I don’t know anybody who has less than 100 songs on their list).

I’ve been a web-mail kinda guy since a long time ago. I ditched my email clients (Mail, Entourage, and Thunderbird) and prefer to keep my GMail handy on any computer (or sometimes cellphone) that I use, wherever I am. But Postbox might just change my mind.

This free open-source mail client (available for Mac and Windows) combines few great features that can help users manage their emails better.

Time Machine is Apple’s all-in-one backup solution that takes a snapshot of your hard drive and incrementally backs up any files that have changed since the previous backup. The default configuration is pretty sparse; there’s an On/Off slider, Disk Selection, and an Options area where you can exclude folders from the backup.

You might think hourly backups are a bit excessive. Apple does not give you a convenient way to change the default backup schedule. Luckily this is easy. Here are two ways you can change the hourly backup schedule to one of your choosing.