Have a Mac? Get Cinch.

If you have a Mac, and you don’t have Cinch, you should try it now. It does only two things, but it does them very well.

Contrary to popular belief amongst my fellow fanboys, Apple hasn’t gotten everything right … yet. I think their window management fairly well stinks (sometimes the plus button works – sometimes not – oh, and when you close something, you don’t really close something … huh?). Windows 7 evidently got this right, but it’s – to date – missing from Mac OSX.

A little $7 app from Irradiated Software solves most of these problems for me. Cinch lets you simply drag a window to either the left side or right side of screen and automatically re-sizes that window to half the screen. Drag that same window to the top, and it fills the screen.

I use it a billion times every day. I’ll set up two Finder windows to move files around. I’ll put my email on the left side and my to-do list on the right side. I’ll put this blog post (using MarsEdit) on one side and MarsEdit’s preview pane on the other.

Try it out for a few days before you buy. See if you don’t agree. Here’s a 30-second demonstration:

If you can’t see the embedded video, click here to watch it on YouTube.

And remember, if you don’t have an iPhone … then, you don’t have to be embarassed every time one of those pretentious, arrogant ads comes on television.

(And if you’re new to Mac and equally befuzzled by the red button not really closing things, learn the keyboard shortcuts: Command-W closes the file/window and Command-Q closes the current app.)