When the time comes to get some serious work done on your Mac, you want to get it completed quickly with high efficiency, so you can spend your time doing better things - like adding artwork to your perpetually growing iTunes collection…

What applications can you install and use to reduce the time taken on everyday tasks? How can you make them simpler, and complete them more swiftly? Let us look at the top 10 time saving applications, which will save you valuable time…to play with PhotoBooth.

1. NetNewsWire

Don’t you hate the daily grunge, checking website after website each and every morning, on your slow dial-up Internet connection, checking for updates to your favourite sites, when nothing has changed on them at all?

NetNewsWire is an application, which stores and downloads all of your RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication). Most sites these days have RSS feeds, which let you subscribe to them in an RSS reader of your choice, and when any updates are made to the site, you will be notified in NetNewsWire.

This is a huge time saving application, as each morning, you only need to click one button to open the application, and all site updates are downloaded, ready for you to read the latest news.

Time Save Rating: 9/10

2. Wallet

How many times have you wasted time looking for a serial number to an application that you wrote on a piece of paper? How many times have you wasted time resetting your password on a forum, because you forgot the password? The answer is, too many times!

Wallet is your ultimate secure, password and serial number database. When you open the application, you are prompted for your password, so you will be the only one able to access your information.

This is an absolute must have application for any forgetful Mac user!

Time Save Rating: 4/10

3. Flickr iPhoto Plug-in

Flickr was one of the best ideas on the Internet in 2005. Flickr is developing at an astonishingly quick rate, and will be one of the largest growing sites in 2006; you can hold me to that prediction!

After a long day out with your camera, shooting hundreds of marvelous shots, you arrive home, connect the camera to your Mac, upload the pictures into iPhoto, and stare in awe at your beautiful shots; only wishing you could share them with others, so they could experience the same feeling as you. With Flickr, you can.

Flickr is an online photo service where you can upload your images, and show them off to the world. Nevertheless, the uploading process can be a slow nightmare if you have dozens of shots to post. The Flickr iPhoto plug-in turns this process into a dream.

Simply click on a photo you which to upload to your Flickr album, click on the Upload button, add in your title, description, and tags, and hit upload. The photo is now online; and your artistic side is ready to be discovered.

Time Save Rating: 6/10

4. Quicksilver

Quicksilver is just like a brother to Spotlight, except, Quicksilver’s speciality is application access.

When Apple released Tiger, they stated that Spotlight would be a lightening fast, displaying results as fast as you can type into the search system. If Apple can pronounce that about Spotlight, it is fair to say Quicksilver is a lightening+thunder fast search system. It is amazingly speedy; a noticeable amount faster than Spotlight.

Time Save Rating: 6/10

5. Dashboard

Dashboard is one of the ultimate time savers on the Macintosh. The time saving possibilities are endless, even with the included, pre-installed Apple widgets.

Check the weather with the weather widget, instead of logging onto a website, fending through all the advertising, and finding the forecast for tomorrow.

Use the Flight Tracker widget to see if the plane is on time, instead of going to the airlines website and customising a search; only then discovering the plane isn’t being tracked on there website.

Use the calculator widget instead of opening up the application. Use the Dictionary widget instead of going to dictionary.com. Use the Currency Converter instead of going through a slow, bank website. I think you catch my drift; Dashboard makes finding information fast, and fun!

Time Save Rating: 10/10

6. Spotlight

Spotlight is in my opinion, the biggest time saver on the Mac, and what’s better, is it’s bundled with Tiger!

Spotlight will save you hours searching, finding, and accessing documents, applications, and emails. Just click on the stylish glass magnifying glass icon in your menu bar, type your search term, and watch the results appear right before your eyes.

Spotlight will make your file access experience a breeze.

Time Save Rating: 9/10

7. Menuet

Menuet is a simple yet efficient iTunes menu-bar controller. It displays a next track, previous track, and pause buttons for iTunes, in the menu-bar. You can change tracks, or pause music no matter where you are, or what you are doing on your computer.

Menuet saves you time, from switching back and forth from iTunes, whenever you want to change a track. It also includes support for Last.fm uploading, and has an album art downloader built in.

Time Save Rating: 4/10

8. MainMenu

System maintenance can be a long, boring process of moving your cursor around the Finder, dragging and dropping old applications, preference files, caches, and documents to the trash. MainMenu can make this process painless.

MainMenu has dozens of different clean-up options, ranging from cleaning the cache, deleting log files, cleaning browser history, and even rebuilding the Spotlight database, for speedier search results.

Time Save Rating: 7/10

9. Sherlock

Sherlock is another great application that Apple bundles with its Macintosh machines. Sherlock is like a maxi Dashboard.

Check movie times, stock prices, eBay auctions, Flight times, the dictionary, and even translate text into different languages!

Sherlock is great to use if you need more advanced information than Dashboard would give you, but you still want to save time browsing around sites.

Time Save Rating: 4/10

10. MacPro…

Imagine if you could go ahead to WWDC and get a new MacPro; could think how much faster you could complete everything? The only problem is, the MacPro’s will cost a lot of money, so you better put some of these time saving tips into action; so you can work more, and afford that new MacPro with a 30� Apple Cinema display…