If you’re a Mac user, sometimes you can feel like the operating system is too simplistic. Work professionally and you can feel like that, although it looks great, there was too much emphasis placed on making the user-interface accessible to newbies, rather than concentrating on power for the advanced Mac user.

Apart from security tools, on the Windows operating system there are more tweaking, optimisation, defrag and boost tools than anything else. However, there are also superb Explorer replacement tools such as Directory Opus, Xplorer and Total Commander. These enable you to work with your files far more easily than the standard Explorer. Leopard ships with a new Finder, but some of these new features are ‘glossy’ features, such as the cover flow approach to browsing folder contents.

ForkLift is a fantastic new Finder tool for your Mac that enables you to work with multiple source/destinations, integrate FTP directly in to the Finder window and, as it’s built for Leopard, shares some of the new Finder features that were integrated in to the new OS, such as QuickLook. You can quickly batch rename a selection of files, create an archive and much more.

Sadly, ForkLift is no way near as powerful as, say, Directory Opus on Windows, nor is it a Finder replacement - it doesn’t open when you want to open a new Finder window. If they could add this facility, it would be a superb tool for your Mac. At the moment, it’s more of an addition than a replacement.