If you have a Mac, you have friends and family who assume you’re a designer. “Please make me a business card!” they plead, “Can you set up a brochure for me?”

You’re a nice person, though, so you break out AppleWorks and start putting stuff together. Hey, even someone with my level of design skills can put up some boxes and text and a picture. The problem comes when you have to pick what color to make everything.

Let’s see… Red, Blue, and Green. Those are nice colors. But why does it look like crap?

Enter Mondrianum, or color picking for farm animals and the mentally disabled. Mondrianum is a wicked cool plug-in for MacOS X’s color picker that lets you browser color sets on Adobe’s Kuler site. (Kuler, if you haven’t heard of it, is a site where design nerds can create and share color palettes with one another.)

Thanks to Kuler, a lot of folks with WAY better design sense than you have, created a wealth of cool color palettes. Pick a palette, pick your colors, and go to town!

Now THAT’S a nice brochure!

Full disclosure: I hate Dashboard. I have found very few widgets that do anything useful for me, and having them invisibly off in some weird dashboardy land bugs me, too. It pretty much limits me to widgets that I use infrequently enough that I don’t want them in front of me.

However, I just found a good one. ProdMe is a widget that beeps at you. It can be hourly chimes (a la MacOS 9), an egg timer, or an alarm clock. It can also notify you via Growl.

There’s lots of times that you need a timely reminder. In my case, it’s usually to check on a database restore or an exceptionally long software install/update. I just go to Dashboard, tell ProdMe to bug me in 30 minutes, and in 30 minutes I get a noise and a Growl notification reminding me to check on the server in question.

Very handy for those one-off reminders that you’d rather not burden iCal with. As for it being off in Dashboard-land, well, who cares? It’s a set-and-forget kind of thing, so it belongs there out of my sight.

For this very special Nik’s Picks, I’m letting someone else shoulder all the work.

John C. Welch, that juggernaut of Macdom, has compiled a list of his 22 can’t-live-without programs for the Mac. Lots of good tools in there for the casual user, the hacker/geek types, and the IT administrators alike. Go check it out!

If you don’t already know about Adium, then you’re missing out.

Adium is an instant messaging client that permits you to use a single program to communicate with people on virtually every instant messaging service in the world. So you don’t have to worry about whether all your friends and colleagues are on MSN, or Yahoo, or AIM, or iChat, or Google Talk, or Skype, or, well, you get the idea.

That, alone, is a neat trick, but it’s hardly unique. There are other programs (such as the excellent Fire) which do the same thing.

Adium raises the bar in how you can communicate over each of these networks.

All right, let’s just get this out of the way. This pick isn’t a Mac application, it’s another web application.

However, it’s a web application that works flawlessly under Safari, but doesn’t work perfectly under IE. Happy now? I thought so!

The web site is stikkit.com. Basically, it’s an online junk drawer/snippet keeper, just like the thousands of similar programs that have been cropping up on the Mac for the last few years. (And yes, even with every word in there as a link to another organizer/outliner/snippet organizer, I didn’t nearly fit all of them.)

Adobe has a free web-based application out called Kuler.

In a nutshell, Kuler is a color picker that helps you design a color scheme of complimentary colors. It lets you start with a base color, and will generate a family of related colors based on some simple rules (whether you want a high contrast or low contrast color scheme, for example). Any of the automatically generated colors can be overridden as well, should you happen to want to.

Where Kuler really shines, however, is in the community around it. You can publish and share and browse other designers’ color schemes. You can rate the schemes you browse, and the best and most popular ones naturally rise to the top.

Here at Nik's Picks, I try to dig up some of the best software out there and share it with you. But I'm just one (lazy) guy, and there's a lot of smart folks out there.

So, to make everyone have a little something new all the time, I set up Squidoo lens that tracks the top MacOS X software.

Just pop over to the lens, and you can vote on your favorite software, and vote down any software you don't think is deserving! Should be fun.

You can see the top few results here in the sidebar, or best of all, at the page itself. Get out there and vote! (And, if you like the lens, be sure to give it a nice rating!)

I recently whomped together a little TiVo decoding application, that lets folks convert the videos on their TiVo into something they can actually use. This has caused me to get a little more interested in other programs that enhance the TiVo experience. So here, for a Very Special Nik’s Picks, is a rundown of some of the best software out there to assist you in using your TiVo. Best of all, they’re all free!

Two picks on one day?! Well, I was just too excited about this one to not share it immediately!

Perian isn’t anything terribly sexy or cool. It’s a simple Quicktime component which adds support for a variety of codecs to the Quicktime player. (Specifically, XviD, DivX, AVI MPEG-4, MS MPEG-4, 3viX and more.)

Why not just use VLC?

Well, like VLC, Perian offers easy smooth playback, and simple installation, but it also builds all this video support into Quicktime, so that it works with Front Row and any other video player based on Qu

Today’s pick isn’t Mac-specific software, but rather a web based goodie from Google. You see, Google just updated Google Reader, their web-based RSS reader.

First, let me just say that I am a firm devotee of online RSS readers. I have a license to NetNewsWire, and I love it. It’s a great program. However, when I’m not at a Mac or not at my computer at all, it’s useless to me. Furthermore, online readers (if they’re good) fit seamlessly into my browsing experience. It’s all in one application, and serves as a launchpad for all my daily reading.

It’s a special edition of Nik’s Picks today with two whole picks! Why? Because, well, these two apps are great tastes that go great together!

Today, we’re going to talk about automating your Mac with Hazel and Proxi. I’m an avid AppleScripter, and I can’t say enough good things about making those tiny repetitive tasks automatic. I have about thirty or so little scripts (scriptlets, I call ‘em) which do one thing that I often want to do or just would rather have automated.

But these scripts are not necessarily easy to write, even with Automator to help out, and there’s a lot of common jobs you may want to get done which simply aren’t possible without some fairly henious AppleScript-fu.

That’s where our two picks come in…

I’ve heard a number of complaints from “switchers” and Windows users about the Mac’s command+tab application switching behavior. The complaint is always the same: It only shows applications, how can I get to the exact window that I want?

Now, I’m a cross-platform-dresser, myself, and am equally (or nearly so) expert in both Windows and the Mac. In fact, I use Windows every day, probably for more time than I use my Mac. But the thing is, the alt+tab application switcher does show all the windows and documents, but I find it more frustrating than useful.

I suspect the reason why I find it so frustrating, is that I tend to open a large number of documents in the same program. To the alt+tab switching window, one Excel file looks like another, so if I have five or six spreadsheets open, I have to scrub through each one to see what the filename is.

What I tend to do is just switch to Excel and then select the document I want from the list of open windows. Pretty much the same as I do on the Mac.

But there are time, I’ll admit, when picking exactly the right window would be a time saver, so I went looking for the solution. I found it in Witch by Peter Maurer (creator of Butler and many other fine Macintosh utilities).

Visor, the new application from Blacktree, creates a half-screen terminal window that pops up with the press of a hot key. This terminal is persistent, so when it’s in the background, it just keeps on going and going and going.

Very clever little hack, and extremely useful if you’re prone to bouncing between the terminal and your desktop.

The only problem I’ve had with it is that it’s only one window. So I invoke screen as soon as it starts up, and that pretty much takes care of it.

Thanks, Blacktree!

Google has just released a terriffic plug-in for Firefox, Google Browser Sync.

In a nutshell, this extension lets you keep your bookmarks, history, cookies and passwords in sync across multiple copies of Firefox. It’s completely configurable (in case you don’t want to give Google access to some of that information, or you just don’t want Doubleclick to track you between multiple browsers), and provides encryption as well. (Unclear whether the encryption keeps Google from data mining my bookmarks.)

Ultimately, I can only give it 5 out of a possible 7 stars because it’s not quite as easy to use as it should be. It relies on a live connection to the server while you browse, so you will get notified if you have one computer connected and fire up Firefox in another. For people (like me) who have multiple computers on their desktop, this can get a bit irritating.

Welcome to Nik’s Picks. This is a little spot where I’ll devote some time to mentioning some of the best Mac-related hardware and software out there.

To begin with, I figured I’d mention the single application that keeps my life in order, gathers my thoughts, and spits them out in an orderly fashion: OmniOutliner Professional.