Window management, in terms of on-screen placement, is one of the Mac's weakest areas, and while OS X Lion's full-screen mode will be fine for focussing on a single task, Windows 7 does a lot better when it comes to multiple applications.

BetterSnapTool is yet another app that brings Windows Snap-like features to the Mac, but it warrants a look simply due to living up to its name – in other words, this really is a better snap tool.

Preferences enable mouse and keyboard settings to be activated or deactivated. On the second of those, you can define shortcuts for maximising a window or sending it to a half, quarter or third of the screen. You can also fire a window to another screen on a multiple-monitor setup.

Further customisation options exist for amending the appearance of the preview overlay when using the mouse to snap windows, delay settings and click actions on window buttons and the window's title bar. For example, you can right-click the zoom button to maximise a window and double-click the title bar to show the actions menu.

Options also exist to move or resize windows below the cursor when a modifier's held. The lack of gesture support is a pity and the app's restore is more like an undo.

But with its healthy spree of options and unusually low price, BetterSnapTool's now our favourite app of this type on the Mac.

Take Five is a solution to a problem you probably didn't realise you had, but that you'll almost certainly recognise: those times when you're listening to music, pause it due to some distraction or other and then realise, hours later, that you're sitting in silence, possibly with your headphones on.

With Take Five being an Iconfactory product, it's polished, somewhat minimal and very usable. At its most basic, you click on the Dock icon to pause iTunes.

On doing so, the Take Five window briefly appears and starts a countdown (of a user-defined value, from between one and 30 minutes), appearing again when 10 seconds are left. You can also drag a slider within this window to define a specific countdown length.

Usefully, an additional option exists for prompting the default delay when you tap your keyboard's play/pause button. If that's disabled, Take Five's window still appears, alerting you that iTunes has paused and enabling you to define an ad-hoc delay to suit your taste.

While The Iconfactory argues that 'less is more' in relation to its software, it would have been great to get a few more options in this instance. There's no displaying a song's rating within Take Five's swish notification window (which shows cover art, name, album and artist, and can be set to display as tracks change) and the current song's title could be usefully shown in the menu bar (which would have enabled us to dispense with other iTunes controllers completely).

Despite these minor niggles, we were very impressed with Take Five - and now less frequently sit with a paused iTunes.

Given that OS X comes with a perfectly serviceable file compression programme for creating archives, is there really any point in paying £12 for one? Bit Per Second, the maker of sArchiver, is betting that the slew of additional features its product has will persuade you it's worth the money.

And if judged solely on the spec sheet, sArchiver looks like it might just be a winner. As well as vanilla ZIP files, sArchiver is able to compress and extract RAR, 7z, Tar, .gz, Bzip2, LHA and ARJ formats, which covers just about all the files you're likely to find anywhere.

It is also one of the few compression programmes that create and manage split RAR archives.

sArchiver includes a couple of neat little extras which add to the appeal. It can create disk image files from any folder; it can also create a backup of your documents folder and application preferences, compressing it if you wish to save space.

But there are some drawbacks. The interface has some odd little quirks. Rather than simply dragging and dropping files onto the main window to add them to an archive, you have to drag them on to a 'drop zone' which slides out of the main window.

More seriously, we found sArchiver extremely slow starting up, taking over 30 seconds to start on a Core i7-equipped MacBook Pro. This made extracting archives a painful process.

Bit Per Second is working on this startup issue, which doesn't affect all Macs. Download the free trial and check its performance on your system before buying. If it's fine, it's worth it.

Once upon a time, drive space was a very precious commodity. Now, though, even entry-level Macs come with 500GB or more, and if you buy a decent iMac you'll get the kind of storage that was the realm of supercomputers not so long ago.

So does the average Mac user really need a piece of software designed to help free up additional space? The answer, we think, is 'yes' – and DaisyDisk does it brilliantly.

DaisyDisk visually represents your hard drive as a concentric graph. This makes it really easy to drill down and find big files; once found, you drag them to the button at the bottom of the interface to collect the files, ready to be deleted.

DaisyDisk gives you a running tally of how much space you will save once you hit Delete. Click on a block in the 'daisy' and you can drill down as deep as you want, with a list of the files, folders and their sizes on the level you're looking at over to the right of the window.

On our test Mac, we were able to find about 40GB of Final Cut Express rendering files that we hadn't touched for two years, and deleted them. That's close to 10% of the usable space on the hard drive, saved in seconds; we're willing to bet that virtually every Mac user has something similar waiting to be reclaimed on their drive.

What makes DaisyDisk great to use, though, is how enticing the interface is. It positively encourages you to explore around your drive, and makes this simple part of maintaining your Mac a genuine pleasure.

Orbicule Witness turns your Mac into a motion-detecting home security system. With the alarm set, the application runs in the background and locks your Mac (use your administrator password to disarm).

If it detects movement through your webcam, it records stills and video that can be retrieved through the Witness web page, or using an optional free iOS application.

The iOS app also receives push notifications when the alarm is triggered, and can set or disarm the alarm remotely, as long as your Mac's not in Sleep Mode. An active alarm keeps it from sleeping, but it doesn't stop you reaching it through Back to My Mac.

Any number of Macs can be added to your Witness account, and when you set an alarm, you can exclude Macs.

It only officially supports internal cameras, but third-party cams that work with Photo Booth or FaceTime should be fine. We tried a number of webcams, and they all worked correctly.

Witness is simple to install and use, and reliable in operation. Push notifications are sent quickly, and images and video are stored on Orbicule's servers, so they're still accessible if your Mac's stolen.

There's no option for setting an alarm without locking your Mac, which would be useful for identifying someone who was misusing rather than stealing it, but we're told this feature is coming.

It's Snow Leopard-only, so it can't protect PowerPCs. But if you have an Intel Mac, it's a low cost and useful addition to your home security setup.

Modern USB sticks are like the TARDIS – their capacities are now huge, while their outsides keep getting smaller. This has resulted in many of us keeping more important data on devices that have become easier to lose.

If we lose these devices, our data – some of it potentially very sensitive – can easily fall into the wrong hands. All someone would need to do is pick up the device and plug it into their own computer.

Conseal USB has been designed to completely protect data on USB devices, and it's easily one of the most secure USB encryption packages we've used.

A dual lock AES-256 bit encryption system results in security that isn't entirely dependent on passwords – the PC also needs to also be connected to the internet.

When you insert a USB stick with Conseal installed, you're prompted for a password. A small security file (or key) is then installed on the PC, pairing the computer with the USB device so that the drive can only be accessed from that machine.

Logging on to the Conseal management console from any PC connected to the internet will let you see where and when your USB device has been accessed.

The console gives you an incredible amount of control. You can set rules that limit what network the USB drive can be accessed from, and even dates and times when it can be used. You can also set up email alerts to inform you when your USB device is used.

Even more usefully, you can remotely set the USB device to 'self-destruct' if it's lost or stolen. This wipes all the data from the device when it's plugged into a computer and accesses the internet.

If the stolen USB drive is plugged into a computer that isn't connected to the internet, then it remains locked – a completely watertight and easy to use security system.

There are several ways to keep your data safe over the internet, but these aren't 100 per cent secure, and there are still gaps that can leave you and your data vulnerable to exploitation by malicious users.

OC Shield Encrypted Internet 2011 aims to plug these gaps by encrypting your entire internet connection.

Whereas antivirus and firewall protections kick into effect after an attempted security breach has been detected, which may be too late, OC Shield Encrypted Internet makes your online activity and data invisible and impenetrable as soon as you go online.

OC Shield makes bold promises about what it can do, including eliminating identity fraud and data theft. With OC Shield everything you do online is hidden, but the extra work as your data is encrypted, sent, then unencrypted can have a negative impact on internet speeds.

The effect can vary, with some tests showing a halving of download speeds, yet hardly any impact at another time. For general browsing this might not be noticeable, but for more intensive use the impact is more pronounced.

Sometimes a visit to Google redirected us to the Turkish language version and emails sent via webmail were occasionally returned undelivered. Hopefully these problems will be ironed out.

You can quickly disable OC Shield by clicking 'Disconnect' if it causes problems, though doing so leaves you unprotected.

Before you put your trust in OC Shield, take a look at the terms of service. In it, OC Shield reserves the right to remove and re-allocate its servers without taking any liability for any inconvenience you experience.

OC Shield doesn't have a strict bandwidth limit, but if a subscriber uses more than five per cent of the network's bandwidth, then OC Shield will contact the user with a warning. If this is ignored then traffic shaping and bandwidth capping may be used.

While OC Shield has yet to take this action against any customers you may not be comfortable with giving it this level of control over your internet access.

With many people now having multiple Macs and phones, keeping them in sync can be a bit of a pain. You could use MobileMe to keep some things the same across machines, but there are more flexible options available.

SyncMate 3.0 doesn't just sync phones or Macs – it can keep a whole host of devices and services singing from the same hymn sheet.

As well as syncing things like Contacts, Safari Bookmarks and Mail Notes, it can manage iPhoto and iTunes accounts between not only Macs, but also PCs.

It's not just devices either, as you can sync services such as Google calendars and contacts too.

But the big addition to SyncMate 3.0 is Android support. Not every Mac owner has an iPhone and the Android system is a perfectly good platform. However, for obvious reasons Apple doesn't make it simple to keep your Android phone in sync with your Mac.

This app is the answer: just plug your device in, wait for SyncMate to recognise it and choose what to sync between the two.

If you're an Android user looking for a simple method of letting your phone and Mac play nice together, SyncMate really helps. You can sync over plain old USB or use Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connections.

As well as the paid-for version there's a free edition that allows you to get an idea of what it can do. If you have an Android device or lots of different Macs and PCs that you'd like to keep in sync then this is an excellent tool to help you.

CrossOver has come in for a fair amount of stick over the years, and for good reason: it's basically a paid-for version of the free Wine – a popular Windows emulator with its roots in the Linux OS, albeit one with a clumsy interface pasted on top and a price tag which isn't reflected by the improvements it offers.

In that respect nothing has really changed with this new version 10. Sadly, CrossOver still isn't suitable for modern gaming, struggling with almost everything we tested.

A companion product, CrossOver Games, claims better frame rates, which is certainly true but only because Crossover gives such very awful results.

To its credit, CrossOver does a decent job of running basic office apps, but anything even slightly system-intensive falls flat. There are just over 1,000 apps marked as 'Gold' in Codeweavers' medal-based ranking scheme for compatibility; those that aren't are almost assured to be the ones you want to use.

Of course, the biggest flaw is still apparent: it's not impossible to find an old copy of Windows XP for the same price as a copy of CrossOver. While the logic of buying a Mac then installing Windows is flawed, the only advantage that Crossover offers is integration with OS X, which Wine does reasonably.

We admire Codeweavers' philosophy, and its customer support is nothing short of brilliant, but CrossOver still can't quite justify its existence.

One of the benefits of Android over iOS is that Google is quite happy to let you rip bits out of it and replace them with your own, if you choose. Swype does this for the built-in keyboard, and it takes roughly 0.4 picoseconds for you to start wondering how you ever lived without it.

You can still tap out words a letter at a time, so you're not losing out on any features. What you gain is the ability to form words by simply dragging your finger between the letters, with Swype instantly working out what you mean. It works amazingly – magically for words in its dictionary.

There's no need for pixel-perfect precision, as is often the case when tapping at individual keys, or worrying about details like whether you should leave your finger hovering over a letter for longer in words like 'bubble'. Most of the time, Swype will work it out without a fuss.

If it's not sure, it pops up a menu with the most likely contenders – 'time' for instance might also be 'tinge' – which is still no slower than having typed it. The increase in input speed is incredible, making it a breeze to write emails, shoot off a quick tweet or respond to an SMS.

Best of all, this keyboard appears in absolutely every app you use, slotting in where the now officially rubbish Android default used to be. No software updates. No incompatibilities.

If you're using Android, install this now. You need it. You'll never look back. It's not on the Market yet, so visit www.swypeinc.com to sign up for the beta and download it to your phone immediately.