All the Mac OS X freeware here is top-notch, highy recommended and of interest to a wide variety of Mac users. And when we say freeware that truly does mean free — no demos or tryouts. If you have any suggestions — especially for cool Mac freeware we may not have heard about — please contact us.
If you’ve never played Bomberman, you may be wondering why it so consistently stays in the Popular Freeware list in the sidebar. All we can say is: try it, you’ll like it.
Bomberman has been around for many years in various incarnations since the 1980s when it was made famous by Nintendo. There is a Linux version called ClanBomber, and the Mac freeware version is called MacBomber.
MacBomber is a lot fun, but it unfortunately lacks instructions or documentation. To get an idea of what the game is about in terms of history and story line, a good resource is the entry at Wikipedia. In short, Bomberman is a robot who aspires to work his way out of a bomb factory and thus become human. To do this he must blow up obstacles in a maze-like level so he can find the door to the next level — and so on to the top.
Noobies might find themselves getting blown up a lot at first until they figure out that once you plant a bomb, you have to run for cover. Blowing up an obstacle not only gets it out of the way, it also reveals items that can help you with your efforts. On top of this, there is a time element — after a couple of minutes a bad guy comes in and starts punching out panels from the floor of the maze. This of course makes it harder to get around, because you could find yourself falling through.
Before starting the game, it’s a good idea to have a look at the configurations for moving your bomberman. Some of them can be tricky because you’re using groups of letters from the keyboard.
Bomberman has endured and endeared for almost 20 years, and is surely worth a look.
It’s amazing how many bloggers like to publish lists of Mac freeware. Since it’s impossible for busy readers to keep up with them, we do it for you.
Surfbits has a list of text editors that starts off with the usual suspects and works its way into the increasingly unusual — topping it with Diamond. I’d never heard of this one so I gave it a download, keeping in mind the words of the developer: “it isn’t for everybody (it may not be for anybody).” I tested it for a few minutes, found it kind of weird, then gave up when it became unresponsive after I tried to use it with Automator.
Chris Pirillo is trying very hard to get some attention, and one way of doing this is by coming up with lists of “interesting / awesome (but largely unknown) apps.” He certainly is succeeding from that point of view. But some of the apps in his latest list are so out-there that you’ll find them interesting or awesome for only a few minutes before moving on.
What’s a good way to stash your notes? We wrote about Scribblet recently, and mentioned a few others for good measure. But a reader suggested SketchBox in the comments, which got us thinking about this program again — because it really is unique.
It allows you to create a series of stickies in various categories and store them in an interface similar to iPhoto. The categories are on the left and the stickies appear to the right. You can easily search for the one you want with a filter. And you can double-click them so that they float just the way you would expect of a sticky.
What makes these stickies different is that they come in three layers. There is of course the familiar ability to type in a note. But there is also a layer where you can sketch a picture using a tool similar to the paintbrush in drawing programs. There are options for thickness and colour — and it’s even pressure sensitive if you have a graphics tablet.
The third layer allows you to scroll through days, hours and minutes to set an alarm and use the sticky as a reminder.
Overall, SketchBox is very much a clever and attractive program. Whether it’s something you would actually use is likely dependent on your artistic temperament and the tradeoffs you’re willing to make for practicality.
Update: Scribblet is no longer freeware.
An April Fool’s Day joke from three years ago is still managing to fool some people. Web Worker Daily places ScreenCleanerPro in a list of four free offbeat apps for Mac. The program supposedly works in the background, bringing your worn out monitor back to its original brightness. What it really does, after doing nothing for awhile, is dim your screen so that a big ol’ rag can swipe back and forth to “clean” it off. It’s a great joke, and you can still get it from Ambrosia. Macworld even joined in the fun with a review, and judging by the comments some people still didn’t understand that it was a joke.
It took awhile, but I finally get it: there actually is a good reason for wanting to keep your Mac awake. This Guy’s Voice has the utility Caffeine at the top of his list of Mac Freeware, FTW — and explains why:
You may have energy saving preferences set in the system preferences pane, but Caffeine overrides those settings to keep your Mac going. Movies, presentations, even reading long reports can be hindered by a Mac falling asleep.
Enter Caffeine. Click on the coffee-cup icon in your menu bar and your Mac stays awake until you give it another click. Or you can control-click and choose the duration of wakefulness from a popdown menu. When Caffeine is working the cup icon is full and steaming. When it’s off, the cup is empty.
Now that I’m a convert, Caffeine may very well be the definition of niftiness.
Challenging game play, immersive soundtrack and rich graphics — who could ask for more from a game? Especially a free and open source game.
Krank is almost impossible to describe because there is nothing to really compare it to. You use your cursor to nudge balls so they connect with each other and create strings. Once they’re properly aligned, they disappear.
It’s not as easy as it sounds, though, because you’ve got three balls following your cursor wherever you go, and the slow-motion physics are not of this world. Plus, the strings are all too easily broken. In fact, with all these challenges, one thriftmac tester declared the game to be “not my cup of tea.” And it should be pointed out that some things about the game — for example, transitions from one level to the next — seem unfinished.
Despite its flaws, though, Krank is a weirdly wonderful game — and you won’t regret trying it.
Thanks to the suggestion box, there are two more top-notch freeware games in the collection: Sauerbraten and HexAddict.
When Sauerbraten first came to our attention a couple of years ago, it was more of a game engine than an actual game. You could play it, but it felt like it was primarily a demo of the engine. How times have changed. Sauerbraten is now a full-fledged first-person shooter with incredible graphics that can hold their own with the best of them. Even more amazing is that the whole thing is an open source project built from scratch.
HexAddict is a nicely done version of Minesweeper that, admittedly, had been sitting on the shelf in the thriftmac lab, and somehow got misplaced. Now that we’ve been reminded of its existence, HexAddict has again been put through its paces. In addition to the all the Minesweeper goodness are the background themes that make you even more of an addict. Some particularly good themes are Napoleonic Spy and Ultima. On the other hand you might want to avoid Pure.
Scribblet received a lot of attention last week when it was mentioned in an article at TUAW. Basically it’s a menu bar item that allows you to pop open a window where you can jot down some notes. These are meant to be temporary notes — nothing that you need to save longterm for later referral.
Given the number of snippet-style programs, it would seem that creating the perfect notetaker has become a sort of Holy Grail among many Mac developers. I like the idea of having a place for my notes in a handy spot like the menu bar, but I would prefer that it be able to categorize them so I can refer to them weeks or months from now. Meanwhile, I’ve been going with xPad and, before that, Sidenote.
For what it claims to do, though, Scribblet seems ideal. The best part is that it is so darn handy. You can invoke it with a keyboard command, type in your notes, then dismiss it using another command — with automatic saving if that is your preference. It’s almost stunning in its simplicity, making this freeware well worth a look.
Update: Scribblet is no longer freeware.
There are some games that never seem to go out of style, which is why it’s not surprising to see continued demand for the likes of Mastermind and Connect Four. For a good freeware Mastermind clone, we recommend Superbrain. And for Connect Four, well, the one we had seems to have disappeared off the face of the Earth.
If you don’t like don’t like Superbrain and you have a yen for Connect Four, we’ve just discovered a couple of games put out by a developer in Italy by the name of Federico Isacchi. He has Connect4 Fisa and MyNevermind on offer, both as freeware.
Are they any good? They’re both quite simple, but they do indeed work as advertised. It didn’t take long for the computer to kick my butt in Connect4, of course, but you will likely do better.
Maybe it’s because you can get a nicely displayed weather forecast from a dashboard widget, but it seems the freeware weather programs we used to depend on are falling by the wayside.
Meteorologist, which we have recommended in the past, no longer seems to work with Leopard. Double-click the icon and . . . nothing. But what about WeatherPop? Like the snow in spring, it seems to have disappeared.
Still, not everyone likes to get their forecasts in a widget — and, let’s face it, the information you get is sparse. So it was nice to come across a neat little app called Weather Vane.
It displays the temperature and an icon indicating the weather in your menu bar. You can get the forecast for five days by clicking it. And hovering gives you a tool tip with lots more info about things like humidity and pressure. Best of all, you can get weather from cities all over the world.
Google Analytics is perhaps the most popular and, arguably, most comprehensive of the free services available for tracking visits to your website. But if you find it lacking in some ways, or if you just want a backup, there is an open source alternative currently in beta that you might want to try called Piwik.
Here at thriftmac, we have been using Google Analytics, but recently it stopped working for no apparent reason. It looks to be fixed now, but meanwhile all the stats for those days are missing. This reinforced the need for a backup, and this is how we discovered Piwik.
Although it is still in beta, it seems to work quite well. There are tons of stats covering all the main bases such as number of visits, referrals, browser usage and so on. The main disadvantage, aside from not being as comprehensive as Google Analytics, is that you have to set up your own database. It’s actually a simple procedure, but if you don’t know how it can be a bit daunting.
The big advantage is that Piwik is a continuation of a previous open source project called phpMyVisites — so development is active and likely will remain stable for years to come.
We’re not really sure that it counts as freeware, but when we opened the suggestion box, out popped Smilebox.
It creates nifty presentations for your photos, which you can then share via e-mail, your blog, or print. You download an app, but have to create an account with the Smilebox web service in order to share. The free version has a smaller display and shows Google ads on either side. If you want full screen display and no ads for the design you’ve selected, you have to pay a fee.
Truth be told, the free version will border on the awful for anyone used to the elegance of a Mac. We can’t help but feel that it is more a way of getting customers in the door than an honest-to-goodness free service. That said, everyone has their own tastes — and you may be among those who find the free Smilebox satisfying.