A freeware foursome at DigitalWaters
DigitalWaters offers a nice little stash of four free apps:
InstantShot! has a ton of options for doing screenshots. About the only thing missing is movies. You can capture the whole screen, a portion of it or a window. Timed screenshots are also possible. And do it all from the menu bar.
FastIcns allows you to create an icon by dragging a file, folder or image over a cube. If you like the preview, double-click and get an icon. It does a good job, although the floating cube is kinda gimmicky.
Offshoots is a screensaver that grows tree branches and leaves — layer after layer. Just watch in fascination or change the preferences to have them follow your mouse cursor.
Cocopad is a simple sketchpad that lets you draw with pressure-variable strokes designed to work with pen tablets. You can have a blank background, rules, squares or transparency. Handy for quick sketches.
These programs are free, but if you find yourself using them a lot, think about a gift for the developer.
Posted Tuesday, November 10, 2009 in Cool-stuff
Amazing folders really open
Is this something new with Snow Leopard? Or did I just never notice it before?
Anyhoo, when you have a Finder window in list mode and click on one of the little triangles next to a folder, the contents of the folder are listed below. The new part (or the part I never noticed before) is that the appearance of the folder changes. You can “see” a file poking out. Or is it supposed to look like the folder has opened toward us? Observe:
But it doesn’t work with all folders. Anything with an icon on it stays the same. For example, look at the Music folder:
Now that I’ve noticed this, it’s going to fascinate — and possibly irritate — me that not all folders behave the same way.
Posted Tuesday, September 22, 2009 in Cool-stuff
MOApp's free app of the month
MOApp — with the slogan create.live.love — is releasing one free app every month, starting with myDiary. Be sure to explore the site. There are plenty of programs worth checking out.
Posted Tuesday, September 1, 2009 in Cool-stuff
Zoom done right
I’ve been using Macs for many years, but have never been able to figure out the point of the green button in the top left of every window — the one that turns into a plus sign when you hover over it.
It’s called the zoom button, and here’s how Apple defines it: “A control that toggles a window between its standard state and its user state.”
In reality, it seems to change the window size seemingly at random. There may be a way of using it properly, but if there is, it is non-intuitive and really not worthy of the Mac experience. Consequently, I never use it.
Or at least I didn’t until I ran across a handy little utility called RightZoom. At last I know exactly what will happen every time I click the zoom button. It toggles between full screen (avoiding the dock) and whatever size it was before. Stunningly simple and actually useful.
You can download it from Blazing Tools — scroll to the bottom of the page.
Posted Sunday, August 16, 2009 in Cool-stuff
Free apps commemorate moon landing
The Mac Observer notes that Carina Software will be giving away copies of its astronomy programs on July 20 only in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Voyager and SkyGazer allow you to explore the heavens and the night sky from your Mac. We could find nothing about the offer on the Carina site as of this writing, so we can only suggest you check again on Monday.
Meanwhile, here are a few free apps from the thriftmac collection you could try out:
Stellarium: A planetarium for your computer that shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors.
Celestia: A space simulation that lets you explore the universe in three dimensions. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.
SkyORB: A 3D planetarium and star gazer with a large catalog of stars, planets, moons, comets, satellites and asteroids. See the sky from any point on Earth or from any planet in the solar system.
Posted Friday, July 17, 2009 in Cool-stuff
Along with AppCleaner
AppCleaner comes highly recommended as a free alternative for deleting a program along with its associated files. But did you know that the developer, FreeMacSoft, also has two other free products: LiteIcon and SecureFiles.
LiteIcon provides a simple way of changing system icons using a drag and drop interface. Your current icons are displayed in a window. To make a change, drag in a new one. And if you want to go back, it can easily be restored. This is an interesting way of getting around the somewhat cumbersome method of opening Get Info and using copy and paste to change an icon.
SecureFiles creates encrypted disk images — just type in a name and set its maximum size and password. A new volume appears on the desktop and you can start dragging files into it. The program uses 128-bit AES encryption, which has been adopted by the U.S. government.
Posted Wednesday, July 15, 2009 in Cool-stuff
ImageWell and ShutterBug at half price
Father’s Day is coming this Sunday, and we’re once again pleased to be able to make a special half-price offer for two of the best Mac apps around — ImageWell and ShutterBug.
ImageWell is the acclaimed little image editor that lets you crop, resize and more before uploading your pix to the web. And then there’s ShutterBug to help you create a beautiful web album with your photos — or pretty much any website you can imagine. A shopping cart feature makes this one a real gem.
With this offer, ImageWell is available for $9.95 and ShutterBug for $19.95. And by the way, that’s in Canadian dollars, so U.S. residents can expect to pay even less, depending on the exchange rate.
The sale runs from Friday, June 19 to Sunday, June 21. You can follow this link for a free, full-featured seven-day trial of ImageWell or this one for a full-featured demo of ShutterBug that adds a “demo” watermark to uploaded images. Purchasing a registration number will unlock them.
To buy at the special discount follow these links for ImageWell or ShutterBug.
Posted Thursday, June 18, 2009 in Cool-stuff
iSquint, meet Evom
It used to be that you could use the freeware iSquint to convert and transfer movies. It was discontinued, but now we have Evom. Drag a video onto the app’s window, choose a destination and let Evom do the rest. Add it to iTunes if you want. It’s currently in beta, so it’s hard to say if it will remain free.
Posted Tuesday, June 2, 2009 in Cool-stuff
See only free apps
Mac OS X Hints has a tip that could very well put thriftmac out of business. If you follow the instructions, you can combine a bit of CSS and javascript so that when you visit MacUpdate or VersionTracker, only the freeware shows up. Very cool — works great in Safari.
Of course, the drawback is that you are presented with all the freeware — the good, the bad and the mediocre. Here at thriftmac, we do our best to sort the wheat from the chaff. Only the good stuff makes it into the collection.
Posted Wednesday, May 13, 2009 in Cool-stuff
Will Postbox deliver?
In a recent survey of desktop email clients, Macworld chose Apple’s Mail as the best of the bunch. Yes, the one that comes free with your Mac.
With the release of Postbox, though, it is apparent that there are those who feel we can do better. This ambitious project is now in beta, and promises to take email to the next level.
There are a ton of features, but what impresses me most is the idea of keeping your email messages and attachments well organized and searchable with the goal of integrating them into your overall workflow.
When it comes out of beta, Postbox will definitely be a candidate for the thriftmac collection.
Posted Sunday, February 22, 2009 in Cool-stuff
Follow thriftmac
|
|
|
|
Dive into the collection
New freeware
Stuff we like
Link love
Send a suggestion by e-mail-
Spread the word with bookmarks
Shop Amazon at the thriftmac store
Been there, done that, buy the T-shirt!
More games
