Let the Lion tweaks begin
Articles like this one by Erica Sadun at TUAW — Lion: Ten things that bug me — are bound to give rise to a raft of freeware that allows you to easily modify default behaviour in Lion.
I predict one of them will be called Lion Tamer.
The only one I’ve seen so far is LionBleacher, which is really more of a mod than than anything else. It changes the looks of Address Book and iCal. Address Book receives a blue pattern instead of brown leather. And in iCal, brown graphics and torn paper are either deleted or replaced by gray.
Just for fun, try a search on “leopard” at MacUpdate as a reminder of all the hacks, mods and tweakers that came with the introductions of Leopard and Snow Leopard.
Posted Thursday, July 21, 2011 in Cool-stuff
Find hundreds of abandoned apps at Macintosh Garden
It’s not exactly the same thing as freeware, but abandonware is indeed free — and there’s a ton of it at Macintosh Garden.
This amazing site first came to our attention when we linked to a game called Desert Trek, which appears to be the inspiration for a more recent game called Explore! But it turns out that Desert Trek is in turn similar to the most popular game at Macintosh Garden — Oregon Trail, which goes all the way back to 1971.
These are just two of hundreds of games and apps that have been abandoned by their original publishers and made available free, with Macintosh Garden providing the links. Other popular games at the site include The Secret of Monkey Island, Prince of Persia and Baldur’s Gate. People mainly go to the site for games, but you can also find the likes of AppleWorks 6 and Illustrator 10.
There is a catch, though, and depending on how willing you are to mess around with your Mac, it can be a big one. You’ll likely need to use emulation.
Much of abandoned software was created for Macs with a PowerPC processor and the classic Mac operating system. If your Mac was manufactured in the past five years or so, it likely uses an Intel processor and Mac OS X. That means you’ll have to download and install other software before you can even get started. Macintosh Garden has instructions on how to do this, but in a nutshell it involves an emulator such as SheepShaver or Basilisk II, a Macintosh ROM image, and an older Mac OS such as the freely available System 7 or the more-difficult-to-obtain OS 8 or 9.
If you’ve got the stomach to go through these steps, or if you happen to have an older Mac, then Macintosh Garden will truly be your Garden of Eden.
Posted Friday, September 10, 2010 in Cool-stuff
VoteBundle has arrived
They may not be free, but they’re pretty darn cheap. Get $361.84 worth of Mac apps for only $39. That includes ShareTool, MacPilot, Flux, Process, YummySoup, MemoryMiner, Simon, CrossOver Mac Games, SpeedDownload, and Time Boxed. Share on Facebook and get DreamCapture as a bonus. I’m especially intrigued by Flux, which offers an innovative way to create websites.
If you’re at all tempted, show your support for thriftmac for using this VoteBundle affiliate link. We thank you.
Posted Monday, July 26, 2010 in Cool-stuff
Help set Purity free
Purity is a great little app for clearing out the cruft that accumulates in your Mac’s hard drive. It costs $10, but you could help make it free — or even open source.
Developer Tim Parnell has promised to make Purity freeware forever if he gets $250 in donations. As of this writing, he has raised $70, with 13 days to go in this billing cycle. For $750, he’ll take it open source.
We’re not sure what he means by “billing cycle,” but $250 seems reasonable when you consider that Parnell wants the cash “to maintain my current lifestyle until I can get an actual job.” When he finds work, he’ll likely make more than that just for showing up at the office for a couple of days.
After downloading Purity and checking it out, we’re impressed with its capabilities. It checks on a ton of stuff — everything from your Cyberduck connection history to your Dropbox cache to your AppZapper log — and deletes it.
It would indeed be a worthy addition to Mac freeware, so we’re pitching in $10 for the cause.
Posted Wednesday, April 7, 2010 in Cool-stuff
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
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You'll find nothing here but 100 per cent, totally free software for Mac. There are no demos, no crippleware, no "freemiums." The only exceptions are for programs supported by tasteful ads. In some cases, developers ask for a donation — and we encourage you to make one if you find the program useful. Let us know if you find an app here that is not totally free, and we'll delete it. And if there is a program that deserves to be here — but isn't — we'd like to hear about that, too.
