Think about Haiti
We just donated to the Canadian Red Cross relief fund for the earthquake in Haiti. Please think about doing the same.
Canadian Red Cross
American Red Cross
International Red Cross
Posted Wednesday, January 13, 2010 in Site-News
Your top 10 free games of 2009
Most of the visitors to thriftmac have one thing on their minds — games, games, games. Or at least that’s what the stats suggest.
Over the past year, the articles about individual freeware apps with the most pageviews were all games, according to Google Analytics. You have to go pretty far down the list before you come to some graphics programs like ArtRage and DrawBerry.
If you happen to be one of the masses looking for free Mac games, be sure to pay a visit to macgameshuffle while you’re at it. We have nice screenshots of all the games, plus you can click on the shuffle button and see what comes up.
Without further ado, for your enjoyment and edification, here they are — the most visited free games at thriftmac:
1. Bomberman: Work your way through the levels with strategic placement of bombs that kill enemies and destroy obstacles. (A perennial favourite that might just be the most popular app ever at thriftmac.)
2. Angband: Take the role of an adventurer, exploring a deep dungeon, fighting monsters, and acquiring the best weaponry you can, in preparation for a final battle with Morgoth, the Lord of Darkness.
3. Alien Abduction: Save crash survivors from abduction by evil aliens.
4. Freecell: A Mac OS X version of the classic solitaire game. (Interesting that this appears to be more popular than Klondike.)
5. GNU Backgammon: Think you’re good at backgammon? Try your luck against GNU Backgammon, currently boasting world class capabilities.
6. Boggle: Make as many words as you can in three minutes. (Not the greatest Boggle game, but it’s the best free one we can find.)
7. Lin City-NG: A city simulation game with nice graphics. Start with a small village and build your way up to a bustling metropolis.
8. AssaultCube: First-person-shooter set in a realistic looking environment. It’s all about team oriented multiplayer fun.
9. Ivory: A solitaire tile matching game based on the single player game known most often as Mahjongg, and also called Shanghai or Taipei. Beautiful graphics.
10. Aquatomic: Slide atoms through the maze-like structures of Aquatomic to create molecules. (Nice to see this classic hanging in there.) Update: Broken link. Aquatomic can be downloaded from this Russian site.
Posted Friday, December 18, 2009 in Site-News
MilkyWay has gone away
I’ve had to delete MilkyWay from the freeware collection. First the download wasn’t working. Now the site itself is not responding. Just speculating, but it could be that the introduction of Quick Look (which does much the same thing) with Leopard effectively killed it off.
By the way, I really do like to keep the collection up to date. If you come across something that is no longer working, please let me know.
Posted Monday, November 30, 2009 in Site-News
Internet apps now in categories
We’re gradually getting the freeware collection better organized by dividing the various sections into categories. The Games section has long been divvied up into action, adventure and so on, but the other sections are also getting fairly long and are in need of easier navigation.
First up in the fixup is the Internet section. It now has categories for email, ftp, messaging, news, photo galleries, sharing, Twitter and web browsing. We gave a couple of apps their own heading and tossed a couple of others that have become outdated.
As always, if you have any suggestions, we’re all ears.
Posted Thursday, October 15, 2009 in Site-News
Become a Facebook fan
Just when you think Scrimpy can’t contort himself into any other letters or logos, he manages to squeeze through the Facebook f. Yes, that means thriftmac now as a Facebook page — mainly for the convenience of those who prefer the walled garden. You can keep up to date on blog entries from thriftmac and, if you click on the Twitter tab, our latest tweets.
By the way, if you’re not following thriftmac on Twitter, you’re missing out on our “extra” Mac freeware. If it’s not quite worth a blog entry, it gets tweeted.
Posted Monday, October 5, 2009 in Site-News
macgameshuffle now twice as fast
Twice now, I’ve received email from my Internet service provider informing me that — what the hay — they’ve decided to boost the speed of my connection. I’m sure they’re doing it for competitive reasons, but I’ll gladly take benefits.
The problem is that with all this speed I didn’t realize how slow all those images at macgameshuffle were for many visitors. So I painstakingly went through each and every screenshot and cut the size by half.
macgameshuffe is all about finding free fun games. Now that it loads faster, it should be even more fun.
Posted Thursday, October 1, 2009 in Site-News
New look for macgameshuffle
Think of macgameshuffle as the illustrated version of the thriftmac game collection — with the added twist of a cool shuffle mode. We’ve been working hard to improve macgameshuffle, and here’s what we’ve come up with: a gallery style display that allows you to look through up to 10 game screenshots at a time.
This means that when you’re in a particular category — say, adventure — you’ll be able to see all the games on offer. Of course, we had to maintain shuffle mode, and you can still surprise yourself with some of the fantastic free games available for the Mac by clicking on the big, ol’ Shuffle button.
We’d also like to encourage you to submit suggestions for free games that should be included. (And by free we mean totally free.) So there’s a big button for that as well.
The site looks great in Safari and Firefox, but unfortunately we can’t make any guarantees for Internet Explorer, especially the older versions. Sorry about that, but half the fun in running a website is using cool new technology, and for whatever reason, Microsoft has been slow in keeping up.
So nip over to the macgameshuffle, play around with it, and be sure to let us know what you think. Is it wonderful? Does it still need work? Is it ‘meh’? You can use the Contact link at the site or contact us here.
Posted Wednesday, September 23, 2009 in Site-News
Scrimpy's Picks
We’ve added a new blog category to the list over on the left — Scrimpy’s Picks. These free programs are used almost daily here at thriftmac headquarters, and all come highly recommended for those with “dis-scrimpy-nating” tastes.
That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the other apps in the thriftmac collection. We’ve taken care to keep track of only the best. There’s no junk, filler or SEO tricks.
Scrimpy’s Picks will change from time to time as we fall in love with new apps or if old ones fall out of favour, so be sure to check back.
Posted Wednesday, September 2, 2009 in Site-News
Pre-order Snow Leopard from Amazon
If you’ve enjoyed thriftmac over the years, and you’re pretty much set on buying Snow Leopard anyway, you can show your support by pre-ordering with one of the affiliate links at the top of the page. As I understand it, you don’t have to buy right now. If you click on a link and buy some time later, it still counts. Thank you for supporting thriftmac.
Posted Tuesday, August 11, 2009 in Site-News
Hey, we're on Twitter
We’re a bit late to the party, but you can finally follow thriftmac on Twitter. There’s also a nifty little logo you can click on at the top right. We tend to be artistically challenged, so if you can’t figure it out, that’s the Twitter bird skewering Scrimpy the thriftmac worm. You’ll mostly find links to the thriftmac RSS feed at our Twitter account, but we’ll occasionally throw in a few surprises as we continued to delve into the ever-changing world of Mac freeware.
Posted Friday, June 26, 2009 in Site-News
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