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
Springtime is Scrimpy time
With the arrival of warmer weather here in the northern hemisphere, it’s time to start thinking about a spring wardrobe. You can get a great T-shirt, and at the same time help thriftmac in its eternal quest to keep you up to date on the best Mac freeware.
Scrimpy the thriftmac worm — that’s him at the top right of this page — is featured in four different styles of T-shirts over at Printfection. You can have a subtle Scrimpy perched over your heart or go all-out with a giant Scrimpy emblazoned across your back. And for those who choose the middle path, there are a couple of in-between versions.
These T-shirts are made of comfy cotton and the prints blend in nicely with the material. I got a good fit by ordering a size larger than I normally would.
Posted Wednesday, April 8, 2009 in Site-News
No comment
Due to a glitch in the inner workings of thriftmac, visitors have not been able to leave comments for the past few days. But thanks to a tip from a loyal reader, the problem is fixed. So fire away — there has to be something we missed in the free newsreaders article.
Posted Thursday, February 19, 2009 in Site-News
An update on freeware newsreaders
It was embarrassingly overdue, but we’ve updated thriftmac’s offering of freeware newsreaders. NetNewsWire is still there, of course, and we’ve retained the open source Vienna and the java-based RSSOwl.
Pulp Fiction, on the other hand, along with Freshly Squeezed Software, has disappeared off the face of the Earth. Strangely enough, attempts to find the site redirect you to “green” news about Chicago — which itself has been discontinued.
NewsMac, meanwhile, has morphed into NewsLife, and will cost you 10 euros.
All is not lost, though: In order to maintain some options, we’ve added Shrook to the list. The interface hurts my eyes, but the developer claims to have features not available in other Mac newsreaders. Decide for yourself.
But, you may be asking, what about NewsFire? It is indeed freeware, but the developer seems to have abandoned support and insists on spamming users with a blog feed that can’t be deleted. You can read about it at MacUpdate. Not nice.
Is there anything we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments.
Posted Tuesday, February 17, 2009 in Site-News
Et tu, Senuti?
In some ways it’s good that Mac developers are converting their freeware to shareware. It shows that OS X is a healthy platform with enough money around to support their efforts. The latest to go that route is Senuti, a program used to transfer music from your iPod to your Mac. (That’s iTunes spelled backward — get it?) Best of luck, Senuti, but at $18 you can no longer be in the thriftmac collection.
Posted Wednesday, January 21, 2009 in Site-News
Aurora gets the boot
Aurora, which lets you use iTunes as an alarm clock, is no longer freeware. Thus, it is deleted from the thriftmac collection.
Posted Tuesday, January 20, 2009 in Site-News
Now using "Download site"
Every now and then, I get a question about how to download a program in the thriftmac collection. I thought it was easy: just click on the “Learn more” link and download it from the developer’s site. In hopes of overcoming this confusion, I’ve changed “Learn more” to “Download site.” I hope this clears things up for everyone. If not, be sure to let me know.
Posted Monday, January 19, 2009 in Site-News
macgameshuffle hits big five-oh
It took a bit longer than expected, but I’ve reached my goal of 50 games games to explore at macgameshuffle. That should be plenty enough for anyone, but I’ll occasionally add more as I come across them.
I’d like to emphasize that these games are all totally free, with no strings attached. I created macgameshuffle as a fun way to discover free Mac games. You can hit the Shuffle button and see what comes up randomly, or you can check out the games one by one in various categories.
In addition to a description, each game comes with a large icon and a large screenshot to give you an idea of what it is like.
As usual, all feedback is appreciated.
Posted Friday, January 2, 2009 in Site-News
No more freeware version of WriteRoom
WriteRoom, the distraction-free text editor, has had a $24.95 price tag on it for some time now, but there was at least the option of downloading the old 1.0 freeware version. Now even that is gone, and so, accordingly, WriteRoom has been dropped from the thriftmac collection. In it’s place, we’ve added JDarkRoom. Plus, don’t forget that the well-regarded Bean word processor sports a full-screen mode that has much the same interface provided by JDarkRoom or WriteRoom.
Posted Friday, December 26, 2008 in Site-News
WhatSize now mostly shareware
We’ve been having a bit of bad luck lately with developers deciding to charge for what was previously freeware. The latest to come to our attention is WhatSize, a utility that measures the size of your folders and the subfolders within them. You can then sort them, with the biggest first. This comes in handy when trying to figure out which data is taking up the most space on your hard drive. Alas, it now costs $12.99. You have the option of using it free to measure 20 MB of data, but it hardly seems worth it.
And so WhatSize is hereby deleted from the thriftmac collection.
Thanks, by the way, to a reader for the tip. If you’ve got one, we do appreciate them.
Posted Thursday, December 18, 2008 in Site-News
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