iStat Menus 2.0
The good news is that iStat Menus 2 brings compatibility with Snow Leopard. This has long been one of my freeware favourites because of its ability to customize the the date and time in the menu bar — not to mention providing a handy popdown calendar.
The bad news is that I can’t get it to install, and I’m not the only one. So here’s hoping for a fix.
It’s long been a pet peeve of mine that Macs were incapable of showing both the date and time in the menu bar. And with Snow Leopard, it’s becoming an obsession. Yes, you can now display the date along with the time, but only in a truncated version (e.g. Thu Sep 3) that is hardly in keeping with the elegance of the system. To get a proper date (e.g. Thursday, September 3, 2009), you have to click on the menu bar. Why not just have it show up this way in the first place?
Posted Thursday, September 3, 2009 in Updates
Spiffy new icon for Cyberduck
Version 3.3 of Cyberduck (still in beta) brings our favourite freeware FTP client up to date for Snow Leopard and heralds a new application icon.
While we’re glad to see Cyberduck will soldier on under Apple’s latest OS, we were intrigued by the new icon. As you may know, one of the features of Snow Leopard is the ability of the Finder to display icons in ginormous view — that’s 512-by-512 pixels for you sticklers. Dietmar Kerschner gets the credit for megasizing the rubber ducky, and he’s done a great job.
The shading is better defined and the eyes are positioned in a more natural pose. It could be argued, though, that the old one has more of the worn look you’d expect from a well-used toy, especially around the wings. Judge for yourself. The old icon is above and the new one is below.
Posted Saturday, August 29, 2009 in Updates
So that's what happened to iGTD
Cultured Code has posted an item welcoming former iGTD developer Bartek Bargiel to the fold to work on Things. So now we know for sure iGTD has hit the end of the road. It’s bad news for freeware lovers, because iGTD was (and still is in some ways) one of the best free apps in its class. Things, by contrast, costs $49.95. But it’s good news for Bargiel, and we wish him the best of luck in his new career.
Posted Friday, August 28, 2009 in Updates
TextWrangler 3.0
Now that Smultron is no longer being developed, it falls to TextWrangler to take on the mantle of best freeware text editor for the Mac. The developers at Bare Bones have risen to the challenge with an update that offers a huge number of new features — in fact it’s bit overwhelming.
Posted Tuesday, August 25, 2009 in Updates
Snow Leopard snacks on freeware
Snow Leopard is officially out for pre-order and Apple has everything you could possibly want to know about it.
But since we’re all about freeware, there were a few items that caught our attention.
Services: This has long been the feature that could have been great, but instead was a mess. The Services sub-menu lists a ton of handy functions — usually making the program you’re in work with another one. For example, if you highlight a word in Safari, there’s a service that lets you paste it into an open Bean document.
Unfortunately, there are a zillion other services, and ploughing through them can be a real chore. The freeware solution has been Service Scrubber, which allows you to disable the functions you don’t want and make services more usable.
With Snow Leopard, services will be contextual — so you only get the ones appropriate to what you’re doing. You can also configure the menu and — putting real power in your hands — create your own. Wow. About time.
Date in Menu Bar: “The date can appear alongside the time in the menu bar.” You wouldn’t believe how long we’ve waited to see those words. Why, oh why, couldn’t we have the date and time together in the menu bar. We’ve been using iStat menus to get the date and time, although we’ll likely keep it because it shows a bunch of other cool stuff, such as CPU usage.
Text Substitution: I’m not sure how far this feature will go, but it looks to have at least the core functions of programs such as TextExpander and Typinator. You type in a few letters of your choosing and they expand to a phrase, such as your signature. There used to be a free app called RapidoWrite that did this, but it has morphed into the shareware Presto. At first glance, it looks like Snow Leopard will at least do enough to satisfy most people.
Those were the three freeware munchies we could find in Snow Leopard. Were you able to find others?
Posted Monday, August 24, 2009 in Updates
iGTD no longer being developed
A comment from a reader made us wonder about the status of iGTD, a freeware program that was well received when it came out a couple of years ago. From all accounts, it does a splendid job of organizing tasks using the popular getting-things-done method. After some rooting around in the iGTD forum, we found this message from the site administrator, Steve Sleet:
In keeping with my word, I am sadly posting that I have given up on iGTD and the promising alpha builds and am moving on. It is very interesting that iGTD still gets numerous mentions out there and a deep shame that such a great app could not continue and evolve to integrate with the iPhone which for me is a must have and IMHO, vital in any GTD app now.
As it stands, iGTD remains a good app. But if you’d like a free program that is still in development, you might want to try Thinking Rock — although the thought of a 39 MB Java app is enough to make me leery.
Lifehacker did an article a year ago on the best GTD programs, with Thinking Rock among them. Also mentioned was a well-regarded web app called Remember The Milk. But a survey of readers found that most people prefer pen and paper to any program. You can’t get much more freeware than that.
Posted Saturday, August 22, 2009 in Updates
That's it for Smultron
Of the free text editors available for the Mac, Smultron certainly ranks as one of the best. So it was sad to see this note on the developer’s site:
Hi!
First of all I’d like to thank you for your interest in my applications. But I have now come to a point where I don’t have the time to spend on the applications that they deserve so I have decided to not release any more versions for the foreseeable future.
Cheers,
Peter Borg
All is not completely lost, as a download is still available.
Rob Griffiths over at Macworld was particularly fond of Smultron, and asks readers to suggest a good replacement for the inevitable day when the app no longer works. It may, for example, not be compatible with Snow Leopard.
We have several text-oriented programs in the thriftmac collection, but the one most suitable as a freeware replacement for Smultron would have to be TextWrangler.
What are your thoughts?
Update: The version being offered for download is 3.0.2. The version I have is 3.5. Not sure what’s going on with that — maybe it was a beta.
Posted Wednesday, August 5, 2009 in Updates
NetNewsWire 3.2 beta
The latest version of our favourite news reader is nearing completion with new features such as Google Reader syncing. What we’re most pumped about, though, is the new icon. The current one is getting a bit tired.
Posted Saturday, August 1, 2009 in Updates
MainMenu no longer free
MainMenu is one of only a few menubar additions I have on my Mac along with Jumpcut, Caffeine and iStat. So I was a little disappointed to learn that this — one of my all-time freeware faves — is no longer free. As of version 2.0, the developer, Dare to be Creative, wants about $20, depending on exchange rates. It’s a great little program, but I’m not quite sure if it’s worth it.
Posted Sunday, July 12, 2009 in Updates
VLC Player at version 1.0
The alternative to Quicktime that’s on just about everyone’s Mac must-have list has reached version 1.0 with a completely reworked user interface.
Posted Tuesday, July 7, 2009 in Updates
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