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
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greg
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Mark
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