Top 10 free mac apps
Lists of favourite mac apps have been popping up everywhere in recent months. They mostly concentrate on shareware and freeware, leaving big guys like Apple, Adobe and Microsoft to promote their own stuff.
We thought it might be cool to add to the mix by creating a list that contains only freeware. That makes it a little tougher, because obviously there is a lot of good shareware, much of it reasonably priced, that mac users could benefit from.
But, hey, we’ve never let a little thing like that stop us before …
By the way, I’ve started a thread in the forum just in case, by some chance, there are those who disagree with this list. Or you can always add a comment.
Sidenote — If you’ve got some notes you don’t know what to do with, stick ‘em in the side. Sidenote appears as a slim white line on the side of your screen. When you mouse over it, a window opens. You can then type or copy in a note and save it. You can colour-code them as a way of creating categories, even if only temporarily. The only drawback is that you might occasionally mouse over it by mistake, which can have the disconcerting result of a window jutting into your work at an inopportune time.
Pastor — Passwords and usernames are the norm these days. If you want to make a lot of money, invent a way that people can use the same password for all the forums they frequent. Meanwhile, you’ll need storage, and Pastor does this quite nicely. The window has two panes. One on the left lists all your entries. One on the right gives information for each entry, including a place for notes. Buttons allow you to copy the contents so you don’t have to do a lot of retyping. The drawback? Well, now that all your important information is in one spot, you’d better make sure to back it up, because losing it would be such a drag.
Seashore — It’s no Photoshop, but it does more than you might expect. I was especially pleased to find support for layers, channels, cropping and text. You can also scale pictures and change their canvas size. When it comes to making adjustments to a photo, though, you’re limited, which is why we recommend that you also use …
PixelNhance — It’s an oldie, but a goodie, discontinued going on four years now. But it still holds its own as a great way to fine-tune your photos. Included in the list of functions are brightness, levels, colour, saturation, tones, sharpness and noise. Rumour has that the developer was snapped up by Adobe to work on Photoshop. If it’s true, we can see why. Some real talent went into this software.
NetNewsWire Lite — How did people keep informed before the advent of news readers? They’re so handy — supplying news as it happens all in one convenient spot. We mac users are spoiled with a large assortment to choose from in this category, but I have no trouble in recommending NetNewsWire Lite. The attention to detail, the professionalism and the support from the developer are unsurpassed.
Cyberduck — When the switch over to OS X first began, there was a bit of hue and cry over the fact that there weren’t any good freeware FTP programs. It seemed outrageous that we should have to pay for an app just to upload the odd file to a server. Cyberduck was introduced in the midst of all this, but it was kinda slow and kinda buggy, so it won over few hearts. It has since then matured into one healthy quacker. And unless your needs are specialized, it could very well be all you need.
Silverkeeper — How many times have you heard this chant? Backup! Backup! Backup! Yet, how often do you actually do it? With all the free backup utilities available, there isn’t much excuse, other than good old procrastination. We chose Silverkeeper because it has an intuitive interface, and a simple list of options — including incremental backups.
MacJanitor — Remember the old days when you were told to “rebuild the desktop” if something went wrong with your Mac? OK, for those of us still forced to work on OS 9 maybe those days aren’t quite so old. The modern-day equivalent for OS X seems to be repairing permissions or running maintenance scripts. Permissions are taken care of with Disk Utility supplied by Apple. And those scripts are run automatically every night by the Unix underpinnings of your system. But if you don’t want to leave your mac on all night, put MacJanitor to work at your leisure.
wClock — Is it really too much to ask that the menu bar display the day, date and time? Apparently. Yes, I know it’s a small thing, but it really irritated me until I found the solution in wClock. As an added bonus, you get a nifty popdown calendar. Update: Wolfware’s server hasn’t been responding lately, so the link takes you to MacUpdate.
Camino — I’ve loved Safari right from the beginning, but increasingly I’ve become impressed with Camino. Why? It can be summed up in one word: speed. Other browsers may have more bells and whistles, but they can’t match Camino for alacrity. And if that’s not enough for you, search MacUpdate for Camino and find all the cool add-ons that have been created for it.
Posted April 3, 2006 in Top-apps
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Alan
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