Who Knew?

Some Good Mac Freeware Apps

I spent more than a year finding these after I switched from Windows XP to an iMac, and now I’m passing the time savings on to you. You’re welcome.

CountDown is a simple little timer that runs in your menubar, and you can set the end date to whenever you like. I set it to the end of term during fall term finals week; when you’re only sleeping two hours a day it’s actually helpful to schedule your workload around exactly how many hours and minutes are left until the end of the week.

Adium is good for IM. If you’re on instant messenger a lot and you don’t mind losing a couple of inches of screen space, select “Borderless Window” under Contact List Preferences, lower the opacity a bit and dock your buddy list on the right side of the screen. I use the Overture 1928 theme.

OnyX is a system maintenance tool and tweaker. It can change settings in OS X that you never really knew existed, and can also run maintenance scripts on your computer that clean up your system.

Quicksilver is an obvious choice for this type of list but I had to mention it. I know it has so many different uses but I mainly use it for an application launcher. If you can type three or four letters faster than you can move your mouse to the bottom of the screen and click on an icon in the Dock, you’ll find this program incredibly useful and timesaving. Because of Quicksilver I now only have three icons in the Dock where I previously had 20+. If you do some strategic Googling you can find all sorts of other amazing uses for this program as well.

I don’t play a lot of computer games and I’ve never owned a console but when I’m bored I sometimes like to fire up a nice NES emulator, NEStopia, and play this crazy homebrew game called Mario Adventure. What basically happened is that this guy found a way to exploit a ROM of Super Mario Bros 3 and made an entirely new game off the SMB engine. It’s incredibly fun to play. Quinn is also a beautiful Tetris game that’s amazingly well-integrated with OS X.

Celtx is for writing screenplays and other things of that nature. I was using a friend’s copy of Final Draft for all my scripts and then I found this program, which not only did everything that Final Draft did but was also totally fucken free. Get a copy if you are interested in writing films or plays.

I really like Safari because I keep track of around 35 blogs and Safari’s RSS tells me exactly how many unread articles I have in the Bookmarks Bar so I don’t have to check all the websites constantly. But Flock is still a really cool browser nonetheless. It has plugins for all of these social services built in, so that you can check your Facebook friends or your Twitter updates or your friend’s Flickr photos right in a sidebar built in to your browser. It’s actually very nice.

The Unarchiver is an elegant way to extract compressed archives like ZIP and RAR files - it’s even better than OS X’s built-in tool.

Reading long articles on the Web is hard, but if you cut and paste the article text into Tofu, it’ll separate the text into columns with fixed widths and text sizes that you can define.

Video playback and conversion tools are a bitch: there are so many different video formats that there’s not really one specific program that will do everything. Luckily, Perian (an extension of Quicktime) and VLC will pretty much handle any video format you throw at it (if it doesn’t work in Perian, it’ll work in VLC). I use iSquint to convert videos (especially FLV files from YouTube) to H.264 iPod/Quicktime-compatible format, and the only program you can really use to effectively rip DVDs on a Mac is Handbrake, which looks pretty complicated but isn’t. Just select your DVD in the Source pop-up, click one of the presets and you’ll have a very nice-looking movie in a few hours.

Cyberduck is great for web designers who just want a simple FTP program that doesn’t suck horribly.

JumpCut can sometimes be the best goddamn thing on your computer - it’s a multiple clipboard application. Other programs like these are shareware, but this one’s free and unintrusive. It saves the last couple of things you’ve copied onto the clipboard and lets you choose which one you want to copy. I use Cmd + Shift + V to invoke it and it can be a lifesaver sometimes.

I have a Logitech USB headset which I have to manually switch to from my speakers if I want to listen to things through it. It’s a pain doing it through System Preferences, so I use SoundSource, which provides an incredibly handy drop-down menu with all possible audio input and output sources, right in the menubar.

If you’re a podcaster, The Levelator can tame those wildly varying audio levels in situations where you’re having an on-air conversation and one person’s mic is much louder than the other. Saves time and your listeners’ ears.

And finally, Senuti is probably the best answer to the eternal question of how to get music from your iPod onto your computer.