Mac ReviewCast
Copyright © 2006 Tim Verpoorten
Mac Freeware of the Month
by Tim Verpoorten
This has been a busy month and I almost didn’t get the freeware of the month article into macCompanion. Somehow Robert twisted my arm enough and I managed to come up with a list of Mac freeware that we talked about on the MacReviewCast podcast in May. I hope you find one or two that fits your needs. I always do!
Let’s start with a few iTunes apps;
Amazon Album Art Widget
http://www.widget-foundry.com/widgets/amazonart.htm
You all know how much I use Dashboard, mostly never, but here is a reason to open dashboard. The Amazon Album Art widget makes filling in the gaps in your iTunes album art collection a breeze. Search for album art from Amazon's comprehensive catalogue, then import it into iTunes with the click of a button. This is a very simple solution to a common problem. That's what good software does.
Aurora
http://metaquark.de/en/software/aurora
Aurora turns your Mac and iTunes into a handy alarm. For any given time and date (be it recurring or non-recurring), Aurora will wake your Mac from sleep and start playing your favorite iTunes playlist. If you like the idea of picking the music or podcast that you awaken to each morning rather then some idiot Disc Jockey yelling at you to buy a used car, this little freeware is just what the Doctor ordered.
Let's get away from iTunes apps for a bit and talk about a former shareware application that Yahoo bought out and turned into freeware. Do you remember which app that was? Let me give you another hint, Apple thought so much of the idea that they designed Dashboard in Tiger to do what this program did.. give up? I have one word for you, Konfabulator.
Butler
http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?section=butler
Butler is a launcher, but it's so much more. You can open files, open preference panes, manage your bookmarks, search the web, run applescripts, extend the pasteboard, enter text snippets, simulate keystrokes, control iTunes, accelerate Spotlight, move and copy files, all with a simple keyboard combination, mouse click, menu docklet, or hot corner.
Due to its unique variety of triggers and tasks, Butler is as flexible as any other utility you've seen before. So don't worry if you don't have a use for all of its features right from the beginning. Just start using Butler and discover a new feature every day.
DeliBar
http://www.rknet.it/program/delibar
Delibar is a Delicious client, it will be store all your bookmarks in the system bar so you can easily access at it by select the tag and the link. Usage is very simple, launch delibar, you will be asked for your delicious account info, put username and password, or if you don't have one go to Delicious and make one, then delibar will download and display all your bookmarks. When you put new bookmarks, simply tell to delibar to reload the bookmarks, and you will be up to date. If you remember, last week I told you about an app that did this, but place them into Safari, called Delicious2safari, so now you have two options for handling your delicious bookmarks.
del.icio.us 2 safari
Import your del.icio.us bookmarks into Safari.
- Imports your bookmarks as a flat list, or let delicious2safari organize them into folders according to their del.icio.us tags
- Lets you choose between downloading to a folder in your Bookmarks Bar, your Bookmarks Menu, or your Safari bookmarks
- Fast, small Cocoa application
- Uses Mac OS X Keychain for password storage
- Once your del.icio.us bookmarks are in Safari, you can also use them with third party applications, such as Quicksilver!
GimmeSomeTune
http://members.chello.at/eternalstorms/try.html
GimmeSomeTune is a utility that works hand in hand with iTunes. It is a status item in the right menu bar and hides itself behind a musical note. Every time a new song starts up in iTunes, GimmeSomeTune fades in a floating, translucent window with information about the song for a duration that you specify. After this time, the GimmeSomeTune window disappears again. You can specify the color of the text and window, the duration of how long the window shall pop-up, and set the translucency of the info window. Shows cover, name, artist, album, duration, and rating, or whatever song-information you want it to show. You can also use hotkeys to control iTunes, like in- or decreasing the volume, play or pause, or play the next or previous song, or rate the currently playing song.
iChartwork
http://yreuxsoftware.com/iChartwork.html
iChartwork is a preference pane, and will sync your avatar on iChat and/or Adium and the artwork of the song playing in iTunes. In other words, if iTunes is playing while you're chatting, your chat image will change to the cover art of the song or podcast playing on iTunes. If iTunes pauses or stops, you can specify a new avatar for that.
iTele
http://www.defyne.org/dvb/iTele.html
iTele is a Mac OS X application that allows you to watch and record Digital TV (including HDTV) on your Mac. It works with the hardware drivers found on the iTele's homepage. If everything goes according to plan, when you run iTele it will initialize all the Digital TV input devices it finds, and then present you with the Channels window. If you haven't run iTele before then this window will be empty. So when you run iTele for the first time (or move cities), you need to scan for channels, just like with a TV. iTele has the capability to do time shifting. What really happens is that the live stream is being written to the disk at the same time as the previously recorded one is being read to display it for you. If you are using a satellite input device, before you scan you must first fill in some information about the antenna network connected to your tuner. Click the Edit button and enter the details of your LNB. Currently only simple LNB settings are supported.
iTunes Remote Control
iTunes Remote Control (iTRC) is a network remote control for iTunes. It allows you to control iTunes on a remote machine with full track changing support and basic but functional playlist support. All you need to do it enable Remote Apple Events on the computer with iTunes on it and remember its network name.
JPEE
http://www.emailextractor.org/index.html
JPEE is available as a free, easy to use, highly configurable, email address merger, and mass mailer. Use JPEE to create customized e-mail messages for your friends, associates, business contacts, students, clients or any grouping of email contacts. Some of its features include;
- Unlimited Custom Tag support
- Inline Image Attachments
- Custom Message Style Creation
- Text OR HTML Message Editor
- Custom Mail Header support
- Scheduled Mailings
- Multi-threaded
- Customizable Import from CSV or TSV delimited lists
- Customizable Import from vCard formatted lists
- Create and save multiple messages for each recipient list
- Pre-Delivery E-mail Verification
- Comprehensive Post-Delivery Verification & Feedback
- Multiple SMTP Account support
LittleView
http://home.online.no/~thorklar/LittleView.html
LittleView is a program that plays your Quicktime movies in full screen.
Make playlists to use in Front Row. Stream from Internet and place them in playlists. Play movies directly from a video iPod. It's a simple little app that does what it says it does.
Service Scrubber
http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?section=servicescrubber
The service menu is available for any application that owns the menu bar. It allows you to use other applications to work with the item you have focused currently on your desktop. Now the more programs you install on you Mac, the more services are placed in your service menu. Finally, one day you look at your service menu and it's spread across half your desktop. Service scrubber allows you to pick and choose exactly what services you want turned on or off and which ones you want listed in which sub folders of your service menu. if you're in front of your Mac right now, just open up your service menu and see how bad it is, then head over to Peter Mauers website and download Service Scrubber today.
Whiteout
Since its debut inside of iTunes, the brushed metal interface texture has grown to skin just about every iapp that Apple has made. If you're like a lot of folks, you were stoked at first, and then it started getting on your nerves. With the debut of Panther, the Finder, among many other applications, has adopted the brushed metal texture. Now, you may love the interfaces that Apple has produced, but this texture has been extremely overdone. Enter Whiteout. Whiteout replaces a system resource file with a modified version. The metal texture is changed to the original Aqua pinstripe texture.
Xjournal
http://connectedflow.com/xjournal/
Xjournal is a Mac OS X client for the Livejournal.com weblog service. It supports a number of advanced features that are not available in any other client. Xjournal supports an offline mode of operation. You can create multiple entries and work on them simultaneously. You can save entries to disk and work on them later. This is especially useful for laptop users!
The History browser allows you to browse through your entire history of LiveJournal entries, and view them in Xjournal. There are also quick-link buttons to open them in your browser for viewing or editing. Xjournal has a built-in tool for creating LiveJournal polls. The Glossary palette allows you to store text snippets for quick drag and drop access. It reads text files found in ~/Library/Application Support/Xjournal/Glossary and /Library/Application Support/Xjournal/Glossary. Similarly to the Glossary, there is a palette containing your Safari bookmarks for quick access. You can edit your friends and friend groups in Xjournal. Xjournal will notify you when your friends have posted new entries. If your blog is located on LiveJournal, then you need to give Xjournal a try.
Yahoo Widget Engine
The Yahoo! Widget Engine (formerly known as Konfabulator) is a JavaScript runtime engine for Windows and Mac OS X that lets you run little files called Widgets that can do pretty much whatever you want them to. As in Dashboard, widgets can be alarm clocks, calculators, can tell you your WiFi signal strength, will fetch the latest stock quotes, and even give your current local weather. What sets Yahoo! Widget Engine apart from other scripting applications is that it takes full advantage of today's advanced graphics. This allows Widgets to blend fluidly into your desktop without the constraints of traditional window borders. Toss in some sliding and fading, and these little guys are right at home in Mac OS X. Also, remember that these widgets are on your desktop all the time, you don't have to open Dashboard to see them. The format for these Widgets is completely open and easy to learn so creating your own Widgets is an extremely easy task. For the "skinning" crowd, Yahoo! Widget Engine is a dream come true. You can easily change the look, feel, layout, even functionality of a Widget.
Tag
Tag is a metadata editor for FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Monkey's Audio and WavPack files.
Tag has an intuitive interface that simplifies common editing tasks while also allowing direct manipulation of tags. Tags can be dragged between files, or Tag can even add all the tags contained in one file to another in one fell swoop.
For files with incomplete or missing metadata, Tag can guess tag values by matching the filename to a user-defined pattern. Alternatively, Tag can rename files by substituting tag values into a user-defined pattern. Need to make many parallel changes? No problem! Tag can edit multiple files simultaneously, eliminating repetition and saving time.
For advanced users Tag features customizable mappings that allow you to specify which tags are mapped to the various fields in the user interface.
Tag works great with the next program on the list,
Max
Max is an application for creating high-quality audio files in various formats, from compact discs or files. When extracting audio from compact discs, Max uses the error-correcting power of cdparanoia to ensure the true sound of your CD is faithfully extracted. Once the audio is extracted, Max can generate audio in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, Apple Lossless, Monkey's Audio, Speex, AIFF, and WAVE. If you would like to convert your audio from one format to another, Max can read and write audio files in over 20 compressed and uncompressed formats. For many popular formats the artist and album metadata is transferred seamlessly between the old and new files. Max leverages open source components and the resources of Mac OS X to provide extremely high-quality output. For example, MP3 encoding is accomplished with LAME, Ogg Vorbis encoding with libVorbis, FLAC encoding with libFLAC, and AAC and Apple Lossless encoding with Core Audio. Many PCM conversions are also possible using Core Audio and libsndfile.
Changing gears let's talk about a handy utility that does one thing, and does it well;
Loan Table
A small program that displays an amortization table for a loan, calculates monthly payment and also extra principal. Almost everyone of us have car loans, home loans or maybe some other consumer loan that we need to know what the payments would be with a different interest rate or if we paid off some of the loan. This will do the trick.
MenuShade
http://www.nullriver.com/index/products
The Menubar can be so bright to look at on your screen. Plus, what if you want to capture your screen without showing the world what you have in the menubar? Well Menushade will shade the bar from gray all the way to black and make it disappear. It's easy on the eyes and handy to boot.
Is anyone using iWeb out there for your blog or website? Listen up then to this next application.
iComment
http://web.mac.com/cbrantly/iWeb/Software/iComment.html
With the release of iWeb, Apple brought blogging within reach of millions of Internet users. While its simplicity and ease of use are unmatched, there are some features of blogging that many users have come to miss. The biggest of those is the ability to add comments and trackbacks to your blog. It is commonly believed that Apple will add this feature in a future version of iWeb, but why wait for comments when you can have them now. iComment allows you to easily add comments, trackbacks, and detailed webstats to your iWeb site. iComment works in conjunction with Haloscan, The free commenting and trackback service.
Finally we look at an add-on application for those of you using the Camino browser.
CamiTools
http://www.nadamac.de/camitools/index.php
The CamiTools are a Preference Pane for Camino 1.0. They provide you a wide range of options to adjust Camino to your demands:
- a toolbar search engine editor for Camino
- an image and script blocker for Camino
- Flashblock for Camino
- configure many aspects of Camino
- it lets you switch the appearance style (Aqua, Unified or Metal) and hide the status bar
- open your existing Camino profile or create a new one
- define your own styles for the pages you're visiting
- sync your bookmarks with an ftp server
HimmelBar
http://softbend.free.fr/himmelbar/index.html
HimmelBar provides an icon in the menu bar to quickly access your installed applications by scanning standard locations such as local, user, network and developer applications. You can also add a custom location such as the Classic Applications folder, or any other folder of your hard disk that contains applications. HimmelBar doesn't just add all applications to a menu, it displays separated menus for each locations and allows you to customize menu contents and scanning behavior to best fit your needs. SO if you'd rather point and click through your programs and applications, similar to how you did it in the start menu in Windows, Himmelbar is the perfect solution for you.
Cog
Cog is a free open source audio player that supports many popular file formats, including Ogg Vorbis, Flac, Musepack, Mp3, Shorten, Wavpack, AAC, and Monkeys Audio. Features include seeking, smart shuffle, and the ability to read unicode tags.
It's small and fast and supports many different tags other then ID3.
Aqua Data Studio
http://www.aquafold.com/index.html
This program is free for private or educational use, but charges for commercial licenses. It may sound a little technical for some users, but if you run a blog or website that uses a database, then this program is a nice option for you.
Aqua Data Studio is an SQL editor and developer tool that allows developers to easily create, edit, and execute SQL scripts, as well as browse database structures.
Aqua Data Studio provides an integrated database environment with a single consistent interface to all major relational databases. This allows the DBA or developer to tackle multiple tasks simultaneously from one application. Aqua Data Studio's sophisticated Query Analyzer allows users to work on database scripts with specific RDBMS syntax highlighting and auto-completion to develop and test scripts, including detailed client statistical information and multi-grid results. Its graphical browsing capabilities allow you to understand the structure and dependencies of the database schema at a click of a mouse. It also includes the ability to save your query results in many formats including HTML and XML.
Ultimate Task
http://www.jaanpatterson.com/jaanpatterson_programs.html
This is another great application in a very crowded field, basic maintenance tasks. ultimateTask is a comprehensive utility with a simple, easy to use interface, to take care of some of the more important cleanup/maintenance tasks for your computer. It is especially useful for System Administrators in charge of many Workstations. As I mentioned, there are many great Mac utilities out there, but ultimateTask is (and promises to be in the future) incorporating some of the more essential and useful tasks, into an all-in-one utility. ultimateTask will:
- Repair disc permissions
- Optimize System (update pre-binding)
- Execute CRON scripts (Daily, Weekly, Monthly)
- Delete Log, System, User, Server, Crash, Temp, Core and .DS files
- Purge all Trash files, Internet cache, History, Safari Icons, and Cookies, for the most common browsers. (Cookie deletion [y/n] option soon)
- Allows you to enable/disable Dashboard and Widgets
- You have the option to restart your computer after running the utility, or shutting down.
The last freeware utility I wanted to talk about is;
Battorox
http://www.branox.com/Battorox/Battorox.html
Battorox is a very small, about 50 KB, utility to monitor your laptop battery status. It refreshes every 5 seconds and give you information such as the laptop name and OSX version running on it, the capacity of the battery, the current capacity left on the battery, the percent of the remaining capacity, the cycle count, voltage reading, and battery temperature. This is a handy little app for your collection.
That’s all for this month, remember to catch us on the Mac ReviewCast podcast.
Take care,
Tim
