Freeware of the Month

Tim Verpoorten
March 2007

March, another month closer to spring but don’t think the hope for warm weather will keep me from reviewing freeware. So as I shovel out from what we hope is the last snowstorm of the season here in the great midwest, let’s snuggle up near the fireplace and dry out those wet socks as we look at the freeware of the month.

Slife
http://www.slifelabs.com/

Do you ever wonder where all the time in the day went? Have you ever sat down on the
computer and then look up and saw that it was time to leave and you didn’t get
a thing done that you intended to do when you first sat down at your
Mac? I do all the time, and rather then blaming it on ADHD, I decided to
try Slife.

Slife is a new application for the Mac OS X that lets you visualize and organize your computer activities like never before. Slife observes your every interaction with applications such as Safari, Mail and iChat and keeps tracks of all web pages you visit, emails you read, documents you write and much more.

All activities observed by Slife are graphically displayed in visualizations that make it easy for you to understand where and how you are spending your time. You don’t want to know where I waste most my time, but with Slife around, I catch myself falling into these digital ratholes and my time on the Mac has become much more productive. At least that’s the story I’m sticking with.

Home and Away
http://maccrafters.com/home_and_away

If you take your laptop to work, or to the coffee shop or to a friends house, and back home again, you’ve found that for each location, you normally want to launch specific apps that you use in that location. Network volumes, maybe iTunes, or Word, or Excel, maybe a business specific app, but no matter what it is, Home and Away can automate this task for you by allowing you to set up different networks. The network you are connected to will determine which volumes are mounted and which applications are launched. Even if you don’t have a laptop, Home and Away can still provide an easy way to mount volumes and launch several applications on login. It’s very nice app for everyone to have, especially if you have a laptop and use it at different locations.

Mulberry Mail
http://www.mulberry.com

Mulberry is a powerful, easy to use electronic mail (email) and calendar program that allows you to send, access, and manage email and calendar data. Mulberry also helps you manage contact information used in conjunction with email and calendars. Mulberry is designed for use with email servers that support (IMAP) and (POP3). It also uses http, WebDAV and CalDAV for storing and retrieving calendar data. I am impressed, the application is very Mac-like in appearance and is easy to setup and as far as I can tell, very full-featured.

iWebSites
http://mistergregg.com/cocoadrillosoftware/iWebSites/index.html

What is iWebSites? It is a program that enhances iWeb by manipulating the website files that iWeb creates to enable a user to create multiple websites that are completely independent of each other. iWeb 1.01 shipped without this capability, but anyone who wants to use iWeb for more than a single web site can benefit from iWebSites. This is especially true for users who utilize File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, (instead of .Mac) to publish their iWeb creations.

iWeb really was not designed with the power user in mind, but it does enable a user to quickly create beautiful web sites. With iWebSites, separate websites are kept independent of each other, and when sites are ÒpublishedÓ to a directory (for uploading via FTP), only the site you are currently working on is published.

iWebSites new version now has the ability to merge two sites together. This is an extremely functional update, as there has been no way previously to move sites in and out of iWeb. Now, users have the ability to share web sites and compile websites together. The interface has been enhanced, so you can now drill down and look at the headings for each site in iWebSites. So if you use iWeb, but you want to have more then just one website, download and install iWebSites. It makes the whole process simple.

GTDGmail
http://www.gtdgmail.com

GTDGmail is a Firefox extension that integrates the highly effective “Getting Things Done” into the popular email service Gmail. I like Gmail and use it all the time. As you can tell from my email address, surfbits@gmail.com. GTDGmail discreetly integrates into Gmail making it even more suitable as a GTD tool. Labels are now structured into Contexts, Status, Projects and References; making it easier to read and use. Labels can be applied much more rapidly than in standard Gmail. Quickly review outstanding GTD tasks that are over a few days old. Searches can be created and saved that enable precise queries over your GTD tasks. If you need or want to try Getting things Done in your online world, this is a nice first step to try.

Crop
http://www.imovieplugins.com/plugs/crop.html

This comes from a website full of nothing but iMovie plug-ins. Crop is a tiny, but effective plug-in for iMovie to cut your clip to size. since a plug-in can’t alter the size of a clip (a limitation from iMovie), those parts of the clip that you cut off are set to a color of your choosing.

Since all plug-ins at this website are just a little bit cooler then other plugins, you can set the transparency of the obscuring color, so that the cropped parts shine through. You can use this plug-in to remove unwanted parts of a clip, or to produce areas free of footage where you can place a second (or third) source. you can also use this plug-in as a high-lighter, where the parts that you donÕt want to highlight are obscured by black (or, if you like, any other color), but the cropping color is slightly translucent. Use your imagination, the possibilities are many, as with all the plugins on this website. Check it out for yourself.

iGTD
http://bargiel.home.pl/iGTD

We all know that the hottest idea in the online world today is GTD, Getting Things Done. Well here’s another application that offers you the ability to arrange and organize your busy life into a simple plan to get your things done.

The idea is this. Just divide your tasks by contexts - where they have to be done, maybe at home, or at your office? On your computer when you access the Internet? Then organize these by projects. Some of your tasks are related to your life projects. If you’re a student, divide your school tasks by subjects. If you’re a developer, organize your tasks and ideas by your software projects. You can also treat projects as categories for your tasks.

You can drag all your browser links or Finder files to iGTD window. New task will be added immediately - with an adequate link. Just click ‘open’ - and there you go! Copy your URLs, your Finder files, your Apple Mail e-mails. And paste them to iGTD - there’s no better way to integrate with Mac OS X. Thanks to the integration with Mac OS X iCal and iSync you can easily synchronize tasks from selected contexts with your mobile device. Stop putting down your shopping ideas on stickies - iGTD will help you. It can synchronize your tasks to iCal. Moreover, it will run the iSync to push and pull your tasks from/to the mobile device. Turn on the menu bar item of iGTD in the preferences panel. You will be able to add a new task to the given context or project. You can also open any browser or file link quickly. If you’re using the GTD method already or if you feel it’s time to add a little organization in your life, give iGTD a try.

Mainmenu
http://www.santasw.com

We all know of, and probably have several apps for the mac that are classified as maintenance programs for the Apple. They repair permissions, or clean caches, and many other useful tasks. I’ve talked about several freeware ones on the podcast before. They are all good apps, but the big problem is that they get downloaded, run once and then forgotten about in your apps folder. Mainmenu app is different because it sits in your menubar and with a single click of the mouse you can make it happen.

Rebuilding your Spotlight library for faster searching, repairing permissions, cleaning caches to improve application performance, and even more advanced settings Ñ such as enabling and disabling the Dashboard Ñ are no more than two clicks away. MainMenu is full of powerful maintenance tools to keep your Mac running like new, within a slick, simple interface. You can run batch tasks, it works with both PPC and Intel macs, and it has growl support. If you try Mainmenu, you’ll always remember and it makes the maintenance so much easier.

Well the fire is dying out and it’s just snowed another few inches. Time to shovel again. See you next month.

Tim Verpoorten
tim@surf-bits.com
Editor: Surfbits.com
Producer: MacReviewCast.com
Co-Producer: The MacRoundtable.com