Mac ReviewCast
Copyright © 2006 Tim Verpoorten
Mac Freeware of the Month
by Tim Verpoorten
Hello, I was having time issues this month, so I had to bring you an abbreviated list of freeware. There's still enough here to keep your interest and I promise next month I'll set a record on The macCompanion for the longest article to make up for the short one this month. Have fun and I hope you're all enjoying the summer.
Aquallegro
http://andyvn.ath.cx/?sect=tech&cat=soft&topic=aqu
So you want to learn music? This is for you. Aquallegro is a suite of music theory teaching software. It contains sections that teach note names in Treble, Alto, Tenor, and Bass clef, and helps with the recognition of key signatures - both flat and sharp. It also teaches ear training to help recognize Major, Minor, Diminished, Augmented, Maj7, and Min7 chords in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th inversion, as well as all intervals from perfect prime to perfect octave. It also teaches the notes on a piano keyboard, including accidentals. It has an easy to use interface, and lets the user customize more than they'd ever need. All of the quizzes are scored while in progress, so the user continuously knows how well they're doing. Aquallegro is perfect for the comprehensive music student or just for the curious that want to hone their musical skills.
Cooliris
http://www.cooliris.com/index.php?s=MAC
Cooliris is in beta yet, so it's only partially functioning, but it's still a unique and functional piece of software.
Cooliris Previews for Mac Beta 1 is a free extension for the Safari browser that lets you preview the underlying content of links without clicking. Simply rest your mouse on a link from an assortment of sites and see its content almost instantaneously. Cooliris Previews works for links on Google (Web, Images, News, Groups, Froogle), BBC News, CNN News, Craigslist, eBay, Del.icio.us and RSS feeds. Simply rest your mouse over a link and see the content immediately. This helps you reduces Back button clicks and dead links, and lets you browse the web more quickly and hassle-free. It's really unusual to see the whole webpage come up in the preview, but you can set the size of the preview window and the speed it appears. Give this one a try, it's going to get better and better as goes along.
CoverFlow
http://www.steelskies.com/coverflow/HomePage.html
One of the big attractions of a physical album is the beautiful packaging and aesthetic appeal, something thatŐs sorely missed with the digital equivalent. CoverFlow aims to bring that aesthetic appeal to your mp3 collection. It allows you to browse your albums complete with beautiful artwork pulled from any sources it can find, whether thats buried in your song tags, collected via Synergy, or looked up on Amazon. Coverflow is actually a beautiful environment for browsing & launching your albums from. It's an interface, actually.
Dockyard
Dockyard is a "dock switcher" for Mac OS X. It allows you to have multiple docks and switch between them with one click. Dockyard now comes in three forms: a menu extra, which appears in your menu bar, a widget, which appears in your Dashboard (Mac OS X v10.4 only), and a normal application (called Dockyard Manager) which allows finer control over your docks. All three programs were created with Apple's Cocoa API, using the Objective C programming language. If you want to use the Dockyard menu extra, you must first get a program like Unsanity's Menu Extra Enabler to allow it to work, After you install one of these programs, just double-click on Dockyard.menu to launch it. From then on, it will always be in the right side of the menu bar. If you would prefer the Dockyard widget, you may simply download and install it like any other widget. The widget will run on any system with the Dashboard, that is, Mac OS X v10.4 or later. Last is Dockyard Manager. Unlike the menu extra and widget, Dockyard Manager is a fully-fledged dock editor. Not only can you create, rename, reorder, and delete docks, but you can also add, remove, and reorder the individual items in them. Finally, you can change docks straight from the current Dock by accessing Dockyard Manager's dock menu.
Eudora Mailbox Cleaner
http://homepage.mac.com/aamann
Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is a simple drag'n'drop application, which helps you migrating your mail and related data between different client programs. Contrary to most other solutions, it preserves message status flags (read, replied, É) and re-attaches attachments Eudora stripped from incoming messages. It supports migrating data from Eudora (both, Mac and Windows versions) and Thunderbird to Apple Mail or Thunderbird. If you have Eudora and want to experiment with Thunderbird or Apple Mail without losing all your data from Eudora, this app is for you.
Goban
http://www.sente.ch/software/goban
You can use Goban to play a game of Go with the computer or online against people on servers across the world. Goban is a powerful, simple, fast go board for Mac OS X. The game is written in a simple and fast Aqua interface and it has a long list of features. SO if you're looking for the perfect Mac experience in an online board-game, this is the one for you.
GoogleMaps Plugin
http://www.briantoth.com/addressbook/
The Google Maps Plugin enables you lookup your Apple Address Book addresses using Google Maps as well as get directions between your Address Book addresses. Take Google's hybrid map views that combine street names and satellite images, following directions has never been easier! At the time this was written, Google Maps supports the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Spain, Italy and France. Google Earth is now supported as of June 15, 2006.
iTuneMyWalkman
http://ilari.scheinin.fidisk.fi/itunemywalkman
iTuneMyWalkman is an iTunes script that will help you synchronize the contents of iTunes playlists with your mobile phone or other portable device. The purpose is to make this happen as automatically as possible, almost like it does with an iPod or an iTunes-compatible Motorola phone. The script is able to detect automatically when you connect your phone.
- Synchronizes the contents of specific iTunes playlists to your mobile phone/other device.
- Detects automatically when the device is connected.
- Creates directory structure according to information for artist/album, playlist or genre.
- Recognizes albums with various artists and tracks with featured artists.
- Copied files can be re-encoded on the fly to save space.
- Play counts can be incremented automatically when songs are transferred.
- Pictures and videos taken with the phone camera can be automatically moved to a user-specified location on your hard disk during synchronization.
Jeteye
Think of Jeteye as an organizational tool for your thoughts or projects. You can easily store websites, text messages, or images in a group that they call Jetpaks. Then you can keep them private or share them with anyone on the website. For example, this is how I use it. My name on jetpak for my account is surfbits. My jetpaks are named after my podcast episodes. So this one was called mrc58. I save all the websites of the freeware, software and hardware I want to talk to you about in a jetpak along with the text from the emails I receive and the notes or tips I want to share with you on the podcast. Then when I go to write the podcast I have everything I need in one spot. Now why is this so handy? Well it works from the website, but better yet, it works as an extension to Firefox browser in either PC or Mac, so I can easily access my jetpak from the office or at home, and whenever I find something I want to talk about on the podcast, it's easy to add the website or email. You can go and search for tags that I use for the podcast, such as macreviewcast, freeware, macs, or my name and you'll find my jetpak and can go into it and surf the links I have and read the emails I enclosed. That's how I use it, but you know you'll find your own method to using it. Give it a visit and see if Jeteye may help you organize your life just a bit more, it sure helped me.
Jiggler
http://www.sticksoftware.com/software/Jiggler.html
Jiggler is a little freeware app with one purpose: to keep your Mac awake. When you have some lengthy task for your computer to do, it's annoying to have to turn off your screensaver and turn off the sleep timer, only to have to turn it all back on again when you're done. (The "never sleep" corner will keep your screensaver from kicking in, but still won't prevent your machine from falling asleep.) What you really want is a little helper who will bump your mouse every once in a while to keep your machine alert. That's Jiggler. Jiggler just wiggles your mouse every once in a while, keeping your machine awake and happy. When you want to stay awake, run it. When you don't want to, quit it. You can even run it while you're working, because you can set it not to wiggle your mouse unless your computer has been sitting idle for a while.
MacTracker
Mactracker provides detailed information on every Apple, Motorola, PowerComputing, and UMAX Mac OS computer ever made, including items such as processor speed, memory, optical drives, graphic cards, supported Mac OS versions, and expansion options. Also included is information on Apple mice, keyboards, displays, printers, scanners, digital cameras, iPod, AirPort Base Stations, Newtons, and Mac OS versions. This software is a must-have for any Mac user with an older machine or a yen for the past.
Man Handler
http://home.comcast.net/~nitewing98/index.html
If you like using the UNIX foundation of OS X, you'll love Man Handler. The "man" pages are a great help when working in unix, but using them in a Terminal window is less than satisfactory. Man Handler lets you open multiple man pages, returns the whole text of the page you're after, and the files are save-able so you don't have to look up frequently used commands over and over. Plus the OS X services are all usable by Man Handler, you can make the text a sticky note, have your Mac read it aloud, email to someone, and a lot more. Written in AppleScript Studio with source code.
MiNews
http://www.js8media.com/minews
MiNews is an RSS news reader that's written in Cocoa and has a beautiful Aqua style, just like the iapps. It's simple to use, full featured, like many of the shareware applications on the market. You can import feeds, share them with your friends and gives you the ability to change views and styles to fit your needs. So if you're not happy with your newsreader, or maybe you're not even using an RSS reader, then make sure you check this one out, it will certainly be one of the best looking apps you've used, I'm sure of that one.
Open Fire
http://bluetorchstudios.com/games/openfire
This is a fun, 3D graphics shooter. The webpage describes it like this.. What is there for a lone man in a tower, armed only with his trusty rocket launcher, unlimited ammo, and cunning wits, to do with an endless stream of lemming-like tanks and army jeeps? Blow them up for fun, perhaps?! Featuring seamless, integrated real-time global online scoring, a holy-man-that-was-a-big-explosion-o-meter, and awesome arcade gameplay backed by the incredibly realistic Ageia physics engine, Open Fire shoves you in the shoes of a lone operative armed to the teeth with explosive rocket rounds. Get ready to unload your weapon and riddle your screen with pockmarked scars of battle, because it's time to Open Fire!
Reference Miner
http://www.sonnysoftware.com/aboutreferenceminer.html
Reference Miner searches the Internet to find and display reference information from PubMed, Amazon (US, UK, Germany, and Japan), and the Library of Congress. Special features include the display of book cover art (Amazon) and the ability to easily perform complex searches. If you or your institution has a subscription to the journal, directly open a PubMed full-text article in your browser. It's a unique way to search these online resources and get the full articles and info instantly.
PatchBurn
PatchBurn is a tool to patch existing CD/DVD-drivers (under Mac OS X 10.2.x) or to generate and install new device profiles (under Mac OS 10.3.x and later). It allows many, otherwise unsupported burners to be used directly with Mac OS X, iTunes and Disc Burner. In other words if you have a third party CD or DVD player that you can't get to work with OSX, give this program a try and you'll be surprised at how many burners will start working that didn't work before.
Sunrise Browser
http://sunrisebrowser.com/en/index.html
This is the open source browser for web designers. It has auto-resizable windows, transparent windows, CSS files linked for easy viewing, graphical bookmarks, The URL field is your search field too, create PDF's of any webpage instantly. easy modification of the source file on any webpage, and so many more features. If you like to experiment with browsers, this one is going to be a lot of fun for you.
That's it for the July issue, have a great month and remember to catch Robert and I every week on the MacReviewCast Podcast at http://www.macreviewcast.com.
