An appeal for good Mac shareware

mac essentials

Don't think any of these have been mentioned yet:

[ Adium ] - IM client (msn/aim/jabber/etc)
[ Quicksilver ] - Productivity zen
[ Textwrangler ] - Freeware text editor from BBEDIT.
[ Omnioutliner ] - Not free, but if you get a demo version i can pretty much guarantee you won't be able to live without it (not the professional edition, which is crap).

Use Fink for unix/linux ports. You can install the X11 windowing system and run any apps that leverage that. That's a lot of apps. OSXGNU has the most complete listing of free open source software for OS X.

Welcome to the platform.

now i'm drooling. thanks joan. these look great.

i missed some other Cocoa apps out:

[ NetNewsWire Lite ] - This is the best desktop RSS reader on any platform. Simple, powerful. Lite version is free.
[ Transmit ] - This is an FTP client. It's good. It's not free.

Cocoa apps are built specifically for OS X. They're the ones with the nicest interfaces.

I will second the recommendation for Cyberduck. As far as I can tell, Cyberduck is just as good as Transmit, only it's totally open source.

I have not used Tofu as much as I thought I would, but I still recommend it. It's simple software that re-formats text in readable columns. Hard to explain it any better—since that's really all it does—but when reading long articles on the Internet, Tofu can really help.

I would say that VLC is the best video player for Mac OS X.

inkscape runs off of x11, and if you've never touched illustrator before, it is a wonderful vector graphics program..

thanks for that malcomx box to linux link though...very amazing potential there...

http://www.garagecube.com/modul8/ Modul8 is awesome for visuals manipulations.

just ripped this off of demonoid...

Communication
Adium - multi protocol instant messenger, open source. Very customizable.
Cocoalicious - desktop Del.icio.us client.
Colloquy - basic open source IRC client
Fire - multi protocol instant messenger, open source. Simpler than Adium but also less customizable.
iChat Streaming Icon - replace your iChat picture with an animation or stream from your webcam
Macirssi - advanced IRC client, requires command line configuration
Mercury Messenger - MSN client
Proteus - multi protocol instant messenger.
XChat Aqua - intermediate IRC client, port of X11 application
Miraclesight-screensaver integrated with iSight
MenuShade & PSP Ware a easy on the eye @ night time & PSP Sync utility
Snak IRC 4 Mac
Postfix Enabler Set up a roving SMTP server + more. Send mail wherever you are with your favorite mail application. Essential for travelers and other laptop users who don't want to use webmails.

Games
http://mac.the-underdogs.org/abandonware,Anybody remember Sim Life, the Secret of Monkey Island? Mac Garden has it all.
SNES9X - SNES emulator
Star Control 2 - really old game, open source
PCSX PSX emulation 4 mac
MacMAME Multi Arcade Emulation
GamePadCompanion Sync up that Game console pad to your Mac

Graphics
Blender 3D - open source 3D modeling
freePhotoConverter - converts, shrinks, rotates photos.
Iconverter - Icon format manipulation tool with batch processing.
FontexploererX
HB Image Processor - to crop/resize a image

Interface Mods
A-Dock - displays the currently open applications in a Dock look-alike.
Desktop Manager - use multiple desktops and switch between them.
MenuMeters - displays cpu, memory and hdd use as well as network throughput in menubar
PathFinder - Finder, on steroids
Quartz Desktop - make Quartz 3D compositions your desktop
QuickSilver - like Apple's Spotlight, only faster and more adaptable
SMARTReporter - simple menu indicator to report a disk's SMART status
Visage - run a screensaver as a desktop background, change login background and customize various system messages
XMenu - customizable application menu for the menubar
TransparantDock Pimp your Dock
Themepark Free GUI designer for OSX

Internet
AcidSearch - add all kinds of searches to your Google box in Safari. Incredibly customizable.
Cyberduck - open source FTP/SFTP app
DownloadComment - puts the URL of all Safari downloads into the Finder comments field.
FTPeel - FTP client
GmailStatus - displays your new Gmail messages in the menubar
Little Snitch - selectively block applications from accessing the internet to keep them from phoning home
Sogudi - Safari add-on allowing use of short cuts and reads Unix manual pages.
XyleScope CSS Tool/Browser
BBEdit Pro featured Web Design Text editor

Music/Media
Barquee - menu bar iTunes controller/display
ByteController - control iTunes from the menu bar or with shortcut keys
DockArt - replaces the iTunes Dock icon with album art for the playing track
Fetch - FTP app
iPodRip - supports recovering songs and playlists from an iPod,playback of audio files and much more
JHymn - decrypt AAC files from the iTunes Music Store without loss of audio quality.
MacTheRipper - freeware DVD ripper
Pod Manager - extract songs from your iPod
VLC - multi format media player, supports virtually every codec you'll ever come across
MP3Trimmer
Adium iTunes Controller-control itunes from adium
http://www.smartelectronix.com/~destroyfx/audiounits.html
Audacity Free well spec'd audio editor
Radiolover Automated Stream recorder
Our Tunes Browse and download from other people's iTunes Music Shares
Ffmpegx Graphic user interface designed to easily operate more than 20 powerful Unix open-source video and audio processing tools
Jalbum Cross-platform Java based web album creatorMidi Monitor Displays MIDI signals
SysEx Librarian Communicate with MIDI devices using System Exclusive messages
Pd Pd (aka Pure Data) is a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing
Supercollider Realtime sound synthesis server
Soundflower System extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications

Utilities
BurnAgain - burn recordable media multiple times
DS_Store Cleaner - cleans DS_Store files from your computer.
MT-NewsWatcher - Usenet news client
Pacifist - lets you see inside package files and verify existing installations.
RAR Expander - a nice rar expanding app made with the WinRAR library
Stuffit Deluxe - work with all manner of archive formats, use this link to download.
ToastMount - mount disk images with a doubleclick
Deloalizer-frees up disk space by deleting files that contain data on other languages
Carbon Copy cloner - Free Backup/Bootdisk cloner
OSX Cocktail Swis army knife for Mac
Bwana View Command Line Manuals in you browser
Bzip2 Bzip2 compression library and tools. Bzip2 is a freely available high-quality data compressor

NeoOffice/J - a open-source option to using MS Office with word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs.

Downloaded a bunch of this stuff last night. VoodooPad already rules - that's one handy little app for someone as disorganised as me...

Did anyone mention Audio Hijack? Nice little app for grabbing audio from any application, including iTunes, on your Mac. In the demo version the files degrade but you can just throw them into ReCycle or some other program and save them there. Or buy the full version of course, which is only $16.

For writers, try Ulysses.

john eden said:

Oh yeah and the mac shop in Regents Street is best avoided. Seriously it's like some mutual masturbation warehouse for apple devotees stroking ipods. And big queues.

Click to expand...

John you are right the Apple Store in Regent Street sucks. Every single computer in there is being used by some student type or tourist checking their e-mail. So if you actually want to go in there and try out a Mac, forget it.

... but don't install this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4723390.stm

The Mac-only Camino browser has just been released. There's a Wired review here and it sounds mostly good. I'm not sure I'm ready to give up Safari + Saft quite yet, but I'll check it out.

bump

for graphics I no longer use GIMP as I've dropped it in favour of krita. It's free and does the stuff that I used to be able to do in a cracked version of Photoshop

adruu said:

Supercollider Realtime sound synthesis server

Click to expand...

Still good.

Slothrop said:

Still good.

Click to expand...

just began learning it properly last month and it's great

A recent discovery of mine: Trevor Wishart's Composer's Desktop Project.
It has been around since the 80s if I'm not mistaken, a bit cryptic in use and the GUI feels even worse than the command line interface, but what it can do is incredible:

just managed to compile this after usual case of several hours spent on figuring out which four lines of code need to be changed

wektor said:

just managed to compile this after usual case of several hours spent on figuring out which four lines of code need to be changed

GitHub - philburk/hmsl: Hierarchical Music Specification Language, Forth tools for experimental music from the 1980's

Hierarchical Music Specification Language, Forth tools for experimental music from the 1980's - GitHub - philburk/hmsl: Hierarchical Music Specification Language, Forth tools for experimental m...

github.com

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program written by this legendary chap:

wektor said:

just began learning it properly last month and it's great

Click to expand...

I've been trying a bit of TidalCycles, which sort of bleeds over into learning a bit of SuperCollider and a bit of Haskell.

I only just twigged that operator precedence in SClang is strictly left-to-right which explains some stuff that had been messing with me for a while. Seems broadly good, though, I'm looking forward to getting into building some more interesting noises in it...