Interesting and more or less useless software for mac
Today at lunch time I was commenting with luy about some of the latest releases of mac software, and I thought it may be interesting to point out some programs that I find interesting. They are not as mainstream as the ones we mentioned (i.e. Apple's Aperture, iLife'06, etc...) but they can be as useful or useless as the other ones, depending on the hands they fall on. So there we go, let's have a look at my Applications folder!
- AdiumX. A gaim based instant messaging application. Can connect with MSN, yahoo!, gtalk and all of those other networks I can't remember now. It's quite nice and leaving aside the fact that it still can't work with a webcam (specially because I don't have a webcam), it's very very good. Highly recommended! (Stop using that MSN Messenger crap)
- Azureus. Best BitTorrent application I have ever tried. Runs under java in fact but in this case it doesn't hurt that much. (You have used this one under windows too)
- Bricksmith. A lego simulation software. Not really useful but very entertaining.
- Camino. The native-mac-os-interfaced browser with the gecko engine. Now in their 1.0 release!
- Chicken of the VNC. A simple program for connecting to VNC servers. Very handy if you want to control all the computers from your chair...
- ClamXAV. Mac version of ClamAV. I installed it just for making sure there weren't infected files in the folders I copied from my old pc, and for cleaning possible malware html pages (specially in the form of evil spam mail messages).
- CocoModX. A module player with a Cocoa interface! If you can't stop listening to your favourite tracked music even in your mac, this is the perfect solution. Comes with fmod, bass and mikmod libraries integrated, so as to make sure each module is played with the best and most accurate player. The icon (a 3.5" disk with headphones and an amiga bouncing ball) is lovely!
- Colloquy. For your oldskool IRC chats. Can connect to multiple servers, etc. Like mIRC but without the pop up with the author's picture ;)
- Cyberduck. Simple [S]FTP client. Allows for online editing as well. It's often updated, and they say they are now using universal binaries, so they should work on your brand new mac-intels.
- Firefox. The one and only.
- iEatBrainz. This application will look through your iTunes collection and find out which songs do not have tags. Then it can proceed to analyse them and look for their right tags in an online database of songs.
- iFeedPod. Read your favourite rss feeds on your ipod! (obviously, it's useless if you have an ipod shuffle).
- Jomic. Simple Java based application for reading scanned/electronic comic books.
- LameBrain. A powerful all-in-one Lame interface. It can rip cd's, encode them, convert between formats, etc...
- Linotype Font Explorer-X. Nice font manager.
- Locomotive. Superhelper for developing ruby on rails applications. A must have.
- NeoOffice. The Mac flavour of openoffice. Stop pirating Microsoft Office and start using OpenOffice!
- Paparazzi. This creates screenshots of a whole page (no matter how much it needs to scroll). Now you can create a png with the contents of your front page, even if you have a very long blogroll on it! ;)
- Pixen. A very funny pixel art program. Latest version, even if it's a bit buggy, has nice features.
- Schism Tracker. The definitive replacement to Impulse tracker.
- Skype. For those neverending phone calls. It doesn't support video yet but who cares?
- svnX. A subversion client for MacOsX.
- TextMate. My favourite editor by the moment. It doesn't annoy you when it tries to help, it's fast, mac os native, etc.
- UnRarX. For all those folks which keep compressing things in rar, well, we now can open that stuff with this little program.
- VLC player. Usually, it plays more videos and better than quicktime. Honest! Audio sucks a bit, anyway.
- xnntp. A news reader (nntp). For extreme boredom cases...