Best of FREE Mac Software: System Settings

Deeper is a personalization utility that allows you to enable and disable the hidden functions of Finder, Dock, Dashboard, Exposé, Safari, Login window and many Apple’s applications…

UNO derives from the Latin word for one and stands for “as one”.
*UNO is the root of Unity.
*UNO is a theme that brings the sunken unified toolbar/titlebar look&feel to every single window on your system (cocoa or carbon, metal or aqua and already unified windows as well).
*On an higher level, UNO’s main goal is to enhance aqua interface consistence, by making all elements look&feel “as one”.
*UNO is aimed to those who want a clean and un-osbstructive interface while keeping the best of Aqua.
*The unity level proposed by UNO does not compromises overall GUI contrast: UNO and UNO shade can be mixed up in order to achieve that usability goal.
*UNO also fixes some Blue/Graphite appearance inconsistencies.

iStumbler is the leading wireless discovery tool for Mac OS X, providing plugins for finding AirPort networks, Bluetooth devices and Bonjour services with your Mac.

The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for “BOMArchiveHelper.app”, the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder. It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems. I personally find it useful for opening Japanese archives, but it should handle many other languages just as well.
*Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, Rar, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more or less obscure formats. Support for so many formats is achieved by using the libxad unarchiving library.

STUFFIT EXPANDER expands all your compressed and encoded files!
** Access any file, download, or attachment!
** Scan your compressed or encoded files for viruses!
** NEW! StuffIt now allows you to open Zip archives encrypted using the 256bit AES method!

UnPlugged is an application to notify when the power cord of the Mac is unplugged or plugged in. Notifications are done using Growl, or with a Alertwindow, when Growl is not installed.

LiteIcon is an application to change System icons. It also includes a function to restore icons.

Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X: it allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications.
*Why use Growl?
**Control
***Growl offers you complete control over which notifications are shown and how they are displayed. You will not receive any notifications that you do not want, because you can easily turn notifications (specific ones or all of them) off.
**Consistency
***Growl centralizes all your notification preferences into its preference pane – you can control them all from one place, and you know exactly how they are going to behave.
**Ease of use
***When you start up a Growl-enabled application, it will “just work.” Your apps can start displaying notifications right away.
**Powerful
***Growl is very flexible. Notifications can be emailed to you or spoken instead of displayed on the screen.

coconutBattery isn’t just a tool which shows you only the current charge of your battery – it also shows you the current maximum capacity of it in relation to the original capacity your battery had as it left the factory.
*You also get information about the battery-loadcycles (how often did you fully load your battery), the current charger (coconutBattery even warns you if you plugged in a wrong charger for your Notebook) and last but not least information about the age of your Mac.

FanControl : Do you think your MacBook (Pro) is running too hot? Give Fan Control a try then.
*Some MacBook (Pro) are just too hot for daylong use. Fan Control adjusts the minimum fan speed depending on the current CPU temperature. For safety, it leaves the original automatic fan speed control intact.

OnyX is a multifunction utility (maintenance, optimization, and personalization).
It allows you to run misc tasks of system maintenance, to configure some hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, Dashboard, Exposé, Safari, Login window and of some of Apple’s own applications, to delete caches, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome, to see the detailed info of your configuration, to preview various logs and CrashReporter-reports, to check the Preferences files and more.

AppFresh helps you to keep all applications (third-party and Apple), widgets, preference panes and application plugins on your Mac up to date, from one place. It works by checking the excellent iusethis.com for new versions and lets you download and install available updates easily.

Best of FREE Mac Software: System Maintenance & Backup Utils

Maintenance is a System Maintenance and Cleaning utility.
**It allows you to run misc tasks of system maintenance: repair permissions, run periodic scripts, reset Spotlight’s Index, rebuild the LaunchServices database, delete Application, Font and System cache, check the status of the Hard disk.

BackityMac
Easiest Backup Solution for all your important Files
NOW WITH SCHEDULED BACKUP GOODNESS!!!
Currently registered users will receive the scheduler for no extra charge. ( $10.00 Registration )
Have you ever wanted an easy way to backup the important files in your home directory? Are you tired of sifting through the Library folder to find where your mail, address book, ical calendars are kept? BackityMac gives you an easy way to backup your Apple Mail files, MS Entourage Files, Address Book database, iCal calendars, iPhoto, iTunes, iWeb libraries, Safari, Firefox, Camino bookmarks, documents folder and your entire home folder.
NOTE: Though this software does have an option to pay, which grants you additional features, this FREE portion of this software is very robust and useful.

Carbon Copy Cloner
*In its simplest form, CCC will clone one hard drive to another, copying every single block or file to create an exact replica of your source hard drive. This is very useful if, for example, your laptop is damaged and you must send it in for repair.
*CCC can also be used to perform regular backups of your data. When you select a source disk in CCC, you are presented with the contents of that disk (hidden items too). Simply uncheck the items that you do not want to backup, and CCC will provide ample indication what will and will not be copied. Select a target disk to which you would like to backup, then press the clone button.

Netrestore
Whether you’re deploying five, five thousand, or 32,000 systems, NetRestore is the software deployment solution for you. Built on Apple’s Apple Software Restore technology, NetRestore can be used to quickly and accurately restore a master disk image to a computer’s hard disk while that disk image is hosted locally, on a network via AFP, NFS or multicast, or on the internet via HTTP. NetRestore can also be used in conjunction with NetBoot to fully automate the deployment of a lab full of machines. NetRestore was designed to be very easy to use, yet flexible, powerful, and extensible. NetRestore supports the deployment of Mac OS X and Windows XP.

VacuumMail is an AppleScript application that performs an SQLite “vacuum” job on Apple Mail’s database, thereby optimizing it and boosting the performance of Mail as it fetches and stores your email. VacuumMail is designed to be incorporated into an automated maintenance routine and run at regular intervals, although you can also launch the software interactively if you need to do a manual run.

AppleJack is a user friendly troubleshooting assistant for Mac OS X. With AppleJack you can troubleshoot a computer even if you can’t load the GUI, or don’t have a startup CD handy. AppleJack runs in Single User Mode and is menu-based for ease of use.

Best of FREE Mac Software: Pics, Vids and Tunes

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Aurora is a free Alarm Clock for your Mac that lets you wake up to your favorite iTunes or iPod playlist or any TV or radio channel from EyeTV.

• Locate and organize all the photos on your computer.
• Edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks.
• Share your photos with others through email, prints, and on the web: it’s fast, easy and free.

Take your photos further with Picasa from Google. Learn more

*Post photos and videos online in seconds
**One-click web upload directly from Picasa, or add photos using a web browser or your Mac.
*Share photos with friends and family
**Share albums exclusively with friends and family, or make your albums public and share with the Picasa community.
*View and save your friends’ photos
**Keep track of your favorite people and see when they add something new. Download friends’ albums too.
*Enjoy photos at their best
**See big photos, scroll through them quickly, rotate and zoom. Have fun with captions and comments.

*BookMaker for Mac
**Now Mac users can create beautifully designed books using our BookMaker software. In addition to our Classic Hardcover book, we offer a Deluxe Hardcover book along with a dozen cover colors and a picture window or book jacket cover option!

*iPhoto Plug-in
**Order your iPhoto books directly from MyPublisher! Get the best quality, the fastest service and special discounts! All iPhoto hardcover books feature cover label treatments.

Flip4Mac With Windows Media® Components for QuickTime, by Flip4Mac™, you can play Windows Media files (.wma and .wmv) directly in QuickTime Player and view Windows Media content on the Internet using a Web browser.

Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.

Best of FREE Mac Software: For your Menu Bar

SlimBatteryMonitor is a replacement power gauge for Apple’s Mac OS X that tracks laptop batteries. Takes up to 70% less space than Apple’s gauge. Monitors laptop batteries and many UPS batteries as well. Select different views for when powered, charging or on battery. Monitor can hide itself automatically when desired.

MagiCal is a FREE menu-based clock and calendar. It features a huge range of configuration options for how the time and date are displayed, and can operate either in conjunction with, or as a replacement for the built in system menu clock. In addition to this, MagiCal features a handy drop-down calendar that can be torn off and placed anywhere on screen.

MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for MacOS X. Although there are numerous other programs which do the same thing, none had quite the feature set I was looking for. Most were windows that sat in a corner or on the desktop, which are inevitably obscured by document windows on a PowerBook’s small screen. Those monitors which used the menubar mostly used the NSStatusItem API, which has the annoying tendency to totally reorder my menubar on every login.
*The MenuMeters monitors are true SystemUIServer plugins (also known as Menu Extras). This means they can be reordered using command-drag and remember their positions in the menubar across logins and restarts.
**The CPU Meter can display system load both as a total percentage, or broken out as user and system time. It can also graph user and system load and display the load as a “thermometer”. The menu for the CPU Meter contains several pieces of information I like to have a single click away (uptime, load average, open Process Viewer, open Console).
**The Disk Activity Meter displays disk activity to local disks on the system (anything that is a IOKit BlockStorage driver). It is hotplug aware, and will show activity on FireWire and USB disks as they are mounted. The Disk Meter menu shows volume space details for local drives (it does not display mounted network volumes for speed reasons).
**The Memory Meter can display current memory usage as either a pie chart, thermometer, history graph, or as used/free totals. The Memory Meter menu shows a breakdown of current memory usage and VM statistics. The Memory Meter can optionally display a paging indicator light.
**The Net Meter can display network throughput as arrows, bytes per second, and/or as a graph. Both the arrows and the graph are scaled using a user-selected scaling factor and calculation. Scaling can be done on the basis of actual link speed reported by the network interface or peak traffic and can use one of several scaling calculations. The Net Meter menu shows current interfaces and their status. Interface information is gathered from the SystemConfiguraton framework and thus is MacOS X network location aware (to prevent interfaces from appearing in this menu see the FAQ).

VirtueDesktops is a virtual desktop manager for Apple’s Mac OS. It offers features, eye candy and configurable options that no other desktop manager on the mac has added yet. Sadly, VirtueDesktops is no longer under active development. It is based upon the work done by Rich Wareham on DesktopManager (specifically the CGSPrivate headers), which is an alternate open-source virtual desktop application. VirtueDesktops includes a small amount of Rich’s code from DesktopManager, which means that presently it is licensed under the GPL.

MarcoPolo brings location-aware computing to your portable Mac computer. It allows your computer to determine its location through gathering evidence from your environment (evidence sources), using fuzzy-logic and rule-based matching to make an educated guess (rules), and then performing arbitrary actions upon changing location (actions).

 

 

At first glance, Quicksilver is a launcher. When opened, it will create a catalog of applications and some frequently used folders and documents. Activate it, and you can search for and open anything in its catalog instantly. The search is adaptive, so Quicksilver will recognize which items you are searching for based on previous experience. It also supports abbreviations, so you can type entire words, or just fragments of each. When not in use, Quicksilver vanishes, waiting for the next time you summon it.

Been Busy…

So I have been pretty busy over the last few months.  Doing many different things and I have honestly had little time to devote to blogging.  This saddens me as I enjoyed it and enjoyed hearing your comments.  I will attempt to make more frequent posts to this blog and hopefully keep current content on it.

My next post will probably be a “Best Of…” post showing the best Free Mac software solutions.  I tend to be a cheap bastard and don’t pay for software.  That said, I don’t use illegal copies of software, I simply opt to use Open Source/ Freeware/ Shareware versions, even if only in their limited use forms.  While I have found several pieces of software I would really like to get full functionality out of, none have had functionality that was a necessity for me.

I really like finding cool Open Source software that allows me to create a customized build of the application for my machine and Operating System.  If you know of any let me know!!!

Well… stay tuned for my “Best Of…” posting!

Parallels Provides More Details on Desktop 2.5

Interested in running Windows inside your Mac, but not ready to leave the comfort of your Mac OS?  Give the new version of Parallels a shot.  There are many new features in this new version, not the least of which is the amazing Coherence mode.   Coherence mode allows you to get rid of the ugly Windows desktop inside an application window and run your Windows applications LIVE next to your Mac OS applications.

So if you should so choose you can run Microsoft Word 2004 right next to Microsoft Word 2007.  Pretty cool, huh?

The performance that Parallels provides in rather incredible.  They are also looking to do integrate 3-D graphics acceleration support in the near future.  Check out the new beta today and give Windows half-a-chance to experience the world of running on a Mac.

NOTE:  To install Windows even in a Parallels virtuallized envrionment, you will have to have a valid Microsoft Windows license key.Parallels Provides More Details on Desktop 2.5 || The Mac Observer

Create & manage screenshots on OS X

Create & manage screenshots on OS X

Aurora – an iTunes and EyeTV Alarm Clock for Mac OS X

Aurora – an iTunes and EyeTV Alarm Clock for Mac OS X

http://www.embraceware.com/software/awaken/

Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts

Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts

Free, Open-Source software for OS X

Open Source Mac has a pretty extensive list of the best software available from the Open Source community.  I use a large majority of the listed software titles and love each and every one of them.  They have listed several that perform similar functions so a lot will come down to your preferences and how you need to use them.

I would highly recommend checking out their site to see if there is some functionality there that you have been wanting but couldn’t find elsewhere or just could not afford.

If you come across any questions with the software drop me a line here.  I would love to help you out with it.  I am self taught Mac guru, converting over in the late days of OS 9 and very early days of OS X.  I a very heavy user on the Mac platform and know quite a bit about the operating system and how to navigate its software.

I am also willing to answer any other Mac-related questions you might have.  If I can get enough responses I will begin to compile a website dedicate to it.

Open Source Mac – Free, Open-Source software for OS X

AppleJack – Tune-Up Utility for your Mac

A great troubleshooting utility and repair tool. This new tool called AppleJack will allow you to run some basic checks and do a bit cleanup on your machine without being logged in.

Discover Mac’s Safe Sleep’s secrets

Do you ever wonder what happened to that disk space that seems to have disappeared from your available space? Have you ever experienced your Mac not waking from sleep mode properly?

Since late 2005 all Mac laptops have shipped with Safe Sleep enabled. But don’t fret if your Mac is a bit older than that you can still enjoy the fruits of this cool unknown feature, but you will have to do a little command line dancing in the Terminal.

Utility applications for Mac OS X

Many people don’t realize but the Mac OS is self-healing, and will fix many of the problems you encounter automatically. The catch is, these functions are run via scripts that are scheduled inside the OS to execute in the very early morning hours, when most people are asleep. But, No Worries, you leave your desktop computer on all the time any, right? But does it go to sleep? If it does, then this maintenance will not get run. If you have a laptop, do you leave it open and plugged in, making sure it is not set to automatically go to sleep? Again, in sleep mode, these won’t get run.

Now, there are three separate scripts that get run, Monthly, Weekly and Daily. All three run at their respective times on the calendar. And just to negate what I previously said, the Daily scripts will run the next the machine is activated, and occassional the Weekly will too, if it missed its previously schedule execution. But the Montly scripts do not run automatically if missed.

The Monthly script does most of the major maintenance on the machine, ie Optimization (or Defragmenting for you Windows folks). So ironically, if you leave your machine running overnight for a few consecutive days, your machine quite possibly will begin to run a bit better. The scripts allow the machine to look at itself and move files into an orderly fashion so it knows how to find them more efficiently, saving you the time and headache of having to wait for it to do something. It will also perform checks on itself and do what it can to correct any problems that do not cause drastic changes to your system.

Now if you are like me with an Apple laptop, it is not always easy to remember to leave your computer up and running all night for a few nights. So there has been software developed that will allow you to force these utilities to run and clean up your machine. Titanium Software, a French group, has designed some of the best utilities I have found, and the best part… they are Freeware. They have released 3 separate utilities I use, Onyx is an all-in-wonder package giving you the functions to repair, modify system properties not available directly via OS X, and other cool and fun stuff. The second 2 are Maintenance and Deeper. Maintenance is just what it says, the maintenance tools from Onyx. So if that is all you want, then that is all you need. If you want access to just the customizations that Onyx offers, then Deeper is tool for you.

These are great tools and will likely give you better control of your system. You will need to be an adminstrator on the machine in order to run Onyx or Maintenance. So start giving your Mac a helping hand and not abusing it so much. Take care of it, and I promise it will take care of you.

Changes to the Mole’s categorization

Some new categories have been added to this blog. I have added the categories “Mac Tips and Tricks“, “Rumors” and “New Product“, these will both be primarily sub-headings under the Technology and “Apple Macintosh” category. I noticed over the last couple weeks that the focus of many of my posts have been Tech related and I felt that there needed to be more clarity of the content that I put in this category.

The new “Mac Tips and Tricks” category will be for the occasional new tidbit of advice and things I come across that I find useful and informational.  And hopefully worthwhile to you as well.

I hope the new organization will make it easier for you as readers to keep up with things, so if you have a comment, good or bad, please let me know. I would also welcome any constructive criticisms you may have in regards to the content, my theme, my posts, or anything in general about this site.

Thanks for visiting and please come back often and comment. I am always interested to hear others viewpoints.