It also has restore capabilities. The latest version supports smart folders and has had some significant performance improvements.

Download:here

If you are one of those folks who prefer speed over beauty, this app is for you. It installs as a Preference Pane in System Preferences and works great.

Download:here

AppDelete is a way to delete an application and all of it’s associated items. Just drag and drop an app and off you go.

I like that it puts all of the items into a folder and puts it in your Trash. That way, you can still take a look to be sure that it didn’t take anything it wasn’t supposed to take.

The developer of AppDelete got a hold of us and asked us to take a look at his program. I’m glad he did.

Here’s an easy way to measure (in pixels) the size of different objects on your screen. Rula is similar in principle to Free Ruler, but instead of bringing up an onscreen ruler, allows you to just draw a marquee right over the object/window you want to measure, telling you the height and width of the drawn marquee.

Download:here

rooSwitch Lite

Have you seen rooSwitch? That’s no “I made this app over the weekend” app. In case you haven’t already, take a glance and see just how sweet profile switching can be. Then take a glance at rooSwitch Lite, the newly available freeware version.

The goal of rooSwitch Lite is “to make it easy for you to create different profiles for each of the applications allowed in the Lite version. You then switch amongst the profiles to activate the data you wish to use. It’s like a multi-user environment for just one application.”

The video clips on the rooSwitch homepage provide a great introduction for those new to the concept of switching, and the video on the Lite page will give you a feel for how Lite differs from its older brother.

Beautiful is the word for these apps, in both look and feel. If you value productivity, give rooSwitch Lite a try. You may just find yourself falling in love.

Download:here

Sidenote is a multi-document application, which means that you can create multiple notes wich will be displayed in this single drawer. A note can handle both text and pictures via drag&drop or using the clipboard. Also, notes are automaticaly saved when you quit the application or logout so saving your notes is not a necessity.

It’s kind of like “Stickies”, but always available and all in one place.

The neat thing about this app is that it hides just off the side of your screen. So, when you need to put someting in the drawer, just move your mouse to the side of the screen and the drawer will slide out. Quick and easy.

Schoolhouse is a very, very, very nice way to organize your school assignments. And with all the new college students buying Macs for the upcoming year, this is perfectly timed.

Some of the features:

• Classcasts- publish your assignments to the web automatically
• Automatic graphing of your grades
• GPA & Finals calculator (You can also use this GPA Calculator
• A Great GUI

Show this app to your parents and get them to buy you a new Mac.

Download:here

Busy Bee

Here’s a funny one. Want to give others the impression that you’re working harder than you really are? Try this application. (To fool onlookers, the app is given the generic codename “Business 2.0″, but it’s really called Busy Bee, currently version 3.6). This one produces a progress bar that shows up on your screen and runs for as you long as you set it, making it seem that you are running some important process. You also set the progress bar’s Window Title, Process Name, Wait Message, etc. to customize your productivity facade.

Download:here

Spotlaser

Spotlaser is a very nice app that takes the power of Spotlight to new levels. When run, it will let you input all kinds of information to make your searches much more specific.

Plus, the icon and app look really good.

Download:here

YEP

Kip is a nice application for those of you who like to stay organized. It is basically iPhoto, but for your documents. It has built in scanning so you can scan your receipts into the program. Given, iPhoto could do this too, but Kip beats iPhoto in the tagging abilities. (Why does iPhoto make it so hard to tag photos without the help of good freeware like Keyword Assistant?)

So get ready for tax season by scanning in all your receipts.

Kip looks like a great program. So good that it looks like they’ll be charging for it after a while. But for now it is free so get it while the getting is good. (Note to developers, please don’t force an upgrade to the paid version when it is released. That would totally take back the good will shown by offering a free version first. )

WriteRoom is a simple app that allows writers to write without any distractions or complexities. After opening it and maximizing the window, you’ll be left with a black screen and a green cursor. You won’t find any distractions such as font or color selectors, menus, options, etc. It’s just a blank canvas for you to do your finest writing.

Might also be nice for brainstorming.

(Update: This application is no longer freeware.)

Download:here

Burn

We are all looking for ways to improve our personal finance habits. For me, there is nothing better to do that than to look over a past month and see exactly what I have been spending my money on. Burn is a great freeware app for doing exactly that.

Burn allows you to list your expenses and mark them with a date and category. You can track everything from mortgage and auto loan payments to everytime you drop the two dollars on the exceptional new fish tacos at Del Taco.

Another good use for this app is to track your business expenses to report at the end of each month.

Download:here

Journler is among the best examples of the variety and depth of quality freeware available for Mac OS X. It’s also a great example of what generous Mac developers give the community through their freeware applications.

Like MacJournal, Journler is a journal/diary application. You might use this to record your day to day ramblings, class notes, work plans, etc. You can keep multiple journals, and journals can be organized into folders. Your journal entries can by styled with any font or color, and you can import music, movies, and photos from iLife. At the press of a button you can export an entry to iWeb or send it by Mail. This is a fantastic app for tracking your life.

Download:here

MenuShade

MenuShade simply dims out the menu bar when it’s not in use. It’s sort of like hiding the Dock; it might help you stay focused on the window you have open and stay on task.

Download:here

Tapdex

I’m quite religious at keeping my address book up to date. I think I’m one of the few people who appreciate when friend, enemies and acquaintances send you those ” I have a new phone number/email/whatever.” I like the info when I need it.

Because I stay on top of my address book, I use it a lot. That is why I really, really, really like TapDex.

Tapdex is brought up with a hotkey that you decide. You can type the person that you are looking for and it will find it in your address book. The reason I like this more than the address book widget is because when it finds the one person you’re looking for, the window will resize to show all the info. Clicking on an email address will open a new message. Clicking on the address or phone number will make it large text so you can see it from across the room.

Download:here

Plaxo Toolbar for Mac.

Plaxo is an online service that synchronizes your address books. It can synchronize your Palm, Yahoo address book, Microsoft Outlook & Outlook Express, and now the Mac OS X Address Book. With the Plaxo toolbar installed on your Mac, all of your address books stay synchronized across all of your computers. You can also access your address book through the Plaxo website. Plaxo can even email people in your address book and ask them to confirm that their contact info is up to date.

Download:here

MailTags

Tags are the talk of the web these days — tags on bookmarks, tags on photos, and keywords in iPhoto. MailTags brings tagging to Mail.app. Now you can tag each message in Mail with keywords of your choice and organize them however you want. MailTags is completely integrated with Spotlight — when you search for keyword tags, you’ll find your messages.

Download:here

Google Calendar

Gcal is for Google Calendar. Instead of having to open a browser window, simply open Gcal and you’re already there. This is nice for people that want to have their calendar open in a separate application

Download:here

Sidenote

Sidenote is a multi-document application, which means that you can create multiple notes wich will be displayed in this single drawer. A note can handle both text and pictures via drag&drop or using the clipboard. Also, notes are automaticaly saved when you quit the application or logout so saving your notes is not a necessity.

It’s kind of like “Stickies”, but always available and all in one place.

The neat thing about this app is that it hides just off the side of your screen. So, when you need to put someting in the drawer, just move your mouse to the side of the screen and the drawer will slide out. Quick and easy.

Download:here

Once installed, AppleJack is accessible from the Single-User Mode command prompt. (Hold down Apple-S while booting.) AppleJack can repair your startup volume, repair permissions, cleanup cache files, and validate preference files. It has a simple text menu so you don’t have to remember commands.

Also see the Macfixit article on AppleJack and read the cautions.

This could be a life saver in case of trouble.

Download:here

As you would expect, this is quite a useful tool.

I think that most Mac owners use Stuffit Expander for rar archives, but UnRarX has helped me when Stuffit Expander couldn’t do the job.

Next time you you can’t open up a rar archive, remember this post and come on back for UnRarX. (Or download it now and save yourself the trouble.)

Download:here

CLIX

Here is another UNIX utility, but this one is also for people that thought Terminal stuff wasn’t for them. CLIX (Command Line Interface for Mac OS X) is a GUI front end for UNIX commands. It comes with over 1000 commands so you can perform many tasks that are only available through the Terminal. For example, you can delete the browser history of all your browsers with just one command.

Advanced users can modify or write their own commands and save them as libraries of commands. Then just double click a task to run it.

Download:here

Do you have a wireless network and want to know who is connected? Do a ping scan on the whole subnet and find out if you have any visitors. Cannot connect to your MySQL database? Do a TCP SYN scan on port 3306 and see if the port is open.

This admittedly is not for everyone, but I use it regularly and you may find it useful too.

Download:here

Open Terminal Here

If you use Terminal and the UNIX command line often, this may come in handy. Open Terminal Here resides in the header of your Finder window, as seen below. When you click it, it opens a Terminal window for you and takes you directly to the location where you were working — helpful if you’ve navigated through your hard drive and then need to run a Terminal command there. This is a tiny app with a specific purpose from one of my favorite Mac developers.

Download:here

Mac OS X does periodic tasks to maintain itself. They are set to happen daily, weekly, and monthly. However, if you have your iBook or Powerbook asleep each night like I do, there is a good chance that these tasks have been missed. PseudoAnacron will help you be sure that Mac OS X performs these tasks.

PsuedoAnacron will be added as a login item. Each time your computer starts up, the program will check to see if there were any tasks that were missed, perform them, and then quit.

If you do not restart your computer often, you can also check out Anacron, which checks on startup and every hour. However, I prefer PseudoAnacron so I don’t have the service continuously running in the background.

SpoofMac lets you change (spoof) your Apple computer MAC address. This could be useful for network security testing. Also, I have been told that some schools throttle bandwidth by MAC address. This should enable you to get around that. (Don’t break any laws, but school rules are fun to break.)

This can also be done using Terminal, but SpoofMac makes it much easier.

Download:here

Platypus

Here’s one for the more tech-savvy user or developer:

Platypus creates a GUI app from a UNIX (Terminal) script. For instance, you may have an Applescript, Ruby, PHP, or Perl script that you occasionally run in Terminal. Platypus helps you put a “wrapper” around it so that it will run in the Dock, let you drag documents to it, and look like a regular app.

Download:here

This is great. Now I can run my favorite screensaver all the time.

Download:here

ToDo is a small application to manage categorized to do lists. Each to do item can be linked with a file on your computer, a URL, such as the address of a website, or a contact from your address book. The linked item can be opened directly from the ToDo window. ToDo items can also include notes, priorities and deadlines, which can be set as reminders in iCal.

It comes pre-configured to work with Google, Yahoo, Mac OS X Hints and several others, but you can add more.

Download:here

On FreeMacPhoto I wrote about turning your panoramas into planets and now this app will let you change your whole photo collection into a city. The screenshot below shows my city, Stukville.

Photopolis is a new way to experience your photo collection. Photopolis extracts the date you took your photo. Then it assembles the photos that were taken in a week as a house. Out of 4 houses, a month is created and so on. The result is a checker-board arrengement of houses in a city. The straight streets represent years, the cross streets months. Because of this arrangement you can for example view your Christmas photos of all the years by walking along the December street.

Download:here

Download:here

Wraparound

Wraparound liberates your mouse cursor. When the cursor reaches the edge of the screen, it can now wrap around to the other side and keep going. It can work horizontally, vertically, or both. Wraparound can also ignore the corners so Expos will continue to work.

You can also view what your friends have recently listened to, view each other is profiles, and send messages between each other.

Download:here

Klondike Forever is a great solitaire application with some very nice features. It may be the best Solitaire app for the Mac. (No offense to Solitaire XL. I love that clean look too.)

There are many types of Solitaire, but Klondike is the most popular by far. I love this version because it makes it fast to play the game. Instead of dragging the card to where it needs to go, just click it and it will fly to its place. Also, whenever a card is ready to be stacked in the four ace piles, it will fly up on its own. (As a bonus, it would not fly up until it is used completely in the bottom. Thats smart.)

Oh, you all know how to play Klondike, just go give it a try. You all be surprised how nice its done. (And it can go full screen.)

(If you want to try 100 other types of solitaire, try the developers Solitaire Forever.)

Download:here