Sunflower

Together 4Front and Subband bring you OSS 3D for OS X. OSS 3D utilizes state of art DSP technology allowing addition of bass spatialization, 3D surround and various other real-time enhancements of the sound played through your system.

OSS 3D provides 3d sound expansions similar to QSound and Spatializer, with additional functionality like Speaker Resonance Correction, Virtual Subwoofer, Brainwave inductance, High Frequency Restoration, Center channel control, and more. Also included a studio quality N-band equalizer with built-in peak limiter to replace default one. OSS 3D greatly improves audio quality in movies and music.

Want to record sound snippets from your favorite DVD movie, digitize your old record collection, record streaming audio from the Internet, or even use your iPod as a personal Dictaphone? WireTap Pro is your solution.

WireTap Pro can save your digital recordings in the popular .mp3, AAC, QuickTime, and AIFF file formats, saving them to your hard drive for later processing/listening. This makes it the perfect tool for recording your own Podcasts. WireTap Pro can also save your recordings directly into iTunes, or onto your iPod or other iTunes-compatible .mp3 player. You have total control over the file format, compression, and quality of your recordings.

Features: gapless playback, smart shuffle, tagging (APE 1.0/2.0, Vorbis comments/FLAC tags, ID3 1.0/1.1/2.3+), seeking.

Songbird is an open source jukebox and media player that “promises to be the Firefox of media players.” Being a jukebox puts it squarely in competition with iTunes, but Songbird offers some unique features that make it worth a look even for hardcore Mac users. (It also runs on other platforms.)

The interface will remind you of iTunes and it’s easy enough to navigate. It can play MP3 and AAC files, but also Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, and WMA. (Of course, it can’t play music purchased from the iTunes Music Store.) It’s built on the same platform as Firefox and will eventually, likewise, offer extensions so you can customize it as much as Firefox. Songbird includes a built-in web browser, which is actually better than you might think. If you browse to a web page that has a podcast or music linked to it, Songbird automatically finds these files and offers to add them to your library.

Songbird hasn’t even reached version 1.0, but it’s already shaping up to be something great and has lots of cool features. I’m excited to see where it goes.

UPDATE: Though I couldn’t get it to work at first go, Jonas wrote to tell me that Songbird can indeed play DRM’ed songs from the iTunes Music Store via the Quicktime plugin.

Download : here

This is useful in a few ways. For instance, maybe you are going to upload a video to Youtube and you want to be sure your site gets credit. Teave it in there on the bottom of the video. Or maybe you are doing home videos of grandpa and he just slurs too much for people to understand. You can type the text out to keep up as he speaks.

Download:here

QuickTunes

Gigavox Media produces my favorite podcasts. They always seem to find great lectures and interviews with technology experts. The audio production is also very professional.

A few days ago they released an application for compressing, normalizing, and limiting an audio file. For example, if you’ve recorded a podcast with Audacity and your voice is much louder than the person you interviewed, simply drag the audio file onto The Levelator and it will automatically be adjusted and normalized.

“Soundflower is a virtual audio device that provides aneasy and simple way for Max/MSP and other applications to send and receive audio to and from any other application. Running with very low latency and cpu usage, Soundflower allows each client application to use its usual buffer size.

Soundflowerbed is an application that resides in the menu bar allowing you to tap into Soundflower channels and route them to an audio device. For more information, refer to the Soundflowerbed section below.”

Download:here

You probably already known that Mac OS X can speak. You can turn on speech in the System Preferences and have it speak everything to you (great for the visually impaired.)

You can also open up the Terminal and type say “Think Different” and it will speak whatever you type. CakeHole is a GUI version of the “say” command. It will speak aloud the words you enter and you can even save the speech to a AIFF file.

Download:here

iRed Lite

iRed Lite lets you use your Apple Remote to control other applications on your Mac.This remote will work with iTunes, Quicktime, etc, out of the box, but the nice thing about iRed Lite is that there is a nice development area for you to add functionality to other apps as well.

Download:here

TotalTunes Control

Take control of iTunes with TotalTunes Control. Think of TotalTunes as a widget/player for iTunes that provides users with a smaller, less intrusive playback center. TotalTunes Control allows users to control playlists, iTunes volume, and much more.

The idea is that Goombah will turn you on to music that you may otherwise not have heard of by showing you what people with similar taste in tunes are listening to.

Download:here

Canto Pod

Canto Pod is a widget for OSX that allows you to download lyrics to your favorite music for viewing at your leisure. So the next time you are wondering to yourself what your favorite mushmouthed rock star is wailing — you’ve got it right there at your disposal.

One of the cooler features in Canto Pod is the music spy. Canto Pod will actually spit out the lyrics to whatever song you happen to be listening to at the time - you don’t even have to do a search or query. Their library is also impressively extensive and grows every day. If you have an iPod, this one is a keeper.

Download:here

Remote Say will allow you to speak from one Mac to another. You just need to have the program playing on both Macs, choose the receiving app from the drop down list, then type and hit return. The receiving Mac will “say” whatever you type.

It’s just a small app, but it’s fun to use.

Download:here

Burn (Disk)

Not to be confused with the personal finance application, this app burns disks — almost any kind. You can burn Mac, Joliet, Mac+PC, or DVD+PC data disks; audio or MP3 audio disks; and VCD, SVCD, DVD, or DIVX video disks. You can also copy disks.

Download:here

LiquidCD

LiquidCD makes it easy to burn almost any kind of CD or DVD. Not that this functionality isn’t mostly native to Mac OS X, but LiquidCD puts it right at your fingertips. You can burn an audio, MP3, or picture CD, burn an .iso, .dmg, .cue/bin, or .toast image, or even duplicate a DVD.

This freeware really comes in handy when you want to burn a music or audio file to a disk quickly. For example, I download college lectures from the internet. Rather than copying it to iTunes, making a playlist with the file, burning it to a cd to listen to in my truck, and then deleting the file back out of iTunes, it’s much easier to just drop it in LiquidCD and burn it there. It’s also nice for audiobooks that don’t really need to be in the iTunes library because you’ll never listen to them again.

Download:here

The interface is incredibly simple. It has perfect integration with iTunes. (In fact, dragging an image over to the turn tables looks like you are loading a record.) You’ll see easy to understand controls. Also, if you press the button that reads “RPM”, you’ll be instructed to beat the tempo of each tune and then you can sync them automatically.

Great software!

Download:here

PandoraMan is a “small cocoa app to run the Pandora mini player using WebKit. Created so you can quit Safari/Camino/etc without killing your music stream.” As you listen to the tunes, you can click on the cover art and “train” the service on the music that you like. You can also get the link to iTunes or Amazon.

So fire up Pandoraman, create a few stations for yourself by naming an artist that you like, and you will certainly find some great music. I have a fairly large music collection in iTunes, but after a while I get tired of my stuff and want to hear something new. This app makes it so convenient.

Download:here

DeKstasy

DeKstasy is, quite possibly, the most amazing DJ software I’ve used on my Mac. But, just like the rest of the software you find here, it is still free.

I’m quite into music, but not a serious DJ by any means. As I read thru the DeKstasy site, I didn’t understand a lot of what they were saying. But, I was very happy to see that the software is completely useable for someone who just likes to be hands on with the way their music is played.

The feature most impressive is the “true automatic beat finding, and powerful tools to ensure perfect beat accuracy.” It does an incredible job at matching beats.

If you want super simple, you can try out DrDJ. But if you want to have some serious fun with your music…and your parties, try DeKstasy.

Download:here

Download and watch all the best internet TV shows and videos in one powerful application. New channels arrive daily in the built-in Channel Guide.

Stop squinting at tedious web videos-- sit back and watch big, high resolution videos one after another. It's so easy to use that you'll be watching interesting videos in moments.

Features: subscribe to video RSS feeds (including podcasts, video blogs, and BitTorrent feeds), watch fullscreen, share with friends.

DivX Doctor II updates DivX .avi videos to 3ivx QuickTime (.mov) videos. After the conversion you will be able to play the video smoothly, and the audio glitches inherent in the AVI format will be fixed. The conversion is fast.

After which you can burn as a DVD playable on any DVD player.

ted has built in support to download torrents for the newest episodes from 24, Lost, The Simpsons, South Park and many more!

Once ted finds a torrent it will automaticaly start the downloading in your favourite torrent client..

VCD Builder

The video can then either be displayed in real time on a second monitor (for VJs) and applied effects can then be altered in real time, or you can render your video out in any format QuickTime can handle.

Also note that all software from Stone Design is offered with free upgrades for life. I.e. you buy your software once and you get ALL future upgrades for free.

Download:here

SmallDVD

If you don’t mind being on the cutting edge, here’s a brand new application that developer Richard Hughes let us know about. SmallDVD is a very simple DVD authoring application — actually a front end to the Unix application dvdauthor. You can select a menu background and font types and sizes. Then select the MPEG-2 videos you want to author and hit Create. SmallDVD creates an ISO image that you can easily burn to DVD.

SmallDVD also requires a free application call iMagine Photo.

Download:here

BitRocket

BitRocket “is a Native (and open source) BitTorrent client for Mac OS X. At the heart of it’s core resides the powerful libtorrent BitTorrent library. BitRocket is aimed to be a good alternative to other Mac OS BitTorrent clients. (Those clients being Transmission and Azureus.)

This client has some great features including RSS support and an integrated search client.

(PS, If you aren’t familiar with “torrents” take a look at this lens. You’ll be glad you did.)

Download:here

LiquidCD

LiquidCD makes it easy to burn almost any kind of CD or DVD. Not that this functionality isn’t mostly native to Mac OS X, but LiquidCD puts it right at your fingertips. You can burn an audio, MP3, or picture CD, burn an .iso, .dmg, .cue/bin, or .toast image, or even duplicate a DVD.

This freeware really comes in handy when you want to burn a music or audio file to a disk quickly. For example, I download college lectures from the internet. Rather than copying it to iTunes, making a playlist with the file, burning it to a cd to listen to in my truck, and then deleting the file back out of iTunes, it’s much easier to just drop it in LiquidCD and burn it there. It’s also nice for audiobooks that don’t really need to be in the iTunes library because you’ll never listen to them again.

Download:here

Tiffany Screens

Tiffany Screens is a presentation tool, able to capture the content of the presenter’s screen and send it to multiple other computer screens at the same time. Any computer can seamlessly become the presenting computer, no matter if connected wirelessly or through an Ethernet cable.
The self-contained solution does neither require nor use a server. It automatically detects all computers on a local network, running the software and those computers can watch the presentation projected onto their screens. Best of all, with a single button click, any computer can switch from watching into presenting mode.

If that icon looks Windows-like to you, it’s because this baby can be used on Mac or Windows. This is good for businesses, computer labs and schools.

Download:here

iRed Lite

As more and more people receive their fancy new Intel Macs, there are bound to be more great freeware apps coming out. iRed Lite is a great example of this.

iRed Lite lets you use your Apple Remote to control other applications on your Mac. It doesn’t replace Front Row, but you can toggle back and forth between the two applications by holding down the Menu button.

Granted, this remote will work with iTunes, Quicktime, etc, out of the box, but the nice thing about this iRed Lite is that there is a nice development area for you to add functionality to other apps as well. I can’t wait to see what people come up with!!

Download:here

Vidi

Latin for “I saw”, Vidi is a fitting name for an application that records video. It’s perfect for recording TV shows through a video capture device because it’s more lightweight than iMovie, and it can be scheduled to record at a certain time, in the background.

It will work with any Firewire capture device, but if you use it with a Formac device, you can also use Vidi to change the channel, adjust video settings, and in some cases record FM radio.

Download:here

Poisoned

Poisoned could possibly be the daddy of all P2P software on the Mac.There are alot of really neat options and the interface is great. Also, rather then just connecting to one network, it connects to several.

From the project’s site:

Poisoned connects to the FastTrack network (Kazaa, Grokster, iMesh), the Gnutella network (Limewire, Acquisition), and OpenFT. This is all made possible by something called the giFT daemon (http://gift.sf.net), the same people behind the OpenFT network.

Download:here

1Passwd stores all your information within the OS X Keychain, allowing you to store all your confidential information like passwords, credit card numbers and other sensitive data in ONE place and access it in ONE click.

Gerald Combs, the creator of Ethereal®, has initiated the Wireshark network protocol analyzer project, a successor to Ethereal®.

It is the continuation of a project that started in 1998. Hundreds of developers around the world have contributed to it, and it it still under active development.

Download:here

IPSecuritas is an application which uses software built into Mac OS X to connect to IPSec-based Virtual Private Networks.

Wimp is a great little program that that emails you your computers current ip address whenever it changes.

Useful for:

• Security - If your computer gets stolen, it might help you get it back.

• Remote control - To use programs like "Chicken of the VNC" to control your computer, you need to know your ip address. If you don't have a fixed ip address, Wimp is a big help.

The application is really simple to use and can be protected with a password for extra security.

"Xyzzy is a pronounceable password generator. It is useful for network or server administrators that find themselves creating new user accounts on a regular basis and need to come up with passwords for them.

The reasons to use a pronounceable password generator such as xyzzy are simply because passwords based on dictionary words are easy to crack by brute force methods, and passwords which are hard to remember usually need to be written down which makes them vulnerable to being found by prying eyes."

Download:here

SecretBook

SecretBook is an encrypted personal information database for Mac OS X. It allows you to easily and safely store all sorts of little bits of information like passwords, credit card numbers, pin numbers and software licenses.

Download:here

KeePassX

Like the Keychain app that comes with every Mac, KeePassX is a security application for storing passwords and other private notes. You can save usernames, passwords, URLs, attachments, and comments all in one secure database. You set the master password for the database and it’s encrypted with AES or Twofish using a 256 bit key.

Download:here

Lithium is a very powerful app for monitoring servers and just about everything else. This app won’t be for everyone, but for those of yoho u wneed something like this you’ll LOVE it.

I saw this application in a demonstration at Macworld. I was so impressed with it and I was really happy to see that they offer a “lite” version that only limits the number of devices you can monitor. But if you have a small network in your house or you’ve used our tutorials to set up a Mac mini as a server then this will work just fine. It does take a bit of a set up, but they offer videos for setting it up on Mac OS X.

From the developer’s site:

LITHIUM Network Monitoring Platform is an integrated and feature rich network, server and appliance monitoring and management platform. Designed to provide an end-to-end solution, Lithium includes automated device monitoring, out-of-the-box support for SNMP and an integrated trouble-ticket case management system.
The platform is built around a scalable, modular architecture that incorporates a Unix-based server-side component (Core) to perform automated device monitoring, data collection, analysis and storage and to manage the multi-user case management system. Core is available for Mac OS X (Client/Server) and Linux (Debian, Fedora, RHEL and CentOS).

Windows and Mac OS X clients (Console) provide the user with a graphically rich and interactive monitoring and management console that delivers integration and efficient work-flow beyond the capabilities of web-based applications alone. A web-based interface (Web) delivers an anywhere, anytime, portal to view all network monitoring data without the need for client applications from any web-enabled device.

AppKiDo

"AppKiDo is a free reference tool for Cocoa Objective-C programmers. The goal of AppKiDo is to help you find what you want in the Cocoa API documentation. It does this by parsing the header files and the HTML doc files that were installed with your Developer Tools, and presenting the results in a form that is easy to navigate."

Download:here

• Drag and drop installation (no installer or uninstaller necessary)
• Includes a precompiled Snort 2.3.3 binary for Mac OS X
• Supports all major Snort preprocessor and output plugins
• Supports all Snort rule sets, and makes it easy to add additional rule sets
• Supports configuring all current Snort rule variables
• Supports direct logging to MySQL databases
• Supports ODBC database logging (for PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server, and more)
• Supports auto-blocking
• Can update Snort rules over the network
• Can set up Snort to run at system startup
• Includes a helper application, LetterStick, which can:
• Provide real-time security alert pop-up windows
• E-Mail alerts as they are received
• Speak the alert text, or play a sound effect, when an alert is received
• Use Terminal to view the Snort logs
• Supports modem and broadband network connections
• Disk-volume-format-agnostic (does not require HFS+ to run)
• Available in English, German, and French (in the same package)
• And more...

The author is not affiliated with the Snort development team. More information about Snort, including additional downloads and source code, is available online at http://www.snort.org/

HenWen and LetterStick are licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2. Source code is available via CVS on HenWen's SourceForge project page.

• Restored compatibility with Mac OS X 10.2.x.
• Fixed a problem which made it impossible to edit variables and rules under Mac OS X 10.4.x.
• The "Launch Snort as a startup item" menu item works again under Mac OS X 10.4.x.

GameRanger provides a completely customized Macintosh-friendly environment for players to meet worthy opponents, organize and play games, discuss strategies, and exchange tricks and ideas.

Persistent player accounts, profiles, chat rooms, game rooms, audio voice chat, paging, server lists and powerful filtering are just a handful of the features GameRanger offers.

The latest snapshot is based on 1.3.3.2. Latest Ghostscript is based on AFPL GS 8.54.

Comments:

Downloads

BlenderBlender 2.42a is the latest release from the Blender Foundation.

It is both stable and powerful enough to be used for serious, high-end animation work. Many of its capabilities rival those found in commercial programs. Some of the highlights include subdivision surface based modelling tools, skeleton based animation, and a graphical language for designing procedural textures and materials.

Comments:

Download:link

Wings 3D

Quesa supports both retained and immediate mode rendering, an extensible file format, plug-in renderers, a wide range of high level geometries, hierarchical models, and a consistent and object-orientated API.

Quesa acts as a scene-graph while using OpenGL for rendering. In principle it could be adapted to use a different low-level rendering engine such as Direct 3D.

Comments:

Scaletron! the scaling calculator, besides performing the scaling calculations you need, gives you this bullet-list of crunchy goodness:

• Cool OS X Aqua interface!
• Written in AppleScript Studio!
• Source code available as an open source licensed Xcode project!
• Cool gigantic 128x128 pixel icon!
• Absolutely 100% FREE! No guilt or money required.

• Optionally calculates scaled image resolution!
• New Preferences menu, allows you to work the way you want!
• Optionally remembers window position between launches!
• Cool NEW gigantic 128 x 128 pixel icon!
• All these great new features and still absolutely FREE!

Scaletron! is simple to operate, yet provides several options as to which parameters you want to enter and calculate such as:

• Enter an original width and a new width to get the scaling percentage.
• Enter an original width and a percentage to obtain the new width.
• Enter an original width and height and a new width and get the scaling percentage and the new height.
• Determine the effective resolution of your images after enlargement or reduction.

Comments:

Download:here

Cenon is a graphical tool built on a modular graphical core aimed at maximum extensibility.

The default installation includes support for Desktop Publishing and Vector Graphics conversion.

Sirds lets you create Single Image Random Dot Stereogram (SIRDS) and Single Image Stereogram (SIS) images from depth map images and pattern images.

• Generate "wall-eyed" or "cross-eyed" SIRDS or SIS
• Customizable dimensions (resolution, observer distance, maximum depth, and eye separation)
• Hidden-surface removal
• Center to both sides method to minimize the distortion
• Oversampling to give smooth depth levels
• Stereogram viewing guide marks
• Random Dot pattern generator
• Supported depth map and pattern image file types: PNG, TIFF, JPEG, BMP, GIF, PICT, etc.
• AppleScript scripting

Bizarre looking screensaver of a creepy looking character that jabbers in tune to any sound.
Play iTunes and fire it up and it becomes a wierd looking visualizer "guy" belting out your top hits.
Talk to your mac, and his mouth moves with you.

Very creepy, and very funny too.

Vine Server is a full featured VNC server for Mac OS X providing remote access to the GUI, keyboard and mouse using Vine Viewer or any other VNC client. Vine Server offers a rich and unique feature set among Mac OS X VNC servers including:

• Flexible port assignment for multiple VNC servers on a single computer
• System servers that run independently of user accounts
• Outstanding clipboard sharing; Exchange of rich text, images, files and applications when used with Vine Viewer

• Fixed critical bug in processes section
• Fixed bug with battery section

BitTorrent promotes the accessibility of data on the Internet by allowing anyone to share information with a large audience. For more information, take a look at the pretty images over at BitTorrent.com.

Features

• Built on BitTorrent 4.2
• Remembers recent downloads and where you’ve saved them to, making resumes quick and easy
• Auto-stop torrents when they’ve seeded a set amount
• Set an upload rate for torrents that start seeding

• User interface for torrent generation allows you to specify torrent comments
• User interface for starting a torrent tracker on your Mac
• Most BitTorrent options are fully customizable
• Supports AppleScript

Cashbox is a personal finance applicaiton for Mac OS X.

Cashbox was designed from day one to be a quick and simple to use application for managing personal finances. As it has evolved, it has become more feature packed while keeping with the original goal of simplicity. Today Cashbox's robust feature set includes:

• QIF Cashbox imports files in the Quicken Interchange Format so you can easily import information obtained from online bank accounts or other sources.
• Printing Need your account information on paper? You asked for it, you got it!
• Searching You can easily find transactions by searching for them.
• Transfers Cashbox keeps track of transfers between two accounts for you.
• Reports Graphical reports can be generated in many different ways so you can track where your money comes from and where it goes.
• Reconciling Save time with Cashbox's built in reconciling system.
• Localization English, French, German, Italian. Your language could be next!

Buddi is a personal finance and budgeting program, aimed at those who have little or no financial background. In making this software, I have attempted to make things as simple as possible, while still retaining enough functions to satisfy most home users.

Buddi is available for free: you can download it for free, with no disabled features and no time limit. If you like it, and feel that it is useful, I would greatly appreciate a small donation via the link at the bottom of the page.

Buddi will run on almost any computer which has a Java virtual machine installed. This can include Windows, Macintosh OS X, Linux, and many other operating systems. One thing to note is that you must have Java 1.5 or later installed. If you are running on Macintosh OS X 10.4 (Tiger), and you do not already have it installed, . If you are running on a different operating system, like Windows, please consult the help files. If you need to download a copy of the Java VM,

Buddi is currently available in English, Spanish, French, German, Norwegian, and Dutch. If you are interested in translating to another language, feel free to do so! I would greatly appreciate it if you also sent me the translated file once you are finished.

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).

MenuMeters comes without warranty or support. That said, if it causes you problems I'd like to hear about it so that I may be able to track down the bug. Even better, since this is open source, you can fix the bug yourself. Patches cheerfully accepted.

Download:Here

Camino

The Camino Project has worked to create a browser that is as functional and elegant as the computers it runs on. The Camino web browser is powerful, secure, and ready to meet the needs of all users while remaining simple and elegant in its design.

Camino combines the awesome visual and behavioral experience that has been central to the Macintosh philosophy with the powerful web-browsing capabilities of the Gecko rendering engine. Built and tested by thousands of volunteers, Mozilla’s Gecko brings cutting-edge innovations and capabilities to users in a standards-friendly and socially responsible form.

That browser is Camino. Camino makes your web experience more productive, more efficient, more secure, and more fun. It looks and feels like a Mac OS X application should, because it was designed exclusively for Mac OS X and the high standards set by Mac users. You’ll see the entire internet the way it was intended. Camino is the browser that gets out of your way, and that means Camino users need not worry about things they shouldn’t have to.

VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server

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.

Download:Here

My original purpose for GIMPshop was to make the Gimp accessible to the many Adobe Photoshop users out there. I hope I’ve done that. And maybe along the way, I can convert a Photoshop pirate into a Gimp user.

If you’ve never used Photoshop before, you may not appreciate my GIMPshop hack. What I’ve done is renamed and reorganized GIMP’s tools, options, windows, and menus to closely resemble Adobe Photoshop’s menu structure and naming conventions. Many of the menu options and even whole menus were recreated to faithfully reproduce a Photoshop-like experience. After running my GIMPshop hack, you’ll find that Photoshop and the GIMP are strikingly similar.

Longtime Photoshop users should feel very comfortable using GIMPshop.

GIMPshop is by no means a 1-to-1 copy of Photoshop and you may find some menu items that are not in perfect order. But GIMPshop’s pretty close, and I think it does the job. I’m getting lots of use out of it and I hope you do too.

Please post any glaring omissions or menu change suggestions in the comments. Consider this release as version .1 beta

Cabos is Gnutella file sharing program based on LimeWire and Acquisition. It is free software. No spyware. No adware. Guaranteed.

Features:

• Free for personal use.
• Sophisticated streaming technology delivers the data to you as you need it.
• Imagery and 3D data depict the entire earth - Terabytes of aerial and satellite imagery depict cities around the world in high-resolution detail.
• Local search lets you search for restaurants, hotels, and even driving directions. Results show in your 3D earth view. Easy to layer multiple searches, save results to folders, and share with others.
• Layers show parks, schools, hospitals, airports, shopping, and more.
• KML – data exchange format lets you share useful annotations and view thousands of data points created by Google Earth users.

Use it for:

• Planning a trip
• Getting driving directions
• Finding a house or apartment
• Finding a local business
• Exploring the world

OmniDictionary is a Mac OS X client for network dictionary servers. It's pretty straightforward - type a word into the entry field, hit return, and the definition is displayed. If the dictionary server supports multiple dictionaries, you can select your desired dictionary from the dictionary popup to limit queries to that specific dictionary, or you can query all the dictionaries.

(Another similar option (and my favorite) is MainMenu. I love that it sits up in my menu bar ready to answer to my commands.

Download:here

If you are going to take the time to run a site you’ll want to be sure it all gets kept up nicely. You’ve got to watch out for broken links and moved pages. Integrity will help you out. Feed it your home page address (url) and Integrity will follow all of your internal links to find your pages, checking the server response code for all internal and external links found.

So take some time and check out your site. Just be ready in case you have some site-maintenance work ahead of you.

Ebbinghaus

Ebbinghaus is a well done application that helps you learn things. Once you input a list, the application will quiz you with the questions and answers.

Like freeware apps Genius and ProVoc, Ebbinghaus will teach you with repetition. But Ebbinghaus has a great color coding feature that will keep track of your progress. You also have the ability to input photos. This would be great for memorizing things like country flags. When you install the app there is an example list to see if you can name some past Apple products.

And once you have your lists in you can share them with others or export them to your iPod. Nice.

Download:here

Smell-O-Mints is a pretty little periodic table of the elements, and is a simple but well-organized app. A pulldown menu lets you easily view the table according to state, radioactivity, metal vs. nonmetal nature, etc. There is also a search feature to find elements and a link to Wikipedia to learn more about them. Click on any element to view more information, including weight, radioactive properties, and atomic number. Science is fun.

For a long time I wanted to have a way to keep to-do lists for myself. I took a look at all the online options and all the applications available for download. I just had a hard time finding one that I liked. This changed when I found the Ta-da List Widget. And ironically, it is a mix of online and local.

Tadalist.com is a free service from the good folks at 37Signals. When I first checked out the service, I thought it was nice but kind of a pain to have to do all dealings thru the browser. When I found the widget I was sold.

First you’ll have to make a free account withTadalist.com. Once you sign in online once, you may never need to visit the site afain. Ta-da lists widget makes it really easy to create new lists and add to-do’s for that list. For instance, I have “Do For Work”, “Do For Sites”, “Do For Church”, and “Random To-do’s” as my four lists. You can have as many as you’d like.

To enter in a new to-do for any list, it’s as easy as typing it in and hitting return. Clicking on the header image will open up your account online. I especially like that you can choose whether to sync the lists everytime that you activate dashboard. If you only use one computer, you don’t need to do this. But, if you have multiple computers like I do, you can sync with the site each time and the lists will stay up to date on all of the computers.

Big thanks to the developer for this. I don’t run a lot of widgets (1,2,3,4), but this one makes the cut. I liked it so much that I donated for his efforts. Honestly, between this widget and my new email reminder system, I’ve been much more productive lately.

Eudora Eudora® email moves to open source development and delivers final commercial version -- Eudora 7.1 for Windows and 6.2.4 for Mac OSX.

The open source version of Eudora® is targeted to be released during the first half of calendar year 2007 and will be free of charge. Once the open source version of Eudora is released, QUALCOMM will cease to sell Eudora commercially Comments: Download:here Eudora Mailbox Cleaner Eudora Mailbox Cleaner is a simple drag'n'drop application which provides easy one-step migration for your messages and other mail related data. The following functionality has been implemented: Mailbox Importing (from Eudora or Thunderbird to Apple Mail or Thunderbird) Direct conversion from Eudora or Thunderbird mailboxes to Mail.app *.mbox packages or Thunderbird mbox/*.msf files. Aside from being faster than the "Import Mailboxes…" in the respective applications, the following problems are fixed as well: Date for sent messages is set properly (i.e., not the date when the messages are imported) "To: " headers will not be lost when importing sent messages into Mail.app text/enriched (Eudora's "rich text"), text/html, and multipart/… messages are imported properly Message status flags (sent, replied, forwarded, …) are preserved upon import (if this does not work for you, see the remark below) Attachment recovery: if the original attachment of a message can be found inside Eudora's "Attachments Folder", the attachment will be re-encoded and attached to the message using proper MIME-compliant encoding. Nickname Importing (from Eudora to the Mac OS X Address Book or Thunderbird) Directly import Eudora nickname files into the MacOS X's Address Book or as address book in the default Thunderbird profile. Nicknames marked as "Do not include this nickname when syncing" in Eudora will be ignored. All group information will be converted from Eudora to the Address Book and mailing lists will be imported as well. Accented characters will import properly into Thunderbird and won't show up as gibberish like they do when using the Thunderbird import. See the remark below if auto-complete of addresses in Mail does not work after import. Filter Importing (from Eudora to Apple Mail) Directly convert Eudora filter files into rules for Mail.app All of these features have been tested importing files from the English versions of Eudora (5.1 through 6.2 on OS X) to Mail.app (version 1.1, MacOS X 10.1.2 up to version 2.0.7, MacOS X 10.4 "Tiger") and Thunderbird (version 0.7.1 through 1.5 in OS X). The import from nicknames into the Address Book has been tested for Address Book 3.0.3 (MacOS X 10.2.6) through 4.0.3 (MacOS X 10.4). Your mileage may vary for different versions… According to user reports, the applicactions works just fine with Classic Eudora data as well. Known Limitations Mailbox Importing Attachments will be only re-attached to the message if the attachment can be found inside Eudora's "Attachment Folder" and the attachment has not been renamed. Attachments which can not be located during the conversion process will be marked as "(missing attachment)" at the end of the message Attachments will be only re-attached for incoming messages - all outgoing messages will lack attachment information Empty mailboxes will not be converted (this is by design) Nickname Importing Some fields available for nicknames in Eudora are not available or not accessible in Address Book for system versions before 10.3. Those fields are: "Nickname" (will be imported into the "Nickname" field inside Address Book but is not accessible from the UI), "Full Name" (will be ignored for the Mac OS X Address Book, Thunderbird will use this as the "Display Name"), and "Photo" (will be ignored) Address Book only allows a single entry for the "Homepage" field. The first "Web" field from Eudora will be used, all subsequent entries will be added to the "Notes" of the contact. Thunderbird allows two home pages - one for "home" and one for "work" - the first webpage in the additional entires in Eudora will be used as the work homepage. If you are looking for a more customizable export of your Eudora nicknames to vCards (which can be imported into the Address Book), you might want to check out Eudora vCard Export, another application I wrote. Filter Importing Mail has a more limited support for filter rules and actions than Eudora. Therefore, only rules/actions which are supported will be imported (Eudora's "Label" will be imported to Mail's "Color") As opposed to Eudora, Mail allows only for one action out of "reply", "redirect", and "forward". When the program encounters more than one of these actions upon importing, the first one will be imported. When importing rules which contain transfers to mailboxes, please note the following: the path for mailboxes where the messages will be transferred to is "/Import/MailboxPath/MailboxName" (i.e., inside the import folder created when converting mailboxes). Since this is the default location where the mailboxes are located after a successful import, this should work properly (when moving the mailbox to a different location later, the rules will be updated accordingly) Comments: Download:Here

Transmission is a free, lightweight BitTorrent client. It features a simple, intuitive interface on top on an efficient, cross-platform back-end.

Transmission is open source (MIT license) and runs on Mac OS X (Cocoa interface), Linux/NetBSD/FreeBSD/OpenBSD (GTK+ interface) and BeOS (native interface).

Released as free, open-source software under the GNU General Public License (GPL), NeoOffice is fully functional and stable enough for everyday use. The software is actively developed, so improvements and small updates are made available on a regular basis.

Business Card Composer

Business Card Composer — the complete solution for creating and printing excellent business cards, calling cards and badges.

Download:here

Forgedit

This app is probably best described by the reader that sent it in. Joe writes:
Forgedit (www.forgedit.com). At first glance, Forgedit is a standard old text editor without that many features.
But….lo and behold, this obscure program is (I believe) the FIRST and ONLY [free] Mac text editor to offer tabbed editing in the style of a web browser (the tabs are actual tabs, not a list in a drawer).
I know a lot of us text editor junkies out there have been looking for tabbed text editing for quite some time. Here’s the answer. And it’s free!
(I’ve heard from some readers that there are other free options for tabs in a text editor. That’s fantabstic!)

Download:here

Download:here

Subliminal Message

Well, this is an interesting application. Subliminal message flashes a text or image message for a split second at a set interval of time.

“You may be surprised that you can perceive a very brief and dim flash of a text message or picture. Because of its perceived power and influence at the subliminal level, this effect is not allowed in TV advertisements in many countries.”

(If you need a good message to flash, feel free to use the one I used in the screenshot.)

Download:here

Between all the freemac sites, LITO, personal blogs and all the Mac mini servers, I have quite a few server, ftp, hosting, and database logins. Serverskine helps me to keep all of the organized.

Another feature I like is the ability to send this info with Mail.app with the push of a button. When I have a new blogger come on, one button and they get all the info they need. If you are a manager that brings on new developers, this could be quite useful.

If you’re a serious blogger or a web developer, this free app could really help

Download:here

Merlin Mann at 43 Folders popularized the idea of the “Hister PDA,” the idea of using plain old paper instead of a Palm or Blackberry to track your appointments and todos. PagePacker makes it easy to create your own paper-based organization system.

Here’s how it works: You choose 8 pages from a catalog of 84 charts, calendars, and graphs. For example, you might choose a monthly calendar, four weekly calendars, a todo list, and two sheets of graph paper. PagePacker will print these 8 “mini” pages on one sheet of Letter size (or A4) paper, arranged so you can fold it and put it in your pocket. (See the screenshot below for more information.)

This could be a handy way to get organized (was that one of your New Year’s Resolutions?) and it doesn’t cost as much as a PDA.

Download:here

ffmpegX is a Mac OS X graphic user interface designed to easily operate more than 20 powerful Unix open-source video and audio processing tools including ffmpeg the "hyper fast video and audio encoder" (http://ffmpeg.sf.net/), mpeg2enc the open-source mpeg-2 encoder and multiplexer (http://mjpeg.sf.net/MacOS/) and mencoder the mpeg-4 encoder with subtitles support (http://sf.net/projects/mplayerosx).

Features:

• As simple as 1.2.3 : Drop a file, choose a destination format, and click "Encode".
• Reads the following input formats: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DIVX, XviD, non-encrypted VOB and VIDEO_TS, Quicktime .MOV, .DV, .WAV, Real Audio, Real Video, H.263, MP4 H.264, PGM, YUV, PPM, AC3, PCM8/16 bits, mulaw/Alaw, WMA-1/2, SUN AU format, MP2, MP3, AAC, 3GP, FPS1, ALAC, and even more formats
• Converts the above formats to DivX, AVI XviD, H.264 MP4, MOV, DV, 3GP, Sony PSP, MP2, MP3, AAC, AC3, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, VCD, CVD, SVCD, KVCD, KSVCD, DVD, KDVD and MPEG-TS with complete control over encoding options.
• Super-fast. Many conversions are faster than realtime. DIVX encoding on a G5 dual is twice as faster as realtime.
• Queue encodings in the ffmpegX Progress window.
• Includes a full-featured universal video player (mplayer) supporting VOB and text subtitles, with choice of fonts, font sizes and international text encodings including Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Greek and more.
• Supports subtitles in VobSub, SubRip, MicroDVD, SubViewer, Sami, VPlayer, RT, SSA, AQTitle, JACOsub and MPsubt formats
• Allows creation of DVD selectable subtitles
• Includes a subtitle converter with OCR from VOB image format to SRT text format.
• Includes a bitrate calculator to control best image quality and target filesize.
• Includes an automatic crop tool.
• Includes a series of video tools like split, join, fix, mux, demux.
• Compresses a non-encrypted DVD to 4GB without reencoding it.
• Reauthors SVCD as DVD.
• Creates DVD image files from VIDEO_TS folders.
• Converts SRT subtitles to DVD Studio Pro 1.5 format.
• Creates AVI or MPG files with two audio tracks.
• Authors as VCD or K/XVCD (.bin/.cue files for burning with Toast by dropping the .bin into VCD window).
• Authors as SVCD, CVD or K/XSVCD (two .img files to be burned in Toast under Multitrack XA window).
• Authors as DVD (/DVD/ folder for burning in Toast DVD mode, and .img file for burning in Disk Image app or Toast disk image mode)

Comments: Fast video conversion, Great GUI

Download: FFmpegX

iSquint

HandBrake

HandBrake is a GPL’d multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter. HandBrake was originally available on the BeOS, but now has been ported over to MacOS X and to GNU/Linux. A Windows port is being worked on.

Supported sources:
- Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (even encrypted)
- PAL or NTSC
- AC-3, LPCM or MPEG audio tracks

Outputs:
- File format: MP4, AVI or OGM
- Video: MPEG-4 or H.264 (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer encoding)
- Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)

Misc features
- Chapter selection
- Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
- Integrated bitrate calculator
- Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
- Grayscale encoding

Download:here

Place the .bundle file in Library/iTunes/iTunes Plug-ins, then restart iTunes. There will be a new DockArt entry in the Visualizer menu up top, but you don’t even need to select it.

If the current song has no artwork, the regular iTunes menu will show.

Download:here

Parsley Is Atomically Deicious

This is why I was so glad to see Parsley Is Atomically Delicious. PAD let’s you add all these tags, and it gives you a really nice interface to do so. It will also let you work with music videos and movies.

Finally, I can rest in organizational bliss. (And they get bonus points because the icon makes me think of El Farolito’s in San Francisco…the best taqueria on the planet.)

Download:here

Last.fm Player

Last.fm also has an iTunes plugin that will pay attention to what music you listen to in your own iTunes library and tailor your “radio station” to include similar music.

(If you’re looking for good, hand-selected music, check out freemacmusic.com.)

There is even a Macosxhints.com hint about how to get your Last.fm radio station into iTunes.

Download:here

• AIM®
• ICQ®
• irc
• Jabber® (including Google® Talk and Apple® iChat Server)
• MSN®
• Yahoo! Messenger®
• Apple Bonjour® (aka Rendezvous)

• Smarter algorithm for selecting a tab after closing the front tab.
• [1287935] implemented /lastlog command (CL)
• Universal binary
• New server list
• Pref for /part all channels on sleep
• Prefs for keys that switch tabs
• irc:// protocol support fixed
• Auto away
• mIRC color protocol bug (Eugene Pimenov)
• UTF8 tab completion fix
• nick completion sort pref (A-Z, last spoke)
• mIRC reverse color protocol fix (Matteo Panella)

XMeeting – Powerful Mac OS X video conferencing solutions
Welcome to the website of the XMeeting project, the developers of XMeeting and ohphoneX!
XMeeting is the first H.323 compatible video conferencing client for Mac OS X. In addition, XMeeting also supports the popular SIP protocol used by many VoIP applications.

The client is highly compatible and has many additional features, so that it can be used for most private and business video conferencing tasks.

Comments:

Download:here

It is OSS / FS licensed under the GNU GPL, so you are most welcome to submit patches, localize, post feedback, suggestions and ideas in the forum, request features, or file bugs.

• Emphasis on ease of use
• Modes:
  • Audio CD project
  • Data project (Filesystems: ISO9660, Joliet, HFS+, UDF)
    • Warnings are listed in the status page.
  • Duplication mode (NEW !)
  • Burn image mode (Formats: ISO9660, DMG, CUE/BIN, cdrdao's TOC/BIN)
  • Disc ripping mode (NEW !)
• Erasing rewritable media
• Persistence:
  • Data and audio projects are documents
  • Therefore they can be saved
  • Therefore they can be edited "in parallel"

Without the need for any external hardware, Synergy2 uses the TCP-IP protocol to share the resources, even between machines with diferent operating systems, such as Mac OS, Linux and Windows.

So QuickSynergy is a graphical user interface for Mac OS and Linux systems, since the official website presents only a Windows version.

• Updated build to work with Tiger.
• Moved to BerliOS as a hosting website.
• This is the end of the 0.5 branch. No further development will be done on this code. Brave people can try the 0.6 developer builds available on the website.

Quicksilver can be given the ability to understand the data inside of files, allowing you to work with data in new, faster ways. Plug-ins add both new items and new actions, allowing you to run scripts, send instant messages, dial phone numbers, look up words in a dictionary, queue up songs in iTunes party shuffle, and much, much more.

Are you having a hard time locating WiFi spots? If so, JiWire probably has just the dashboard widget you’ve been looking for… along with those free WiFi areas. Once installed, JiWire locates various WiFi hotspots in order for you to piggyback.

Not only does JiWire find these hotspots, it also loads additional information about those responsible for providing it. If you are an iBook user with a wireless network card, JiWire is just the tool you are looking for.

Download:here

JaBack

JaBack is an automated Data Backup application from HiTek software. Nobody thinks having good back ups are a bad idea. The problem is, having good backups can turn into a tedious chore or hassle. That’s where JaBack shines. It makes it easy to create and manage your backups on whatever schedule you like.

The scheduler software is probably my favorite aspect of JaBack. It’s super easy to configure and use. JaBack will even zap you an email if it fails a scheduled task for whatever reason.

Bottom line: JaBack is free, it’s easy and it’s always better to have a back up and not need one than to need a backup and not have one.

Download:here

Download:here

BatChmod’s most universally useful feature is “Force Empty Trash”, for those pesky times when you can’t empty your trash the normal way.

Download:here

Twotade

This is a simple app, but I can definitely see why it would be useful. “Twotade is a drop application utility for setting the creation dates of files and folders to the modification date, and conversely. Various options are available, such as only processing files.”

So if you need to cover your tracks or just keep with a chronological scheme, this app will be your friend.

Download:here

Menu Butler

If you like the convenience of Menu Items, but you don’t like the icons taking up your Menu all the time, Menu Butler is the app for you. Menu Butler is a widget that will let you quickly add icons for common items like Airport, Bluetooth, Displays, etc.

When you start “Keyboard Cleaner”, you screen is blacked out. The only keys that have any ability are “Command” and “Q” and only when pushed at the same time. So, once started, you can wipe down your keyboard.

I like how simple this app is and tags make it easy to use. I especially like that the “tags” or “keywords” are stored in the Spotlight comments of the file. With this feature, you can use Spotlight to search this database. Nice integration.

Download:here

SafariBookmarkChecker

In the same way that dead.licious checks your del.icio.us bookmarks for dead links, SafariBookmarkChecker will, obviously, check your Safari bookmarks.

iLikeYouMore allows you to easily change the Type and Creator codes of any file. You can also use iLikeYouMore to erase these Type and Creator codes, which can be useful for applications like BBEdit, which adds its Creator code to any files it can get its hands on, even if your default application for those files is something else.

Download:here