# Mt top ten freeware



## Rhisiart (Mar 6, 2006)

OK, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.

Despite this, here are my top ten freeware products:

BUTLER
Excellent menu bar drop menu, which more than compensates for the lack of Mac OS 9 Classic Menu. 

SKYPE
Free Internet calls.

ADIUM
Multi-service IM software (but no video facility).

METEOROLOGIST
Excellent weather info. Resides on the Menu Bar.

VLC MEDIA PLAYER
Cross platform media player.

CARBON COPY CLONER
A simple, bootable backup for your hard drive.

gDISK
Use your gmail account as a back up hard drive.

VIENNA
Excellent RSS feeder.

CLAMXav
For the paranoid, or those who just want to protect other people's PCs.

CYBERDUCK
I recently discovered this great FTP programme.

TOFU
Great little reader that makes reading long documents easier.

What, you say, that's eleven freeware products! Well just think of the volume control on the amps used in Spinal Tap.


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## bbloke (Mar 6, 2006)

Interesting idea for a thread.   

I don't use a lot of freeware, although I have a few shareware apps, but most of my software is commercial.  Let's see, in no particular order:


Fugu - SFTP, SCP, and SSH client

SubEthaEdit - well, it *was* a great, free tool for coding (especially web page creation, with the built-in, realtime preview), but they have recently made it shareware

Mactracker - obtain information on any Macintosh, including hardware specifications, history, startup chime, and more   

FileInfo - modify the type, creator, and attributes of files

X-Chat Aqua - IRC client

iMass - periodic table, molecular mass calculator, isotope pattern generator, and more

ClamXav - free anti-virus app

GanttProject - create Gantt charts for project management 

CoverFlow - flick through your iTunes music library in 3D using the cover art

VLC media player - plays a range of video files




Honorable mentions:

PyMol - molecular visualization

Plot and QtiPlot - graph plotting tools


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## Lt Major Burns (Mar 6, 2006)

wow. everyone should download the CoverFlow thing.  it's really nice.


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## Mikuro (Mar 6, 2006)

In no particular order:

&#8226; Butler
It does a whole mess of things. I use it for keyboard-based application launching and quickly opening web searches.

&#8226; ChangeDesktop
Randomizes your desktop background much better that Apple's built-in method. It's very fast, very flexible, and chock full o' features. I have thousands of desktop backgrounds, so I really appreciate this!

&#8226; SizzlingKeys
Controls iTunes from the keyboard from any application. There are tons of apps that do this. Even Butler can do it. But I like SizzlingKeys most. I have F5-8 control volume, and control-option-right/left-arrow move to the next/previous track.

&#8226; BBEdit Lite
Clean, fast, efficient, no-nonsense text editor. Apparently it's been discontinued, although it's still available for download. Now they offer TextWrangler instead, which is also free. I have never been motivated enough to replace BBEdit Lite, though.

&#8226; Tofu
Formats text documents (and also HTML and even PDFs) into columns for easier reading. Horizontal scrolling is a little easier to follow, too. Great for reading e-books from Project Gutenberg.

&#8226; QTAmateur
Gives you all the encoding power of QuickTime Pro, but for free. Also supports queueing. Unfortunately it doesn't let you edit movies like you can in QTP, still, it's useful.

&#8226; ffmpegX
The answer to 99% of your audio and video conversion needs. I know, I know, it's shareware, but it's so useful that I'd feel remiss if I didn't include it. Besides, you CAN use it for free...if you're a cheapskate.  (I wonder if I should mention PithHelmet by that same logic. Hmm. Well, I just did, so I'll leave it at that.)

&#8226; MPlayer
Like VLC, but for some reason it don't get no respect.  I like VLC, too, and I actually use it more than MPlayer, but MPlayer still has some distinct advantages. It can play FLVs, and some RMs that VLC can't handle. I also prefer its interface, and it seems to be a little faster (although this is rarely noticeable, since all players are very fast on a 1.25GHz G4). Note that there are different versions of MPlayer for OS X. The one I like is the _official_ one. The other one is buggy and hasn't been updated in forever.

&#8226; ShowVolumeFragmentation
A great tool to help you determine if you need to defragment your disk.

&#8226; EasyFind
This is essential in Tiger, because Apple dropped the ball with Spotlight. It's not the cleanest program out there, but it gets the job done. Sometimes Spotlight just doesn't cut it.

*Bonus 11th freeware app!*
&#8226; BackLight 2
Lets you use any OS X screensaver as a desktop background. Not all that practical, but...c'mon. It's pure awesomeness. I love showing this to PC users, too.  Thanks to the magic of Quartz Extreme and OpenGL, many screensavers don't use much CPU time, so you can actually work while they run.


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## delsoljb32 (Mar 6, 2006)

hehe, Backlight is a cool "show off app", but i think running it for any length of time on my laptop will singe my leg hairs off! hehehe

lil warm here!


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