Mac Utilities, Games, and More!

Really good racing game for mac:
Racer
Its completely free and open source.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Story

Cave Story (洞窟物語, Dōkutsu Monogatari?) is a freeware Mac game designed and created by Daisuke Amaya, art-name Pixel. The game is a traditional action-adventure game, reminiscent of the Castlevania and Metroid games. After being fan-translated to English by Aeon Genesis, the game has received praise from gamers worldwide.

 

AudioExpress

http://macapper.com/2007/04/06/audioexpress-serial-released/

AudioExpress is a dead simple sound recorder for Mac that allows you to record via the built-in mic or an iSight. It does what it was designed to do quite well and interfaces nicely with iTunes or your iPod.

 

iStat widgets and apps!

http://www.islayer.com/

'Our sole aim is to build as many impeccably crafted, free or very reasonably priced widgets and applications as possible. So far we've done an ok job on the widget front, and are looking to OS X applications for our next challenge.'

Five million downloads and counting.

 

America's Army v2.5 (Mac/Windows/Linux) or v2.8 (Windows Only)
Free Multiplayer Only FPS
www.americasarmy.com

Awesome game.

 

Hey, thanks man! I love all this stuff! 2 thumbs up for you and all this software!

 

How on Earth did I miss this thread?

 

Where can you get the download for Mac, i dont see it on their site...

 

Missing Sync
http://www.markspace.com/
$39.95

This is a must for those with a Windows Mobile, Blacberry, or Palm device. It will allow your device to sync with your Mac. Works very well and is reliable.

 

It's no longer available at the official website. Just google 'america's army 2.5 mac" or something like that. Last I checked, there were plenty of websites that still had it. Sorry I took so long to respond, I've been busy playing with my new MBP.

 

http://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/

Basically tells you how many times you charged and discharged your battery. Its also free.

 

iStat Pro
Widget that monitors just about everything going on in your system:
Temperatures,
Battery charge and cycles recharged,
CPU usage
RAM usage
running processes and % usage
time logged in
lots more.

 

Anybody know where I can find a F@H widget?

 

How much do these Mac apps hog resources?

 

It depends. Research the app you're thinking of to find out.

 

Or try them out and see for yourself. Most all of these have free trials and many are free all together.

 

Let me put it another way....

If someone ran a whole bunch of these apps on a PC, it would probably bog things down a bit. Is it a similar situation on a Mac, or does the Mac OS handle this stuff differently?

 

Well this is getting off topic, but I will tell you what I have running.
iTunes (watching a video)
Firefox with 5 tabs
iCal
Dashboard with 7 widgets
QuickSilver
Google Notifier (both calender and Gmail are active)
SoundStage
Synergy

I am having no slow downs. Everything is snappy and quick.

 

Perfect.

Thanks!

 

BUMP

Anybody know where I can find a F@H widget?

 

K nvm I found a widget that shows your F@H stats: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/22622

 

SMSRotateD

turn the notebok sideways, the screen tilts. ive never used it but it lookes prety kool

 

You Products
3 cost money (have trials) 1 is free

total of 4 products-
tunes, desktps, fonts, and control

right now im using the tunes and trial version of desktop.

 

Any truth to the rumors that Apple is going to release a MBP 17" with a 2.6 processor sometime in August?........August 7 is what I have heard.

 

This thread isn't where this discussion should be...this thread is for suggestions for applications and tidbits of Mac OS X.

But anyways, there's a rumour of an Apple Special Event on August 7th, but its not going to be about the MacBook Pro, more about new iMacs with new MacBook-like keyboard, possibly new iLife and Mac Minis. It won't be about the MacBook Pro, because the last update was too recent.

 

Wait... it will be, or won't be about the MBP?

 

Oops, forgot to add a word there .

To clear it up, if Apple holds a Special Event any time from now until October I'd say (99.99999999% sure) it will not be about the MacBook Pro. The 17-inch MBP may get LED screens, but nothing more. The Special Event will most likely be focused on new iMacs and possibly new iPods. Mac Mini's future is uncertain.

 

Acqlite

A p2p program similar to Limeware without all the spyware and adware.

 

Google Docs

Not Mac-specific, but works fine on the Mac.

A free alternative to Office or NeoOffice. It doesn't have as many functions as Office does but all the most commonly used ones they have (bullets, SpellCheck, B U I, etc.) and the reason I love to use it is you can access the documents from any computer that has an internet connection.

You can upload .doc files to be edited and saved onto your inbox, and you can save documents as .doc onto your Desktop. Also, it automatically saves your document every few words you type so even if your internet connection breaks or you close the browser window your file is not lost.

 

Starcraft 2 is coming to the mac. Hmmm, delicious.

 

Dont know wether anyone has mentioned this yet but I just came across a must have screensaver for every macbook, macbook pro and late powerbook users. Its a 3d aquarium that gradually builds up ontop of whatever you where working on and if you have a laptop with the motion censor you can turn on a feature that makes the water tilt and stay parallel to the the ground if the notebook is moved whilst the screensaver is in action.

You can download it from the apple downloads section, it really is one to impress your mates with.

Get it Here!

 

It's okay, but it's a 14-Day Trial (Shareware) then you must pay $9.95 . I want Freeware screensavers!

 

what is a good media player that can play everything and has good subtitle support like media player classic. VLC has been pretty good so far but does not render subtitles right most of the time.

 

What rendering issues are you talking about?

VLC is the best I've found. You can configure different settings if need be, VLC --> Preferences --> Video --> Subtitles/OSD. Check the Advanced box for even more options.

 

well instead of using the font of the subtitles provided, it replaces it with a crappy white standard font. If there happens to be more than one line of text, they will overlap each other making both very hard to read.

 

VLC has always had problems with softsubs, even in 0.8.6c, regardless of OS. Font issues aside, it can't even get the layering right.

There are really only two ways to get decent subtitles in OSX. Perian (with QT, or NicePlayer - QT is better though) and Mplayer.

QT is included with OSX - just update to the latest version via software update to fix bugs and get full-screen support. DL perian here http://perian.org/. Make sure you get rid of all the unnecessary and redundant plugins for QT first. This method is nice, especially for large Blu-Ray rips because after spending 10 min preloading the mkv, you can view the entire movie almost perfectly.

Use Mplayer for most things though:
First install X11 from your OSX installation disk, if you haven't already.
Then use this installer:
http://mplayer.andiyar.com/files/MPlayer.dmg
After you install it, open it, go to preferences, under advanced, add the following parameters:
-ass -embeddedfonts -fontconfig

When running a video, Shift-3 lets you change audio tracks, "j" (without quotes obviously) lets you change subtitle tracks.

See http://forums.animesuki.com/showpost.php?p=1084136&postcount=419 for credits and more instructions if necessary.

 

Isn't it about time we consolidate this thread into a "top applications for your new MB/MBP", organized by category, post? Everyone except NBR seems to have one

 

That would be really nice. Whoever took the time to do that would have my eternal gratitude .

 

I just came across a good site that list all of the useful apps for macs.

http://bestmacsoftware.org/

 

That's a really nice site. I'm sure if NBR could do something similar, with improvements, of course .

 

Well, we need cashmonee's approval first...and who's going to write it?

 

Hm I can type up one if you want for just applications. I find myself here almost every day now that I have a MBP, lol. Something like this?

Freeware

Bittorrent
Transmission - Lightweight, multiplatform, Bittorrent client.

Browsers
Camino - Based off the Gecko (Mozilla) rendering engine. Best put, Mozilla Power, Mac Style.
Firefox - Very popular browser based off the Gecko rendering engine. Not as integrated with OS X, however.

FTP Clients
Cyberduck - Open source FTP/SFTP client which integrates nicely with OS X.

Messenger Clients
Adium - Works with a number of different protocols in one application.

Multimedia Related
VideoLAN - Multiplatform media player capable of playing virtually anything you throw at it.
MPlayer - Another multiplatform media player compatbile with almost everything.
HandBrake - Multiplatform DVD to MPEG-4 converter.
ByteController - Adds forward, previous, and play/pause buttons for iTunes to the top tray.
Perian - Adds additional Quicktime playback support for various media types.

Text Editors
TextWrangler - Text editing software useful for coding or editing configuration type files.

Misc
Quicksilver - A new way of using OS X.
UnRarX - Software to open RAR files.

 

Well, there's tons more , but its a good start. Thanks, Eluzion!

 

Oh yeah, I know, just getting the general formatting down. Wasn't sure if anyone was already doing it so I didn't want to do the entire thing just quite yet.

Another thing though, should we really list ALL of the freeware applications or just the top/more common ones? Having a big laundry list of applications can be really confusing for someone new to OS X. Kind of like the Linux world... there's about 15 programs each that do exactly the same thing. lol

 

Well, not all applications, but for example Adium isn't the only good IM client out there. And for web browsing there's also Shiira, OmniWeb, Opera, etc.

 

Yeah, well I started a thread so people can post up just freeware software and any recommendations to make the list more organized.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=160062

I'll just update it as we go along I suppose.

 

Hi, This post is very informative, however I would like some specific information. If someone can help me then please send me a private message. Best Regards.

 

Sorry about that...that last weird post was from a known scammer.

Carry on.

 

Hrm, so let's see - this thread gone into disuse sadly, so here's one more to add to the list:

Freespace 2 Source Code Project:
When this came out, it was among the best space sim shooter games at the time for graphics, gameplay, and plot. Although several years old by now, Volition, Inc. actually released the source code for the game out to the public, and the project listed above has been updating and modding it ever since.

Basically what this means is - (1) it's free for you to play (noncommercially), (2) there are massive campaigns and mods out there that rival the original campaign in plot and length, (3) contrary to what you might expect from a several-year old game, the graphics and gameplay has continuously been updated and (4) because of the dearth of good space sims out these past years, Freespace 2 SCP is arguably still one of the best pure space shooter sims out there.

The Freespace 2 SCP actually has an installer that'll install everything you need to play (original game, all the extra finished campaigns, the mods, etc.).

The best part though is - whereas the original game was PC only, you can play this game on OSX just fine - the SCP even has a OSX installer package included.