Friday Freebies, And Nifty Neato Mac Utilities.

Tops on my list is the free MoviesToGo. There’s not much here but it’s free and it works. In fact, it works pretty well.

MoviesToGo is from MindSafe and lets you download movie showtime information to your iPod. So, your iPod carries all the movie showtime information with you wherever you go.

MoviesToGo pulls showtimes from Yahoo!Movies up to 10 days in advance. Just enter your Zip Code and the information gets pull from Yahoo! and transferred to your iPod (it’s stored in a MoviesToGO note in the Notes folder on your iPod).

Thumb down to Extras in the iPod Menu. Then select Notes, then MoviesToGo. Browse around. There’s movies by Zip Code (you can enter more than one), by Title, by Theatre.

To get the information from Yahoo!Movies to your iPod all you have to do is click on MoviesToGo once you’ve connected your iPod to your Mac (sorry Windows users).

Pretty slick. The MindSafe developer offers MoviesToGo as donation ware. $1.00. As of today, enough $1.00 contributions were made so that only 243 more “donations” would be needed to buy the developer an iPod.

Click Here to view the MoviesToGo page and download.

Nearly free is one of those nifty neato apps that does something so simple you’re suprised it hasn’t been done already. WatchIt from Vertical Eye is a stop watch for Mac OS X.

WatchIt features a nice, resizeable window with a stop watch timer embedded in the middle. There’s also a Start and Reset button. When the timer is running, the Start button becomes a Pause button.

Lest you think that’s it, wait! There’s more.

The resizing of the time is done through the Preferences slider. Huge is good. Small and out of the way is there, too.

There’s also a series of Actions which allow WatchIt to perform other functions. These include:

You can edit those actions and add other actions to play a sound, pause, or pulse the window (my favorite). Unlike a standard stop watch, WatchIt is also a timer. Select Timer from the menu, and a pre-set time appears. Click Start and, well, the Timer starts and counts backwards to zero. There’s more:

The “pulsing action” alone is worth the $6.00. Click Here for a look at WatchIt and the download link.

Finally, WordService. Your Mac is loaded with a Services function that provides, well a bunch of services. The problem is, not all services function the same way, and nobody tells you much about the services that do exist. Some of them are cool. Here’s a free one that I find very useful.

WordService.

No, it doesn’t have anything to do with Microsoft Word. It’s simply a group of services you can perform on words selected in a number of Mac applications. WordService offers nearly three dozen (34) functions that let you convert, format, or speak selected text. You can also insert data, show statistics within all Cocoa applications and most Carbon applications which support services.

For example, I use Safari to enter my articles into a text window. There’s no way to count the words, or characters, or reformat email cut and pasted from Mail (messy line breaks).

WordService will reformat, remove line endings, multiple spaces, quotes and more. It’ll change text to all caps, all lowercase, move between Mac/Windows/Unix line endings, and give you really pretty quotes.

You can also insert current date and time in multiple format. My favorite is Statistics. Select the text in the Safari text window (or other application), click the Safari menu, then select Services, then select Statistics. Poof! A word count, a character count, and more.

Hey, that’s worth something, right? But it’s not, because WordService 2.5.2 is freeware from Devon Technologies. Click Here for more information and the download page.

BONUS. Devon has other freeware applications on that same page.

Is this a great country, or what?