Great New Apps For Your Mac. They’re Free!

There’s nothing like a good bargain to keep your Mac running well, keep productivity high, so you can save money for a new Mac, right? Here’s the latest list of freebie goodies for you and your Mac.

First, tools. More specifically, DigiTools 2.0DigiTools 2.0. For the life of me, I don’t know why developers provide free applications, but they do.

Thanks, guys. I owe you a beer. Next time we meet…

DigiTools is a collection extra utilities for your Mac that may help out where you didn’t have enough money to spend after forking over five big ones ($499) for a Mac mini.

Included, for free, is a nifty word processor that features RTF support, a word count (I need that; Tera says...), a Spell Checker, Color, and Font formatting. Wait! Isn’t that the same thing as TextEdit which comes with Tiger? For Free?

Yes, kinda. Except not everyone has Tiger, which is about $129. So, “free” is still good.

DigiTools also has a nifty font browser that lets you look at all your fonts, set up ‘presets’, etc. Wait! Isn’t there a FontBook in Tiger? Yes, and at $129… you get the idea.

There’s also a Movie Player which does full screen playback and adds A/V controls. For image buffs there’s an image viewer which rotates, prints, rescales, and saves as JPEG files.

Don’t forget Notepad. Think of it as Post It Notes with features. OK, they’re all in DigiTools and all free. Not every Mac user has Tiger, or Panther, or… whatever. But they’re free.

Also free is a favorite app of mine that works with Tiger’s Mail (Panther, too). It’s called Mail Scripts now at version 2.7.4. This is a collection of AppleScript Studio scripts for Mail and AddressBook.

All those little things you don’t know how to do in Mail, but wish you could? Now you can. On the fly. Eyes closed. Archive messages. Change servers. Remove duplicates. My favorite? Schedule Delivery of Mail messages.

While we’re “thinking free” I just remembered that ThinkFree Office is NOT free. Don’t ask why. Maybe they’re practicing to run for office. ThinkFree Office is, remarkably, up to version 3.0.0595.

Now that’s a numbering scheme worth paying money for. ThinkFree Office is a word processor, a spreadsheet, and presentation graphics, all rolled together. It’s very similar to NeoOffice/J which is, by the way, really free.

I admire a developer with a bit of chutzpuh. They’re doing things in the Apple tradition of ‘think different’ in that the name is Think Free but they sell for $49 what you can get elsewhere for really free.

Think Uh uh.

Also free today is Adium X. It’s not up to version 1.0 yet, but it’ll give you something to do while you wait. Adium is a free instant messaging application which does AOL’s AIM, Jabber, Microsoft, Yahoo and a bunch of other instant messaging services.

All rolled into one. For free. Does it work. Sometimes. YMMV (your mileage may vary). UB (user beware).

Frankly, iChat gets me where I want to go and I’m just sitting around using it until Apple comes out with it’s own Voice Over IP system. Hmmm. I guess that’s iChat. For now.

Got two Macs and want to control one from the other? Well, you could spend $299 for Apple’s nifty Remote Desktop. Or spend nothing and use the latest version of Chicken of the VNC.

I’m nothing if I’m not the Bargain Girl of Mac360. Control remote Macs for nothing. What a concept.

Enough of the ‘Land of the Free’ games. Here’s one that works like ThinkFree Office. It’s called OpenWeb 3.0. It’s for wannabe webmasters who got off the clue bus and lost their way.

OpenWeb has the Apache web server, PHP (the scripting language/engine), MySQL (the relational database), and a bunch of other great applications that work wonderfully and promise to turn your lowly Mac mini and OS X Tiger into a whopping big time web server. Really.

Except the OpenOSX folks who sell OpenWeb 3.0 for $60 a pop aren’t so open about telling you that all the applications they include are actually free. Yep. Find ‘em, download ‘em, install ‘em. For nothing. Na da. Free.

Or, pay the $60 for OpenWeb. I’m open minded so I’m open to that because I like open source software. The kind thats FREE! However, if you’re willing to pay me $60 (plus expenses) to download and install on your Mac, who am I to argue.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

Off Topic #72 - Need to save a few dollars on Mac software? Click Here to save almost $10 on the new version of Photoshop Elements, and almost $20 on the new Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac from the Mac360 Store (it’s really Amazon). Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage and more-- barely $50 more than Apple’s iWork ‘08.

Off Topic #58 - Do politicians use personal computers? Of course. We’ve heard Barack Obama prefers a Mac, while Hillary Clinton uses a Dell, though, apparently neither of the candidates can bowl. Does Obama’s potential vice president use a Mac? Even Clinton acknowledges Apple’s brand power but says she can’t afford a Mac. Maybe she’d win if she used a Mac.