| Previous Shareware Picks | Current Pick | Picks 1-15 | Picks 16-30 |
| Picks 31-45 | Picks 46-60 | Picks 61-75 |
| Picks 76-90 | Picks 91-105 | Picks 106-120 |
| Picks 121-135 | Picks 136-150 | Picks 151-165 |
| Picks 166-180 | Picks 181-195 | Picks 196-Current |
SoundApp 2.6.1  | |
| System Requirements: Color 68k or PPC, Mac OS 7.0 or later, Quicktime 2.5, Sound Manager 3.1 | Price: $0 |
| SoundApp is a great program that will play or convert just about every type of sound format. I has tons of options for compression, playback, converting, and everything else you can do with sounds. If you ever get sounds that you can't open with other programs, just download this, and you will be able to open it. Every Mac owner, sound master or not, should have this little gem. | |
Holiday Lights 5.0  | |
| System Requirements: Color 68k or PPC, Mac OS 7.0 or later, Quicktime required for music | Price: $19.95 |
| Holiday Lights is a fun program that does what it's name implies. It places a string of lights around your screen, plays holiday music, and even has a built in screen saver. Everything is completely customizable with hundreds of bulbs available for download, and any MIDI file works for music. Best of all, unlike most screensavers, this is an application, not a control panel. This means no extra crashes during the holidays! Plus, if you know someone who justs loves christmas, you can buy this program as a gift for half off! It's a great program that anyone who loves Christmas, or any other holiday for that matter, should have. | |
ListenDo! 1.1  | |
| System Requirements: 200Mhz 604 PPC or better, Mac OS 8.5.1 or later, 48MB RAM, PlainTalk 1.5.4 or later, Plaintalk Microphone | Price: $0 |
| ListenDo! is a speech control problem. This is not a dictation program. It can be used to clikc the mouse, pull down menus, run Applescripts, open items in the frontmost finder window, press buttons, type text macors, and run Script Paks all with your voice. ScriptPaks are packages of scripts for specific applications. These ScriptPaks allow you to completely control an application by speech. It will let you do anything you wish it to do except continuous dictation. This is a great program with no real downside except it bogs down your system a little. But would you rather have Carpel tunnel Syndrome or a slower Mac? | |
TechTool 1.1.9  | |
| System Requirements: 68k or PPC, Mac OS 7.0 or later | Price: $0 |
| TechTool 1.1.9 is a scaled down version of TechTool Pro. While the freewar TechTool doesn't do nearly as many things, it's still a great application. It can do many troubleshooting activites including, completely rebuild the desktop, completely ZAP the PRAM, check the system and finder files for corruption, clean your floppy drive, and give you information about your computer. As the saying goes, "The little things in life are what makes life worth living." These little things that TechTool does will keep you Mac in good health, and may even save you some headache if your system files ever go bad. In my opinion, every Mac user should use this program. | |
CPU Charger 1.0  | |
| System Requirements: 68k or PPC, Mac OS 7.1 or later | Price: $0 |
| CPU Charger is a utility designed to speed up your Mac. It does this by making sure that all the CPU proccess are being used by the front most application. About the only good thig about this extension is that it's free. From my tests, it didn't do a good job at all. I tried it on both my Mac IIsi, and G3. On both systems, I ran Norton Utitlties' System info after installing this extension, and it found no spped increase whatsoever. Also, there was no perceived speed increase either. One more thing, on the G3, I normally run many applications at once. With CPU Charger installed, doing this was a pain. For instance, when I had both AOL and IE 4.5 open, started a page loading in IE, andswitched to AOL to respond to an IM, everything involing IE wouls stop. Even the modem would stop downloading the page unless I switched to IE. Not acceptable at all. |
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Graphing Calculator 1.1.1  | |
| System Requirements: 68k or PPC, Mac OS 7.1 or later | Price: $0 |
| Graphing Calculator is a, get this, graphing calculator for your Mac. It's like a simplified version of a TI-xx graphing calculator. The differences are that it's alot fater and uses far fewer batteries. It gives you the standard set of 'buttons', plus many hidden buttons when you press 'shift' like keys. It will even evaluate, simplfy, and deferenciate equations for you. But there are some problems with it. It is hard to understand, doesn't do integrals and other important functions, and is an advertisement for it's big brother, Graphing Calculator 2.0. If you enter a function only supported in 2.0, it will promptly tell you, plus in the demo, most of the stuff it shows is only available in 2.0. Overall, this is a solid program for Triganometry nad Pre-Calculus students, but beyond that, it just doesn't have enough functions. |
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Directory Optimization Grapher  | |
| System Requirements: 68k or PPC, Mac OS 7.6 or later, Appearence manager 1.0.1 | Price: $0 |
| Alsoft's Directory Optimization Grapher does one thing, and does it well. It creates a colorful (if you find different shades of blue colorful) graph that represents how fragmented your drive is. It tells you the number of directory files present, and how many of them are out of place. Something that is really annoying is every time you open this program, you have to click 'agree' on the licence dialog. Also, I found this program to be a shameless plug for their flagship product, Disk Warrior. The worst thing about this is the System Requirements. If you have an OS prior to 8.1, you must go download the Appearence Manager (see link above). Also, you need Quick Time 4.0 to save a graph. | |
GifBuilder 0.5  | |
| System Requirements: 68020 or later including PowerPC, Mac OS 7.0 or later | Price: $0 |
| GifBuilder is a simple program that is used to make animated gifs. In fact, it was used to make the icon for this week's pick. It offers many options, although many are either hard to understand, or hard to find. Also, if you set the prefrences (which are all in the menus, not a dialog) the way you like, yuo have to select a Save menu item just to keep them for the next to you use it. If you only need to creat an ocasional animated gif, this is a great program. But if you need something more powerful, don't even bother. | |
GraphicConverter 3.7.1  | |
| System Requirements: 68020 or later including PowerPC, Mac OS 7.0 or later | Price: $30 |
| GraphicConverter does more than its name implies. It allows you to open, edit, convert, and save practically every type of graphic there is. I haven't found any kind of graphic file it can't open. It even allows you to make QuickTime movies out of the graphics. And it has enough compression options to make any file smaller without loosing quality. One thing I noticed with this program that I have never seen any other program do: If you have OS 8.5 or above, it will ask you if you want to use the old style open/save dialogs, or the new navigational services. A very nice touch to a very nice program | |
MacTuner 2.1  | |
| System Requirements: 68040 or PowerPC, Real Player 5.0 or G2, 16MB RAM, net connection | Price: $22.95 |
| MacTuner is a Radio, TV, and other Programming all on your computer. It has a huge database including stations from all over the world. You can use the map to find a state or country you wish to view content from, or you can search the database of over 1800 stations. You can even have a list of favorite stations set to buttons so you get to them with ease. The only bad thing with this program was some large countries like Canada wern't divided up into provinces like they should have been. Instead, it's counted as one very large chunk. But that's a low price to pay for instant access to thousands of stations around the world. | |
GURU 2.8  | |
| System Requirements: Any Mac with OS7.1 or higher | Price: $0 |
| GURU, the GUide to Ram Upgrades, is just what it's name implies. It's an application that gives you specs on any Mac or Mac clone. These specs include things like Processor speed, bus speed, gestalt ID, and all sorts of little things you need to know about your computer. It also gives RAM and VRAM configureations for every Mac and clone ever made. No more guessing how much RAM you can install and what type to get. This little thing does it all for you. | |
Desktop Resetter 2.0  | |
| System Requirements: Any PPC Mac with OS7.1 or higher, 68k users can use v1.2.1 | Price: $10 |
| Desktop Resetter is a program with one very usefull task, reset the positions of icons on the desktop. If you switch resolutions alot, play games that switch resolutions, or you must have your icons in the same place all the time, this program is for you. You just set up the icons the way you like, click remember, and then anytime you want you icons back in place, launch it and click reset. It's as easy as that. | |
clip2gif 0.7.2  | |
| System Requirements: Any color capable Mac with OS7.0 | Price: $0 |
| Clip2gif is an undispensible program for any web developer. You can make GIFs and JPEGs from PICT files, or directly from the clipboard. It gives you a wealth of options including transparency, interlacing, bit depth, scaling, among others. The interface is not much to look at, but it gets the job done with perfection. The only problem I had was with printing. The printed image would come out huge, no matter what I did. But you can get around that by using a different app to print. | |
Fetch 3.0.3  | |
| System Requirements: Any Mac with OS7.1 and a TCP/IP connection. | Price: $0 |
| Fetch is an old FTP client that works perfectly. It can handle any FTP you come across. It both downloads and uploads to FTP serves. Plus it can resume downloads! The only quirk I have with Fetch is that it is a little slower that some other FTP clients, but that was cured by increasing the amount of memory it gets. Also some of the menus and preferences are hard to understand, but that's minor. | |
Prestissimo 1.5.1  | |
| System Requirements: Power Mac with OS 8.5 or 8.6 installed. | Price: $0 |
| This is one of the greatest program's that anyone using the new style scroll bars of Mac OS 8.5/8.6 can use. It gives you all sorts of options including things like putting the double scroll arrows on both ends, and lets you customize the application pallette without using all of those key combinations. It even lets you change which key combination switches applications. | |
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Mac, the Mac logo, Mac OS, the Apple logo, and other Apple product names are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. The Made on a Mac Badge is a trademark of Apple, Inc., used with permission.
Additional company names, company logos, product names, and product images may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.
Arbitrary Quote - I finally came up with a punishment for the boy. First, no leaving the house, not even for school. Second, no egg nog. In fact, no nog period! And third, absolutely no stealing for three months!
Mac, the Mac logo, Mac OS, the Apple logo, and other Apple product names are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. The Made on a Mac Badge is a trademark of Apple, Inc., used with permission.
Additional company names, company logos, product names, and product images may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are hereby acknowledged.
Arbitrary Quote - I finally came up with a punishment for the boy. First, no leaving the house, not even for school. Second, no egg nog. In fact, no nog period! And third, absolutely no stealing for three months!