Previous Shareware Picks
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This icon: denotes a Dashboard Widget. Requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later


MilkyWay 1.5.6
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or later Price: $0
Ever wish to see a preview of your images without having to open them in an image editing/viewing application? If so, then MilkyWay ma be just what you were looking for. When MilkyWay is running in the background, clicking an image in the Finder pops up a little window displaying the contents of the image file. It even has some cool features such as quick zoom via the mouse wheel, rotate, and full screen view. This is a great way to quickly figure out what is in all those image files you are certain to have on your hard drive.
HyperEdit 1.5.1
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or later Price: $19.95
If you are like me, you prefer creating your web pages with a screen full of text rather than fiddling around with graphical objects. With HyperEdit, you get the best of both worlds. On the left hand side you edit your HTML, while on the right hand side, your changes take effect real time. NO longer do you have to edit your page, upload to the web server, and open the page in your web browser. It also has W3C validation built in, which works as you type, and of course syntax highlighting. This program can really cut down on the time it take you to create great web pages.
Business Card Composer
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or later Price: $34.95 or $39.95
Almost any business (except for my current employer) seems to love those little pieces of cardboard with your name and phone number with a cool logo. Of course, those pieces of cardboard are called business cards, and if you don't have a good looking one, you are often shunned in the business world. That's where Business Card Composer can lend a hand. It provides hundreds of designs and thousands of images to get you started, plus has image editing tools to allow you to make a completely unique card. One of the best features is the great ability to print to card stock, which is something OS X does not have standard (even in Address Book). If only it didn't cost so much, it would achieve a perfect score.
Photo Desktop 1.5.1
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later Price: $0
Photo Desktop is a unique application that allows you to place a bunch of your favorite photos one your desktop, all at the same time. It works with iPhoto to select pictures from your library, and puts them on your desktop, where you can drag and drop them, size them, add captions. The photos a displayed with a white border to make them look like actual Polaroid pictures stuck to your desktop. Personalize your desktop like never before.
Service Scrubber 1.1.2
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later Price: $0
Click on your application menu (next to the Apple menu), and find the menu item that says Services. Highlight that to bring up the Services submenu, and take a gander at how many services are installed on your machine. If your Services menu is anything like mine, there are a bunch of services there that I would never use. Enter Service Scrubber, the program that makes cleaning up the Services menu a breeze. With this application, you can enable and disable services which a simple check box. You can even change/add keyboard shortcuts to the services for quick access to the ones you use most. I have been looking for any easy way to get a handle on that menu for quite some time, and now, my desire has come to fruition.
Snail Mail 0.6.8
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or later Price: $0
Remember the days before email and electronic bill payments? Back when we went to the post office to buy stamps and send our letters, which usually take 2-3 days to arrive to the destination instead of 2-3 seconds? Well, some people still need to occasionally use that service, which is where Snail Mail comes in. Snail Mail pulls in addresses from your Address Book, to print out envelopes complete with Postal bar codes. You can adjust the text styles, set style profiles, and even add images to the return address to personalize your envelopes. This application can certainly come in very handy for those times when you still need to use the USPS.
SysStat Nano 1.1
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or later Price: $0
SysStat Nano is a dashboard widget that displays various system statistics in a nice, compact form. This widget can show CPU usage and temperatures, memory usage, disk capacities (used and free), current network transfer rates, uptime, battery stats, and more. There are many widgets can show the same information, but this one excels in these three areas: shows both CPUs individually (not many system statistic widgets do this), small form fact (uses very little screen space), and low resource usage (small memory footprint and low CPU use). SysStat Nano is currently the best widget in it's genre.
Thumbscrew 1.0b9
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3 or later Price: $0
Thumbscrew is a neat little program for making unique thumbnails of images. It's very simple to use; simply drag a photo, a group of photos, or a folder to the Thumbscrew window, and it will create thumbnails with a border of your choosing, rotated by an angle of your choosing, and with a nice drop shadow. It will even generate the HTML for you, which can be copy and pasted into a page you have set up. This is a really neat program, that can bring some character to your thumbnails, but it does have some shortcomings: The HTML generation needs some work (it leaves little dashes on the page and doesn't make the paths website ready), the preferences are a little confusing, and the HTML generation is not auto-saved. With these things fixed, Thumbscrew could easily be a 5/5 application.
Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection 1.0.3
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later Price: $0
Most of the visitors to this site are Mac users at home, but many of us (present company included) have to use Windows at work. If this includes you, the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection software might be a perfect piece of software for you. With it, you can connect to any Windows PC (that you have access to, and remote desktop access turned on), and do absolutely anything that you could do if you were physically sitting at that computer. This is because you are actually running that computer, and just routing the display to your Mac. I have used this many times to log into my work computer, and work from home. It works great, and I recommend it to anyone who can use it.
Audion 3.0.2
System Requirements: Mac OS 8.6 or later. Mac OS X 10.0 or later. 604 or newer CPU Price: $0
Audio is an extremely full featured music player, encoder, modifier, and broadcasting station. It will play MP3s, WAV, AIFF, Vorbis, and many other formats as well. Plus, you can change the formats of your files with ease, and even cut and paste, into and out of, your MP3 files. It has support for such things as real time cross fading, transferring files to all sorts of portable devices, and recording/streaming from any audio input. It's even skin-able for those who like that kind of thing. This won't replace iTunes on my machine, but it certainly is a great tool to have around. Notice: Get the free serial number on this page.
iTunesLyrics 2.0
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or later Price: $0
iTunesLyrics is a widget that checks various databases for the lyrics to the song currently playing in iTunes. This makes it very easy to follow along with the song, or figure out what they are saying (if you have a hard time with that like I do). Very simple to use, and a nice way to impress your friends with a perfect recollection of song lyrics.
Countdown Calendar 1.0
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or later Price: $0
Countdown Calendar's job is easy to determine from its name. Enter in any date, and it will show you how many days there are left until that day. I have always liked counting down to vacation, Christmas, birthdays, etc. This simple widget is absolutely perfect for that.
TV Tracker 1.0
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or later Price: $0
The TV tracker widget uses the TV listings at Yahoo to show you your current TV channel lineup. This widget will download the listings based on your preferences, and show them in a very nice format. Click on a show title, and your browser loads with information on that show. The only thing that could make TV Tracker any better is if it would automatically adjust to the current time, instead of requiring the user to click a button.
AppleJack 1.3.2
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.2 or later Price: $0
AppleJack is a troubleshooting tool for when no other tool will do. This command line based program only runs in Single User mode, when you don't have a CD to start from, and are having troubles with your system. Use it to run disk repair, permissions repair, preferences repair, and cache cleaning. All this without the need to launch a GUI. Even though it is command line driven, it is very simple to use, as it provides on screen instructions as your go. I very handy tool certainly worth the download and install.
Iconographer X 2.5
System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.0 or later Price: $15
If you have ever wanted a custom icon for one of your disks, a folder, or even a specific file, but could not find one you liked, then you may have tried to make your own. However, making icons on OS X can be very difficult, especially if you don't have the right tools. One of the best tools available is Iconographer X. It allows you to create the images and masks for all sorts of icon sizes, and even lets you import various formats so you don't have to do all your drawing there. However, probably the most important feature is the icon preview panel. With it, you can see what your icon will look like on the desktop, and it changes in real time according to your editing. I think the hardest thing to get right with icons is the borders, and this program makes working with borders almost a snap. Another handy feature is the ability to drag anything (even your hard drive) to the Iconographer X program, and it will open that item's icon. This is great if you just want to make a small edit. The only thing keeping this program from getting a 5 rating is the editing tools are not the greatest, some thing like tolerances for the paint bucket would be very helpful. Overall, it's a very good program, well worth your time.
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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!