Mac Programs

In this section I am listing a few interesting shareware and freeware softwares for the Apple Mac (without any pretense of writing in-depth software reviews).

This section is aimed in particular to those students of the School of Advanced Studies who decided to take an iBook on lease but obviously anybody with similar needs should be able to find some interesting hints.
I put a little asterisk near those programs that I think are "essentials".

"Get" buttons will take you to the developer's site or search for the program online. If the "get" button near a program entry is not active the best thing to do is to go to VersionTracker or MacUpdate and put its name in the "search" box.

Sub-sections

Maintenance and System Monitoring

Mac Janitor *

Log files maintenance utility - FREE/DONATION WARE

Mac OSX keeps a number of log and system files that need to be cleaned periodically. Unfortunately the times at which this operation is scheduled by default are times when the typical user will have their computer off!
To override the default time a minimal knowledge of Unix is required, but Mac Janitor solves this problem brilliantly by allowing the user to perform daily, weekly and monthly maintenance tasks when they want at the click of a button.

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Onyx *

System maintenance and Preference setting utility - FREE WARE

Onyx allows the user to perform scheduled maintenance tasks at the touch of a button and much more.
With this program you can easily access on a graphic interface many console and terminal based functions and manage to change a lot of normally unavailable preferences settings.

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Hardware Monitor

Temperature and System Monitor - SHARE WARE

Monitors and tracks history of all hardware sensors (including fan speed) on a Mac, plus CPU, Memory usage, Net traffic and a few more.
BUT!! It seems iBooks G4 (at least the 2004 vintage I have) gives almost always a sensor reading of 0 Rpms for the fan speed, so you might be more interested in the next two softwares if you have an iBook.

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Temperature Monitor

Temperature Monitor - FREE WARE

By the same guys as hardware monitor, monitors and tracks temperature sensors only (no fan speeds).

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X Resource Graph

Temperature and System Monitor - FREE WARE

Monitors most hardware sensors (fan speeds on some machines only), CPU, Memory, Net traffic, HD traffic and, if you like, weather and stock indexes off the internet.

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Battorox

Battery Life Meter - FREE WARE

Monitors Battery Residual Life, number of recharges, maximum capacity.

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Internet Browsing, E-mail, FTP and HTML editing

Mozilla

Web browser, E-mail client, HTML editor, News Client - FREE WARE

The open-source incarnation of Netscape. A rather large applications set, not really necessary unless you want to have the NetScape feeling you could be used to or you would like to be able to set up profiles.
If you are interested in alternatives to Safari give a look as well to FireFox, a stand-alone browser (i.e. no mail client or editor) from the same Mozilla guys.

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ThunderBird

E-mail client - FREE/Donation-WARE

Quite big to download, very powerful and flexible, apt for more advanced users or for those who need to manage more e-mail than Mail.app can easily handle.
As of July 2005 (when I transferred) there was no utility to transfer painlessly mailboxes, address books and filters from Mail.app to ThunderBird (mailboxes and addresses can be transferred manually quite easily but tediously), so if you think you could use this program you should make up your mind before you set up a zilion mailboxes in Mail.app.
There seem to be utilities to transfer automatically from Eudora and Outlook but I never tried.

WARNING: Using ThunderBird I had occasional problems sending attachments to people with Windows-based machines. If you have essential attachments to send it would seem advisable to send using Mail.app which has an option for "windows-friendly" attachments (see mail.app preferences pane and help for more info).

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PageSpinner

HTML editor - SHARE WARE

Powerful HTML editor and Page files manager. Intuitive to use although not as powerful as some of its PC equivalents like Ace-html.

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Taco HTML

HTML Editor - FREE WARE

Simple, nice, not incredibly powerful but free, enough for basic editing and with a very nice tag coloring and validation tools.

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Get

NVU

HTML wysywyg Editor - FREE WARE

Nice HTML editor with a "what you see is what you get" function, code verification, a CSS editor, FTP client and more ... Very good for basic to intermediate editing needs, for beginners and for routine site maintenance.

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Cyber Duck *

FTP/SFTP client - DONATION WARE

File Transfer Protocol is the method used to transfer files to a remote server, used e.g. whenever you want to upload html pages that are going to make up your web site.
Cyber Duck is fast, reliable, has good SFTP capabilities, keeps bookmarks; is not very fancy or incredibly powerful but well more than enough for the standard user.

URL Manager PRO

Bookmarks Manager - SHARE WARE

Store and manage your bookmarks, useful especially if you use multiple browsers or accounts, if you need to migrate browsers or if you need to store links to put on a web page.

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Speed Download 3

Download Manager - SHARE WARE

Speed-up downloads by creating multiple connections, restart broken downloads, schedule down- or uploads.

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Text Editors

Alphax *

Multi-language text editor - SHARE WARE

Very, very powerful text editor for programming, writing HTML, TEX ... it has special menus for over 50 programming languages!
Rife with Find and Replace, Auto-completion and fill-in-the-blanks tools, it is even almost too powerful for the standard user. Nevertheless, if you like the concept and are willing to invest a little time to learn it you will love this program. You can find related material, info and tips at the AlphaTcl Wiki

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TeX Editors, BibTex Managers and Equation Editors

TeX *

Typesetting language - FREE WARE

TeX is a language and set of tools for type-setting professional quality mathematics, it's the language that is used to write basically ALL scientific literature nowadays. In order to be able to use TeX you will need first to install the language and interpreter on your machine and then to use a front-end and editor (i.e. a program allowing to write raw files and pass them to the TeX interpreter to produce the final output: a professional looking paper in postscript or pdf format).
TeX tools have been widely developed by something like an open-source community and it is possible to find macros and packages (i.e. programs that work with TeX code to perform particular tasks) for managing bibliographic references, making slideshows, including images and graphs of various kinds, including hyper-textual links and even doing fancier stuff such as producing annotated bibliographies and writing music!

Learn more about TeX

Gerbern Wierda's iInstaller *

TeX Installer (liveTeX / TeTeX distribution) - FREE WARE

One of the simplest ways of getting TeX to work on your Mac, go to the home page, download the program and follow religiously the instructions you can find at University of Oregon or on MacDevCenter. (WARNING: I am sure these work well for OS 10.2 and 3, I never installed on 10.4)
I find this installation has most of the stuff needed, including lots of additional packages (for Bibliographies, slides, hyper-text ...).
There are other TeX distributions for Mac which I do not know as well as this one, e.g. OzTeX, in case you want to look around. You can read more on this on MacDevCenter.

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TexShop *

TeX Editor - FREE WARE

A basic TeX Editor with most functions one could want. Nice set of key bindings, some symbol and tags panes.
Includes an internal PDF viewer (which had problems when using hyperreff or similar packages in the version for OS 10.3.9).

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iTexMac *

TeX Editor - FREE WARE

More powerful and customizable than TexShop, but also a bit more complicated. Support for .pdfsync is quite powerful but requires multiple operations to set up. Obviously has its own PDF viewer (which had problems when using hyperreff or similar packages in the OS 10.3.9 version).
Some people maintain TexShop is better, some say iTexMac, the authors say: "why not have both"! and I fully agree with them.

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BibDesk *

Bibliography Manager - FREE WARE

One of the great features of TeX is its very powerful bibliographic references manager: BibTeX. In order to use this feature, however a special references data-base file needs to be prepared, called a BibTeX file.
Bibdesk creates and manipulates BibTex files using a simple form and tables interface. Customizable, it also can keep the pdf files of the articles sorted, named and within a single click from their table entries for you.
Still missing a capacity to do full text searches on the database of stored files, but that can easily be performed by Mac OSX, and with an army of open-source developers working on it, that kind of feature should not be too far in time.
Oh, did I mention it also has TeX cite commands drag and drop and auto-complete features?

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Equation Service, LaTeXit, LaTeX equation editor

Equation Editors using TeX - FREE WARE

Using these programs it is possible to write TeX code for an equation and obtain a small .pdf file large as its bounding box to drag and drop to other apps.
In Equation Service it is possible choose from a variety of bounding boxes styles (e.g. single display, no display, multi-line equation arrays) and all the preamble and stuff that is not strictly you equations will be taken care by the program.
IN the other two it is possible to store frequently used equations and fragments in a "library" to fetch them easily when needed.
Very useful for those who want to do an Office document but do not have time to waste on Equation Editor (with all due respect).
My advice is: if you need one of these it's probably better to get all (they are all smal downloads) and check wich best suites you.

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LyX

wysiwym TeX editor - FREE WARE

A word processor using a LaTeX engine to format documents, but where most of the TeX code is generated by the program. It follows a so called "what you see is what you mean" approach i.e. the logical structure of the document will be the same in the editor and the compiled version. Sorrowly it has not yet a powerful math editor as "Scientific Workplace" and the like and sometimes can be a bit slow.

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Mathematics and Graphing

MuPad

Symbolic Math - SHARE WARE

From the guys producing Scientific Workplace, basically a Maple in disguise. Less agile on some graphical commands, it can do basically everything Maple does.
If you can stand the time investment to learn the different syntax rather than pay the money it is a nice addition to your library.

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Graph550

Math functions graphing - DONATION WARE

Allows to graph simple and parametric mathematical functions and export results to PDF or image file.
Rather simple but gets the job done.

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Ipe

Graphing, drawing and presentations with TeX - FREE WARE

Ipe is a rather powerful tool offering a vector drawing interface (a bit like drawing in Office applications), the possibility of inserting text boxes using TeX and saving the results as pdf files. It could be used to create graphs to insert in articles or slides for presentations.
WARNING: it requires the installation of additional components and sometimes some minor path adjustments, so beginners might need help for its installation.

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PDF Tools

PDFLab

Join, split, merge PDF files - FREE WARE

PDFLab is a very powerful tool allowing the user to manipulate PDF files page by page, joining and splitting documents or reordering/inserting pages. Very useful when dealing with papers with rogue tables or graphs.

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PDFViewer

View and print PDF files - FREE WARE

Very lightweight PDF Viewer. Will open in a split second and will be able to send most "problem" files to inkjet printers correctly. It lacks text search features and the advanced printing controls of Adobe but is a very good alternative.

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PDFShrink

Reduces the size of PDF files - SHARE WARE

By eliminating unwanted information, reducing DPI resolution and using other "tricks" it can vastly reduce the size of pdf files, especially those generated by scanning software of by "save as pdf" under OSX.

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Synchronization and Backup

Synk *

Synchronization tool - SHARE WARE

A really nice Synchronization tool: batch jobs, backup and Synchs in one click, preview before execution, timed backups ...
Some of the versions have been less stable than others, but it is still possibly the best choice for the job (and on top has free educational license for students).

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SilverKeeper *

Backup tool - FREE WARE

A nice and simple Backup tool, from the guys making the LaCie drives.
The nice thing is that it can also make single-user or single-folder same-disk back-ups to an image file, that then you can split and put onto CDs, so you don't need another Multi-Gigs hard disk or a DVD (but "only" a good amount of patience).

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DMGScissor

Image file splitter - FREE WARE

I include here as its primary use is to allow splitting large .dmg (image files) generated in backups, so that they can be put on multiple supports.

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Miscellaneous

MyMind

Concept Map creator and outliner - DONATION WARE

Creates beautiful conceptual maps, with links, colors and different styles.
Can export in Html and image formats.

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VoodooPad Lite

Hypertext based notepad - FREE WARE

This is really a jewel, you can jot down notes, create links to other pages, import contents from most other programs at super fast speed.
If you think that you can even drag and drop links to external files (e.g. articles in .pdf), citations from BibDesk (if you select the Text format there) and add equations using Latex Equation Editor or Equation Service you can start seeing how useful this could be.
A more powerful version also allowing export to HTML and other formats is called VoodooPad and is Share Ware.

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Omni Outliner

Outliner - SHARE WARE

Versatile tool for creating outlines.

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Hog Bay Notebook

Organizer / Outliner - SHARE WARE

Nice and very flexible organizer, manages folders and documents in an iTunes like interface and admits use of wiki-links and other ways of linking pages and external documents.

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iSnip

Clipboard manager - DONATION WARE

Save clipboard contents, visualize, paste them or store them for later use. Very good for managing things such as recurring TeX bits, addresses and salutations in documents etc.

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RadioLover

Internet Radio Recorder - SHARE WARE

Records Internet Radio, if Mp3 tags are provided by the stream: divides, names and stores files in your iTunes library (all perfectly legal as long as they are kept for personal use only).
One of the best ways to get to know lots of new music.

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FoxTrot

Search Service - SHARE WARE

Indexes the contents of files in user-specified folders and then conducts super-quick full-text searches. Very nice results selection pane. I am still trying it out but it seems very powerful and very useful.

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Namely

Application Launcher - FREE WARE

This small app indexes the contents of the applications folder, then launches at login and can be called by a simple hotkey combination. A small window appears where as you type the name of the application you want it displays compatible names in a drop-down menu. Very nice, especially so for keyboard addicts and for those who have tons of applications.

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