Great Mac Apps – Indepth Part 2

Burn – Burn is an open source CD and DVD burning program that some have compared and said betters commercial software like Roxio’s Toast. Now I have Toast and its pretty good, but its very bulky. Burn, is a nice simple little app that will burn audio CD’s, data CD’s (for Mac, PC, Joilet, UDF, and DVD Video), VCD’s. SVCD’s, DivX DVD’s, normal DVD’s as well as burning disc images to discs (dmg, img, etc). Its pretty handy really. It will also create VIDEO_TS from video files for you if you want to share a DVD with friends over a torrent or something else. And you can’t beat the price. Its equal to about zero Alex’s (can’t find a link for this. 1 Alex = $700)

AppDelete - Think of Windows for a second (I know its a painful memory). Now imagine the Start button, Control Panel and that little thing called Add/Remove Programs. Your one stop shop for removing unwanted programs. Now skip forward to the simple life of Mac OS X. Goodbye windows installers. Hello drag and drop. Well now, what about all those open source apps you downloaded that you don’t want. And what about the plist files and cache’s and settings they created and dumped in your user Library. Well AppDelete takes care of those. Simply drag and drop (so easy isn’t it Microsoft) and AppDelete finds all those nagging files and moves them all to the Trash in one hand folder. Simple. No settings. No cache’s. No application. Lovely

Monolingual - I discovered this off Macbreak Weekly and its lovely. So simple. Question: How many languages do you speak? Now how many do you use on your laptop? If the answer is 2 then lucky you. If its one, this is for you. Why do you need all the program settings and files for Hungarian, or Bavarian, or Sweedish, or any of that? You don’t. Monolingual will ask you to choose some languages to remove, then go out and trash all those files that all the many apps have stored somewhere. The result? Nothing really noticable about from at least 1Gb of brand new free space to fill with episodes of Lost.

Smultron – Finally. I’ve been waiting to talk about this. Mainly cos the icon is a strawberry. lame reason. But it is a good program. At its basic level, its a replacement for TextEdit. At its most complex, its a good program for editing XML files, plist files, or do any coding whatsoever. It does colour coding automatically for each tag, which can help keep track of which ones are open and closed. It also handles multiple open files at once, and gives you a file list so you can quickly switch between them. It also supports Full Screen mode so you can focus without the constant distraction of Mail, Firefox other unproductive apps.

Transmission – Everyone loves BitTorrent. Whether it be for nice legal file sharing with Gran, or whether its for less legal needs. In my opinion Transmission is the best out there. It is up to date, its fast, well designed, fairly well customisable. You can set download speed limits between certain times, you can monitor folders and automatically start downloads (combine with an RSS feed and Democracy for a awesome way of getting those latest TV torrents). You have other options, [see this blog post] but I don’t find any of them as nice as Transmission. Azureus is multiplatform but its slow. BitRocket seems to have trouble reaching some servers. So check it out

Thats it for part 2. Part 3 to come shortly, when we look at Growl, MenuMeters and MAMP.