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The Best Mac Shareware/Freeware.

Damien

Damien

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 2, 2004
244
31
London
I was looking around at the amazing amount of shareware that is out for the Mac. There is a incredible amount of good independent developers creating great work.

I wondered if anyone had anything they could recommend? Examples such as Handbreak, Adium, iOrganise and SubEthaEdit are the kind of thing i am looking for?
 
Nothing much actually, Just looking for cool software. I like to fiddle around and see what cool, fun or useful stuff is out there.

You are certianly right that we seem to have a much better mamount of quality software for the mac. I think its because many people learn programming on a windows platform but that may be wrong.

Cool site! I dont like version tracker though. Too complex and hard to just surf unless you knwo what your looking for
 
This thread has a few free suggestions, and this thread has loads of useful little apps but they're a mixture of free and shareware. :)
 
Damien said:
I was looking around at the amazing amount of shareware that is out for the Mac. There is a incredible amount of good independent developers creating great work.

I wondered if anyone had anything they could recommend? Examples such as Handbreak, Adium, iOrganise and SubEthaEdit are the kind of thing i am looking for?
Click to expand...

I suggest giving Proteus a try, its freeware.

A quick glance at my Applications folder shows the other shareware/freeware apps I use often are; Flip4mac, Folder Icon Maker X, Solitaire XL, ircle 3.1, MacTheRipper, MacFLAC, Shorten, and VLC.
 
gDisk, looks nice, lets you use you Gmail account like an iDisk

however you need to have the gDisk app installed on you computer to get your files,

also like FireFox
 
bense27@gmail.c said:
What exactly does Handbrake do?
Click to expand...


HandBrake is a GPL'd multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter. HandBrake was originally available on the BeOS, but now has been ported over to MacOS X and to GNU/Linux. A Windows port is being worked on.

Supported sources:
Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (even encrypted)
PAL or NTSC
AC-3, LPCM or MPEG audio tracks
Outputs:
File format: MP4, AVI or OGM
Video: MPEG-4 or H.264 (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer encoding)
Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)
Misc features
Chapter selection
Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
Integrated bitrate calculator
Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
Grayscale encoding

thats handbrake info from http://handbrake.m0k.org/
 
iphil said:
HandBrake is a GPL'd multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter. HandBrake was originally available on the BeOS, but now has been ported over to MacOS X and to GNU/Linux. A Windows port is being worked on.

Supported sources:
Any DVD-like source: VIDEO_TS folder, DVD image or real DVD (even encrypted)
PAL or NTSC
AC-3, LPCM or MPEG audio tracks
Outputs:
File format: MP4, AVI or OGM
Video: MPEG-4 or H.264 (1 or 2 passes or constant quantizer encoding)
Audio: AAC, MP3, Vorbis or AC-3 pass-through (supports encoding of several audio tracks)
Misc features
Chapter selection
Basic subtitle support (burned into the picture)
Integrated bitrate calculator
Picture deinterlacing, cropping and scaling
Grayscale encoding

thats handbrake info from http://handbrake.m0k.org/
Click to expand...
so basically it lets you rip DVD's to your computer?
 
Shareware: Sticky windows. I am so used to it, I find myself trying to use it at work...on windows. :(
 
Have you tried this?

Mitthrawnuruodo, your new tar rocks!
happy0065.gif
 
I agree, there are tons of handy third part applications out there, VLC, ScummVM and MacIrssi(0.8.0 finally works :D) being some of the favorites.
 
I see lots of topics and blog posts like this where people list their favourite freeware or shareware. So I created a website that kinda pulls it all together -- the freeware, at least. Check the link in my sig.
 
Jay42 said:
Yes, I think that OS X freeware is much higher quality and more useful than Windows, even though the user base is so much smaller.
Click to expand...

The user base is not as small as you think. OS X is UNIX and much of the UNIX software is available for the Mac.

In fact most of Mac OS X itselt is "freeware". The core of OS X is "darwin" which is Apple's version of BSD which has been free for the last 20 years and then all the services that run, sharing disk, the web server all of the 100+ "standard" utilies included with Mac OS X all are free. Apple went and got them for you they are the same as on Linux or Solaris systems. What Apple added to all this is a nice, prety grapical desktop.

So when you say "the quality of freeware is good" Yes it is the bulk of OS X being the prime example.

So what to get.... two "must haves" I can think of

1) Gimp at http://www.gimp.org

2) Open Office at http://www.openoffice.org

I just happen to like this text editor. It's a "pure text" editor. not a wordprocessor.
If you write code of any type I recommend it.

3) nedit http://www.nedit.org
 
I recently got Transmit which is the best FTP client i have ever head :eek: I am looking into Unison which is panics other main program. The output of this company is amazing
 
Jay42 said:
Yes, I think that OS X freeware is much higher quality and more useful than Windows, even though the user base is so much smaller.

Do a search, tons of stuff on these forums.

http://coolosxapps.net/

http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/

What are you looking to do?
Click to expand...

I am looking for a data recovery program.
I had to do a system restore and a secondry user with one file I would like back, was not backed up so not restored.
 
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