Archives for Category : General

If you’re looking for a replacement for the standard Apple Mail application head over to:

• mailsmith.org, the home of Mailsmith

And take a look at Mailsmith. It is an email application created by Bare Bones Software the authors of the popular programmers’ editor BBEdit and Yojimbo, “Your effortless, reliable information organizer for Mac OS X.”

Mailsmith was formerly a commercial application but Bare Bones has decided to release it for free. It’s no longer a Bare Bones product but it will apparently still be supported and updated as a standalone product.

There is one very importatnt thing to be aware of if you do decide to evaluate Mailsmith: if an email account’s type (displayed just below the account name in Mail’s Accounts list) is POP rather than IMAP then any mail retrieved through Mailsmith may be gone should you decide to switch back to Apple Mail. This will typically not be the case for .Mac/MobileMe accounts but probably will be true for Comcast and Verizon accounts.

There’s no guarantee you’ll like Mailsmith more than the current Apple Mail, but at least now it’s free to try and you might find it suits you.

The Omni Group, maker of high quality Mac applications, has released four of them as freeware:

• OmniWeb
• OmniDazzle
• OmniDiskSweeper
• OmniObjectMeter (for developers)

These join the previously free:

• OmniDictionary

The Omni Group got their start writing applications for Steve Jobs’ NeXT operating system, the predecessor to Mac OS X, and used that experience to write high quality applications for Mac OS X when most developers were still learning the basics. OmniWeb was one of the first truly Mac OS X native web browsers and set a standard for elegance and simplicity that Apple eventually championed in Safari. Basically, The Omni Group writes good stuff!

So head over to the Omni Group’s web site and start by looking at the freebies. If nothing else grab OmniDiskSweeper and you’ll finally be able to figure out what is consuming so much space on your Mac’s hard drive. And while you’re there take a look at their other excellent apps: OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and OmniPlan.

Intego, the makers of the VirusBarrier anti-virus software for the Mac, has issued a security warning that the supposed anti-virus software MacGuard is in reality itself malicious software:

• INTEGO SECURITY MEMO – October 17, 2008
• Macworld: Intego warns against MacGuard malware
• MacGuard knows malware because it is malware

Created by the same company that makes a Windows™ package called Winiguard:

which is both a scam that attempts to sell useless software and a dangerous rouge tool that “hijacks the user’s desktop and typically displays exaggerated or false claims of spyware found to frighten the user into paying for the program,”

Regarding MacGuard:

The software may be dangerous to Mac OS X, and there is a risk that the company “selling” this software may be scamming users and some sources suggest that they may be using the credit card numbers they harvest for nefarious purposes.

Good news for folks looking for compatibility with Microsoft Office but who can’t or won’t pay the price for the official version.

OpenOffice is a free, open source Office compatible application suite for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It supports: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing and databases with an eye to supporting native Microsoft Office document formats. It also provides some support for Visual Basic scripting, a feature dropped from the latest official Office release (more details).

The major news in the 3.0 release is that it is finally available as a fully native Mac OS X application (previous versions used Apple’s X Windows implementation and frankly looked pretty awful in comparison to a typical Mac OS X app.) Some of the dialogs could still use a dose of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines but the application itself is much improved. It’s also a simple drag and drop application install.

It’s free and well worth checking out. Make sure you grab the 3.0 release as some of the mirror sites are still vending the older 2.4 release.

• OpenOffice.org download
• Ars Technica’s Article on the Release
• ZDNet: OK, now OpenOffice is definitely good enough
• Mac360: How To Replace Microsoft’s Office For Mac For Free

Given the popularity of Macs in the arts, it’s not particularly unusual to make a music video using a Mac. It is however very unusual to make one exclusively from video screen captures of the Mac OS X user interface itself.

And that’s exactly what filmmaker Dennis Liu did for the song “Again & Again” by the group the Bird and the Bee.

The Finder, Stickies, Dashboard, Word, Fast User Switching, even screen savers; they’re all there and more. So check it out:

• YouTube: Apple Mac Music Video
• Macenstein: Warning! This song WILL get stuck in your head