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Widget me

14:36 / 22.10.05

As a new convert to Macs and OS X, I'm still getting my head round some of the cool new bits of freeware available to me. The novelty of widgets still hasn't worn off and I'm amazed at the number of groovy little gadgets that you can get gratis. And the choice is incredible, hence this thread; I'm probably yet to come across some gems.

For example, I just discovered Quicksilver, a launcher that takes the pressure of my trackpad and allows me to perform pretty much any action with just a few keystokes. It's unbelievably intuitive too.
I've also got a dashboard bristling with widgets - particular favourites being Sing that iTune, the BBC listen live radio widget (which I undertand Tom had a hand in creating), and a beautiful Gmail alert widget that looks lovely sat in the top right corner of my dashboard.

So, widgets, freeware, shareware, anything you'd recommend?

15:42 / 22.10.05

Very rarely use the Dashboard, apart from for the BBC Radio Player and, very occasionally, the calculator (and an upload widget for Transmit, but that's not free so doesn't count). I used to use Quicksilver all the time but Spotlight is better so I use that.

Some freeware utilities that I favour are:

* VLC - plays all the shit that Quicktime doesn't, including DVDs (see also MplayerOSX and Xineplayer - if those don't play something, it's fucked or it's Windows Media)

* also for media files, ffmpegX (convert anything to anything) and Handbrake (rip DVDs to MP4 very easily indeed). Mac The Ripper is good

* Gimp.app (needs X11 but that should be on your install discs)

* NeoOffice/J - forget the official OpenOffice port for OS X, it's crap, get this instead

Hell, I could go on about this for ages. Depends what people are after really.

16:26 / 22.10.05

Hey I'm happyfor you to keep talking here...

16:37 / 22.10.05

Me too.

I think the thing that most impressed me about Quicksilver was how fast it is and how it learned my preferences. But then, like I say, I'm a Mac n00b and I haven't really given that or Spotlight enough time yet.

Was already tipped off about VLC elsewhere and it's a joy (there's loads of stuff that Quicktime doesn't seem to want to play).

I need an office suite so thanks for the link to NeoOffice, fridge. Please keep going. Someone somewhere might be looking for anything you might think to recommend.

16:45 / 22.10.05

Quicksilver is indeed wicked fast, but Spotlight indexes all of your content as well as the filenames so is more useful, and is in fact just as fast. I barely bother with looking at directories these days. I just hit ctrl-space (my shortcut for Spotlight), type the name of what I want and bang, it's there.

Spotlight also indexes the comments field for each file, too, so if you have an oddly named program that rips DVDs you can add "DVD ripper" to the comment field (select program in Finder, press apple-i, it's in there) and then whenever you search for "dvd ripper" you'll get that program. Note that Spotlight needs plugins to index some files. If you're going to use NeoOffice or OpenOffice, install the appropriate plugin for that, I can't remember what it's called but it's linked to from the page. It even indexes Safari bookmarks.

For other freeware... it's hard to know where to go. The above are ones that I use regularly, but there are lots of others for more specific purposes. Would anyone like to suggest an area - say, writing, converting documents to different formats, stealing music?

17:06 / 22.10.05

Yeah, so far the ability of both apps to search my bookmarks for me is what I've found most useful. As someone with an awful lot of bookmarks and without the discipline to organise them as rigorously as I might, it's a dream come true.

As for suggested areas, I think all of the things you mentioned would appeal to various people here. I'm quite happy for this thread to be a dumping ground rather than being focussed on anything in partic. I'm on the look-out for an RSS aggregator, if you have any advance on NetNewsWire-lite...

18:22 / 22.10.05

Unfortunately no. I use NewsFire but it's not actually that better than NNWLite and it costs money; I'm a bit disappointed to be honest, given that it comes from the same source as the excellent Acquisition, my main file-sharing app (way better than Limewire, searches lots of different Gnutella networks and has a great UI). It's not free, but it's cheap. This is quite common with OS X apps - many are written by small developers who have a fairly small user base so can't rely on donations, and given that OS X users are not at all tolerant of adware which is another way of supporting development, they ask for $10-15 for a registration key.

Web-based aggregators like Bloglines are the way to go if you can cope with the somewhat clunky UI, particularly if you use more than one computer and/or want to publish your bloglist. I'm actually fairly happy with the feed reader in Opera, my main browser at the moment.

Oh yeah, blogging apps. Okay - the very popular one, which can post to multiple blogs, stores entries, has all sorts of really handy features etc is ecto. The developer is very responsive and keeps on top of the latest developments in the blogging world. If you use Livejournal, the best client for OS X is Xjournal (which is free) but that's linked to from the main site anyway.

*

19:26 / 22.10.05

Yeah, I've been using Bloglines, with the little bloglines notifier which makes it a little less annoying to check for new articles. It would be nice to have a widget which was a more fully-featured front end for bloglines. I have used minews in the past but found it annoying.

Second the rec for Acquisition; it's the best.

13:36 / 23.10.05

I used Limewire, then Acquisition, then Poisoned (Don't remember why I decided I liked Poisoned better).

Then I discovered Soulseek. Nicotine.app was an app under X11 for OS 10.1-10.3, but ssX is a native 10.4 app that I am wholeheartedly in love with.

Widgetwise, the only one I use with any regularity is Scenatio Software's poker widget.

14:37 / 23.10.05

Yeah, I tried Nicotine a couple of years ago and it kept crashing on me, but I'm sure it's got better since then. I've just not felt the need to try another client; Acquisition is just so nice and streamlined.

There's Xfactor as well - again, I tried that ages ago and it wasn't very reliable, but it's probably improved. People looking around for an app that they prefer should look there too.

Couple more I thought of that new users might not be aware of:

* Adium is a nice multi-network chat client, as is Fire.

* Audio Hijack is an extremely convenient program that allows you to save audio output from any application. Grab all that streaming stuff and save it for later, very convenient. It's another one of those low-cost apps, but the demo version is fine if you want to record things under ten minutes (it starts putting static in after that).

It saves in uncompressed AIFF format, so you will probably want to convert the files to MP3; iTunes will do this, or, for better results, use a program based on lame, such as Audion 3 which used to cost money but is now free, and handy to have around for those times when you want to play an MP3 but don't want to open up iTunes (my music library is on an external drive which confuses iTunes if it's not plugged in).

*

16:32 / 23.10.05

Hey fridge, I've got a question. Fire does this thing with me where the longer I run it the slower it gets, until finally it crashes. Does Adium not do that? Is it better than Fire? I've been hoping for a Mac Trillian for a long time and I suppose it's not going to happen.

17:43 / 23.10.05

I don't use Fire regularly so I couldn't say what the problem is. (I use either Psi or iChat with a Jabber account that connects to the other networks server-side.) There's certainly nothing wrong with Adium though, it's a good program.