Great free software for the Mac

Maelstrom was great. My sons very excited about the reboot of EV nova.

I wonder who took it over. Ambrosia doesn’t exist anymore. Easy Envelopes was free. Did Ambrosia put the code into the public domain?

I remember Cheshire. They’d probably be sued by Disney because they used the Cheshire cat as drawn by Disney for the film Alice in Wonderland. Purple and White stripes. And that big grin.

There was a program, I cannot remember the name, that shot “holes” in your screen along with the sounds of different guns beings used from a .45 to a Shotgun to a Machine Gun. They all left a different gunshot pattern.

It was a great stress reliever when in the early days of the Mac, things didn’t quite work as planned. If you were really pissed, you could enable gory mode and red blood would drip out of the wounds and drip down your screen.

There was also a joke program that when you started it, just displayed the classic Microsoft Blue Screen of Death and you could not get out of it without the keyboard combination to quit the app. It had some kind of enticing name that made you think it was pictures of Playboy Centerfolds or something similar.

There was also a program that had a whole series of logic games. Came in a box and the colors were Red, Black & White. One of my favorites was “Parking Lot” where you had to slide the cars around to get the one trapped car out of the lot. Sometimes there were trucks that were twice the length of a car. It had the word Big in the title, but stopped working when the PowerPC disappeared.

Mike’s Cards is still around as Solitaire Forever II on the App Store. Free for 8 games including 2 versions of Klondike, then you pay for the other 300 solitaire games like $20 or $30. All or nothing, so if you want Clock or Pyramid, you have to buy the other 298 games along with those.

I just downloaded the old Myst, rewritten for the iPhone. It is still really hard to solve all the puzzles. I am still just wandering around on the island . . . I may have to find the cheat book like I did decades ago. The cheat book came with a felt tip yellow highlighter pen, and there would be multiple answers to each puzzle, the top one being just a hint and the bottom one the full answer. Use the highlighter pen to reveal the answers as you need them.

I do not handle frustrating puzzles I cannot solve easily very well. Myst took months to work through.

There’s a YouTuber I watch who has had videos about free utilities:

Two “oldies” from the Ancient Times I haven’t seen mentioned are Disinfectant, which helped keep our classic systems out of harm’s way, and ZTerm, shareware that got a lot of us on the text-based early internet for the first time.
And mentioned above are only just a couple of Oakley’s ever-expanding suite of nifty tools.

THANKS FOR THIS LIST!!! I use many of these items and love them! Top notch effort reminding all of us that big time developers, huge corporations are not the only source of very fine apps for ur Macs!

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I believe these three haven’t been mentioned yet.

Omni Disk Sweeper - super simple but effective tool to find large files using up lots of space
MkConsole - prints log file entry updates to my desktop background, really nice for “what’s it doing now?”
Time Tracker - tells you exactly which files Time Machine copied over during a specific backup

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BBEdit is probably the most durable piece of software I have ever used. I’m sure I used the original free version on my SE30 and my IIci and I still use the current version today. By the time they split it off into text wrangler I was already paying for BBEdit. I can’t think of another piece of software that goes back that far continuously in my Mac history.

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Fetch (an FTP client) is older (since 1989, vs. 1992 for BBEdit), but that’s the only other non-open-source app I can think of.

I did use fetch back then, but forgot about it as I switched to Transmit at some point.

BBEdit isn’t free.

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For those who still burn CD or DVD discs, Burn is free:
https://burn-osx.sourceforge.io/Pages/English/home.html

SimplyBurns is another:

As has been explained, Bare Bones used to have BBEdit (paid) and a cut-down version, Textwrangler, free. I pay for BBEdit, but, in reality, do not use more functionality than TextWrangler provided. Anyway, BBEdit not essentially has combined TextWranger and BBEdit, but paying for BBEdit only gets you a features that would not have been in TextWrangler. So, even running BBEdit in free mode gives you one of the most powerful text editors on a Mac.

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HandBrake is a free and open-source transcoder for digital video files.
youtube-dl is for downloading youtube content.

Your post reminded me that I forgot tsMuxerGUI for preparing high definition files for BluRay disc creation.

Shout out to SimpleNote.

I now use it exclusively to store recipes.

Things I like:

  • text only, but has Markdown support—viewer built-in
  • easy sharing and collaboration e.g. with family members (if they also use SimpleNote for this)
  • multiplatform syncing. And searching is fast enough that I can review recipes on iPhone at the shops.
  • has tags, e.g. some of mine are “baby”, “cake”, “thermomix”, “condiments”, “desserts”, “slow cooker” etc
  • has its own Publishing feature. Useful if someone asks me for a recipe. I find a recipe just too long to copy and paste into a Messages. I also find it weird to send a recipe in an email: text only? PDF? Screenshot?

Whereas, I can publish it to a URL from within SimpleNote (hosted on Simplenote servers), and send the recipient a link. The Markdown is converted into HTML.

Meanwhile, if necessary, I can review the recipe, edit it, clean up the formatting etc, without having to send updates to the recipient. And my recipes are usually messy, or have typos, which need cleaning up.

I’ve tried many recipe apps on the Mac, and have stuck to this system the longest.

But it’s not free, is it?

That depends. A large subset of features are available for free, but some features require paying for a license. The free features used to be split off into a stand-alone application that variously went by the name “BBEdit Lite” or “TextWrangler”. There is now a single downloadable BBEdit application, which gives you a 30-day free trial of the full set of BBEdit features and continues to run with the core/free features indefinitely without any nagging or interruptions. While I’m a longtime paid customer, my sense is that the free subset of features has a great deal of functionality and is comparable to (or even better than) what they used to provide in the separate free programs.

So BBEdit is basically an application with both a free feature set and a paid feature set, and it’s quite possible that the free feature set will meet all of someone’s text editing needs. Back around the time TextWrangler was discontinued, they made a page documenting what you can do with free BBEdit vs what you have to pay for:

https://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/comparison.html

Dave

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It certainly is free to me. As a lifelong user of TextWrangler and BBEdit Lite (I have the T-Shirt) I am perfectly happy with the totally free version since 30-days after it was introduced.

NameChanger Rename files. Very convenient if you need to change more than a few file names.

Fontbase is a font administration program that is competing with Suitcase and Font Agent Pro the two major programs for keeping order in large font libraries. There is a free version of Fontbase that has a lot of functionality. One of my professional roles for the last 25 years is to be font administrator in AD agency’s and Commercial Printers. The free version of Fontbase is what I recommend now for individual designers and graphic artists

And I can confirm that TextWrangler/BBedit is great software. I need the payed version, but many of the people I work with use the free version