Freeloader Friday Download of the Week

Mac Only Freeware

We all love to see our machine of choice get more powerful, so why not be glad that Intel Macs can run native Windows? But lets not get too carried away. After all, we all know half of what we love about our Macs is the operating system. And while you're in Aqua or Brushed Metal Nirvana, you can enjoy the following free applications knowing they're only for the Mac.

Adium

Adium is the Appled version of Gaim, the Open Source mutli-protocol chat application. Adium sports Aqua polish and Mac only features over the top of Gaim's evolving chat engine. Adium is also backed by a strong community and a slew of add-ons. Last week we covered Adium's VoIP prowess via the Gizmo Project plugin. There's even a portable version that runs on removable memory.

Camino

Recently hitting its 1.0 milestone, this Mozilla browser has OS X finesse. The Gecko rendering engine gives you a well supported alternative to WebKit and integrates with OS features like Bonjour, Key Chain, Address Book and Spotlight. Camino is fast and stable and includes powerful ad-blocking features built in.

Camino is also supported by an active community and includes cutting-edge features like Instant Back and Forward, bookmark search and pausing downloads.

Creammonkey

Still Safari-faithful? Then we have something for you to add one of Firefox's most powerful features to OS X's built in browser. Creammonkey introduces user script support to Safari. With this plugin, you can install and browse with user scripts - tiny JavaScript webpage enhancers. Because Safari's Javascript and rendering are different than Firefox, not all scripts will work.

Growl

We've referenced this system utility before, and its time it got a proper introduction. The Growl project introduces a system-level notification engine. Applications like Adium, Skype and many others support Growl for notification windows.

The appearance settings are highly configurable. Notifications can be read or emailed to you. Plugins add to the functionality (including notification of hot-swapped hardware) and window styles. Growl is also supported by a user community.

ImageWell

This tiny app is a powerful graphics tool. There's no point in launching Photoshop and Fetch when all you want to do is crop, scale and upload an image. This can all be done in this tiny graphics utility.

Whats more, ImageWell supports annotation (think dialog bubbles) borders, watermark and drop shadow effects. And, when you are done ImageWell will upload the image with the touch of a button.

Happy 30th to Apple. Three decades and still the coolest in tech.

Brian

  


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