Author Archive

Although we just reviewed two photo and doodling apps, there’s a new contender on the block. Plasq’s new drawing app, Skitch, has been hanging around for a while on the web, but yesterday the public beta went live. Plasq has started sending out copies to people who signed up as beta testers a while ago. If you haven’t already signed up, it may take a while for you to get your copy, as Plasq wants to keep the invite rate steady. Plasq also wants to make sure that their photo sharing site can handle the load, so invites may take a while to come.

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to interview two of the developers from the excellent MyDreamApp site. The MDA site has been very quiet for a long while, but it turns out that a lot has been going on behind the scenes. Read on below for the exclusive interview with two of the founders of MyDreamApp - John Casasanta and Austin Sarner!

So, what exactly is My Dream App and what inspired you to start it?

While a lot of the Mac apps out there are free, most are quite expensive, or simply not worth the price being asked for them. This causes more and more people to resort to pirating, which not only is illegal, but is also unfair to the dev’s who spent long, hard hours coding these apps. Not to mention all the bad karma implications.

Here I have compiled a list of free alternatives to normally expensive Mac apps, that are just so useful you gotta have ‘em.

There are tons of RSS readers for the Mac. However, most of them ship with basic features and are almost powerless. Introducing NetNewsWire, a powerful and robust RSS reader. NetNewsWire has a familiar three-paned interface, similar to Mail.app, and can fetch and display news from thousands of different websites and weblogs, making it quick and easy to keep up with the latest news. Besides reading articles and news, you can download podcasts and audio files and have them sync to your portable audio device. The app now synchronizes with NewsGator Online and the rest of the NewsGator RSS Suite.

Thanks to everyone who entered the dryptAway giveaway contest. For those of you who don’t remember, dryptAway is a helpful OS X security utility valued at $10. Unfortunately, we couldn’t pick everyone, and ended up selecting five winners. The winners are Louis, David, Brian Waldo, Mike, and Mr D.A. Your serials are on their way. To everyone who lost, there are plenty more chances to win free apps and more, so check back frequently

CSSEdit from MacRabbit is a leader in CSS editing apps, and allows you to design beautiful and innovative stylesheets for the any web project. With it’s intuitive UI, and low price, CSSEdit is perfect for the beginner, intermediate, and advanced web developer.

App Update is a free Dashboard Widget that automatically checks for updates to your installed software. It supports Apple’s software directory, MacUpdate and Version Tracker. It will present you with a tidy link list of all the updates found, enabling you to read release-notes and download the updates you want quickly and painlessly.

App Update comes with plenty of features such as Growl support, ability to manage application versioning data, support for preference panes, quicktime plugins and frameworks, and more. It also has a built-in help function that you can access at any time by pressing “Shift+H”.

This little app may not be to everyones taste, but to some it may be ever so useful.

LittleSecrets is a Mac OS X app for storing, you guessed it - secrets. You can entrust notes of any kind to the program and save them encrypted on your hard disk. It’s up to you for which purpose you use the app, e. g. storing passwords, account numbers, provider data, serial numbers, project ideas, URLs etc. LittleSecrets keeps your information in a safe place and makes sure that only you can access the information inside it.

dryptAway is a powerful but compact OS X security utility with great drag and drop features. dryptaway will create RC4 or Blowfish encrypted files by the extension name “.drypt”. Enter a password hit, “Enter”, drop a file for encryption/decryption and you’re done! dryptAway will also create encrypted sparse (grows as space is needed.) disk images (.dmg) and burn them to disc if you need. (Hint: simply hit Command + B to burn) You can set dryptAway in .zip, .gzip or .dmg. If one of these extra modes is set, dryptAway’s encryption/decryption mode will be ignored - simple as that.