Posted on November 19, 2008
Otis is a fun little Mac game that’s been around for some time. The goal is to knock out blocks on a big board full of them. To knock them out, you have to click 2 or more of the same colored blocks that are touching. If there are no more block pairs you can do, you lose. While it sounds easy, the concept has proven to be pretty difficult in the end result, and the game can be pretty casual and easy or extremely challenging. The app has a nice UI , as well as some cheerful sound effects to complement the fun nature of the game. Otis is a Mac gaming classic because of its simplistic but incredibly fun gameplay.
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Posted on November 18, 2008
For those of us with jailbroken iPhones, it can be frustrating when you finally find a PNG image in your filesystem, only to see that it can’t be read on your Mac. Such images appear as question marks in Apple’s Preview.app. The first fix for this problem was a terminal command and library called fixpng. However, knowing that not everyone is handy with the Terminal, indie developer Malcom-Mac has created a GUI alternative. You just drag and drop your images into iPhonePNGApp, and they come out as normal, readable images. This strange phenomena of unreadable system is explained in-depth on his site. But anyway, if you’re interested in theming your iPod touch or iPhone, or just want to take a peek at what makes up the iPhone’s gorgeous user interface, iPhonePNGApp is a great solution for you.
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Posted on November 17, 2008
GeekTool is awesome. It’s essentially a Terminal window, but it’s on your desktop. So, while doing other work, you can see the output of Terminal (whether it be from a UNIX program or from a system output log). For all you UNIX geeks out there, this is your calling. By the way, it says it works on Panther and Tiger, but it also works on Leopard (in a nice little preference pane!).
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Posted on November 16, 2008
GrandPerspective is an awesome utility that can inspect your filesystem and graphically show you what’s taking up room. It’s extremely useful for cleaning out your Mac, and finding the chunky files on your hard drive that are just taking up space. Unfortunately, GrandPerspective is unable to reveal or delete files within the app–you have to find and delete them yourself. However, a 1.0 release is imminent, so we may see some additional functionality soon.
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Posted on November 15, 2008
NatsuLion is a nifty little native Twitter application that I just discovered this weekend. Unlike most of the Adobe AIR-based Twitter apps out there, NatsuLion has a fresh, slick feel that’s sure to make you feel at home. It has all the functions you would want from a Twitter client, including checking your friend timeline, and recognizing @-calls. But NatsuLion does better than that! You can select a user you’re following, and see your conversations between you and them, manage read/unread tweets, create favorites, and even enable Growl notification support. Also, it has a spiffy translucent background in the main window. For those of you guys that are using Twitter, definitely give NatsuLion a try.
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Posted on November 14, 2008
DownloadMonitor is an innovative little app that adds back some of the functionality lost by users of Safari. It can react to conditions of downloaded files on your computer, which is truly something that Apple should have thought of. It’s basically the download manager that wasn’t included with your browser. It has full AppleScript and Automator support, and an awesome little HUD window indicating downloading status. Pretty cool.
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