Magnifique is a is a nifty app that allows you to theme your Mac with a completely revamped interface. Many themes (which you download and apply with Magnifique) are available for free, and are for the most part very well-designed. It’s intuitive and effective, and an excellent app to have if you’re getting bored with the Mac OS X UI (or just want to get rid of those nasty Aqua elements!). My current favorite theme is “Disinmaso”, which is a mashup of two themes by interface designer Susumu Yoshida called “Disingenuous” and “Umaso”.

WARNING: As of this writing, Magnifique is NOT compatible with Snow Leopard. It is only compatible with Leopard. A Snow Leopard-compatible version is being planned, but will likely require a rewrite of the entire application, so it may be some time before it’s available.

Rating: 5/5. Easy, functional, and has a bunch of awesome themes available for free download.

Developer site:
MagnifiqueApp.com

Poladroid is a fun little app that converts your images into Polaroid-style photos, complete with post-processing. It adds a great (and editable) vignette, and changes the colors of your photos. My favorite part is that you actually have to wait for the images to develop, and you can watch them slowly appear over time. The interface is simple–just drag and drop a photo, then wait. It’s not exactly the most useful application out there, but it’s a lot of fun to mess around with.

Rating: 4.5/5. Finish localizing the menus, and it’ll be perfect.

Developer site:
Poladroid.net

Colors is an extremely simple app that can get the exact RGB value of any color on your screen, and copy it to your clipboard in several different formats. It’s great for web and/or graphic designers who find the “perfect color”, and need to use it in their work. The UI is a minimal HUD window with a small magnifying glass that you can click. This then zooms in onto a small portion of the screen, allowing you to select the exact pixel you want.

Rating: 5/5. Stylish, accurate, and easy to use.

Developer site:
MattPatenaude.com

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.

Rating: 5/5. Works great, images come out clean.

Developer site:
Malcom-Mac.com/Blog/iPhonePNGApp

Due to the hideous icon of WeatherVane, the app I posted yesterday, I felt compelled to post an app today with a nice, clean icon. After some scavenging, I found an excellent note-taking app called SketchBox. SketchBox is like OS X’s Stickies app, only infinitely better. Each note you make is stored in an iPhoto-esque environment with
your notes in a grid view. But, what makes the notes special is that they can store text, drawings, pictures, and even custom timers. All of these functions make for a great app with an attractive price: $0.

Rating: 5/5. Great app, amazing interface, and especially stunning icon. Perfect across the board.

Developer site:
OMZ-Software.de/SketchBox_Index.html

P.S. The gigantic 512X512 icon is available here. Seriously, look. You won’t be disappointed. It’s so crisp!:
http://FreeMacAppaDay.com/Images/SketchBox.png

Pipette is a simple tool that lets you find the hex color value of any pixel on the screen. All you do is click the little eyedropper, then drag to the pixel on your screen that you want the color of. Then release, and press command-c to copy the hex value to your clipboard. Very useful for Photoshop designers and other photo editors.

Rating: 4.5/5. It’d be nice to be able to just click a spot instead of clicking and dragging to it.

Developer site:
CharcoalDesign.co.uk/Pipette

RapidoResizer is a nice image-resizing app for mac created by the aptly-named developer “app4mac”. It can batch resize images with ease to any proportions you set, and resize it on the spot. It has a nice little preview window and a HUD interface where you can change your settings. The only drawback to this app is that it has an annoying advertisement splash screen when you use command-Q to quit. Fortunately just closing the main window or using the Dock to quit avoids this behavior. All in all though, it’s a nice app that I use very frequently.

Rating: 3.5/5. A blatant copy of Resize ‘Em All (no longer available), and also has an inevitable splash screen at quit. Still functions great, though.

Developer site:
app4mac.com/Action_Products.lasso

OSXplanet is a fun project that displays a current view of the world from space–right on your desktop. It can display live data of clouds, volcanoes, storms, earthquakes, and many other natural occurrences. It also renders other planets as seen from other planets, which is awesome. It uses almost no CPU power and has a well-integrated UI. What more could you want?

Rating: 5/5. Functions perfectly, and looks amazing.

Developer site:

DrawBerry is a light vector drawing app that supports everything you’d want: image importing, color swatches, shape relativity editing, and tons of other great stuff. It’s great for small imaging projects that don’t require the bulk of an expensive app like Adobe’s Illustrator or Tweakersoft’s VectorDesigner (which is also a great app, by the way). This app, although slim, is packed with nice tools that will keep you busy for ages.

Rating: 4.5/5. More features would be appreciated, but the speed and dexterity of it now is great.

Developer site:
Is kind of wacko. Here’s the MacUpdate Page:
MacUpdate.com/Info.php/ID/26577/DrawBerry

Sequential is a simple image viewer for Mac that has a smooth, unobtrusive interface. It can read a ton of image formats, and has a great EXIF data reader that’s built with Leopard’s beautiful HUD interface window. It also works great for viewing comics and/or manga. And, of course, you can view images in full-screen. Sequential is a very simple app, but very nice all the same.

Rating: 4.5/5. Missing a few small features, but has the best UI of any image viewer I’ve seen.

Developer site:
SequentialX.com