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

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!).

Rating: 5/5. Awesome.

Developer site:
Projects.Tynsoe.org/En/GeekTool

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.

Rating: 4/5. Works well, but I prefer the abilities of Disk Inventory X over the speed of this app.

Developer site:
GrandPerspectiv.SourceForge.net

Ghost is an excellent little utility that can work with hidden files in OS X. Ghost’s ingenious system for hiding and unhiding your own files is so obvious that I’m not sure how everyone else missed it. All you do is drag a file into Ghost, and check or uncheck to hide or unhide, respectively. Ghost also has an option to show or hide all hidden files in Finder, which is much faster than running the lengthy “defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE” command in Terminal over and over. This app is a must-have for people who need to work with hidden files on their Mac.

Rating: 5/5. Works fast, drag and drop is perfect, and the icon is awesome.

Developer site:
Opt-6.com/Ghost.html

DiffMerge is an awesome file comparison tool that lets you select two sources, and compare them. You can compare folders, individual files, or even several files at once. Once compared, you can merge them (which works quite well, I might add), or choose from a few other options. Overall it’s a great app with awesome performance, and is definitely worth a glance if you need to merge several items. As an added bonus, it comes with an equally awesome command line tool.

Rating: 4.5/5. Really nice app (and easy to use!), but the user interface is a little aged.

Developer site:
SourceGear.com/DiffMerge

OpenTerminal is a tiny, yet useful little app that has a single, simple function: to open the Terminal at the current folder in the Finder. It’s available as a little app, or a contextual menu item in Finder. Both versions are very useful to people who use the Terminal a lot, since you no longer have to type “cd”, then the directory you want to work in. This app is extremely minimal, but comes in handy a lot. If you use the Terminal frequently, this one is worth trying.

Rating: 5/5. Easy, works as described.

Developer site:
Homepage.Mac.com/ThomasW/OpenTerminal

Every copy of Mac OS X (or any Unix-based system) ships with a Terminal application.  Terminal lets you run commands and access deeper tools than what’s available through most applications with a GUI. But, many have also complained at the lack of features that the default Terminal has. This is where iTerm comes in. iTerm has a ton of features like AppleScript support, custom background pictures, Bonjour support (with bookmarks), mouse focus following, rearrangeable tabs, a customizable interface, and even the ability to send a command to multiple tabs. The list goes on. iTerm is an amazing app that’s nearing its 1.0 release, which I really look forward to in the near future.

 
Rating: 5/5. Nice app, easy to use. Everything Apple didn’t include in Terminal.

Developer site:
iTerm.SourceForge.net

Split & Concat is an old Mac freeware favorite of mine. While it hasn’t been updated for some time, it’s still a very useful little app. Pretty much it lets you split files into smaller sections (useful when uploading large files online) of the size of your choice. Or, you can “concat” files (short for concatenate), which will stitch split files back together. It can even repair damaged archives using the Unix tool spar and par2. Overall, this is a nice app that should be a part of any Mac freeware junkie’s collection.

Rating: 4.5/5. Nice functionality, but the interface could be better.

Developer site:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~loekjehe/Split&Concat/

7z is an extremely high compression file archiving algorithm that’s recently become much more mainstream. Put simply, you can compress some files far beyond what simply zipping them can do. For example, I compressed a 700 MB folder of files down to 180 MB with Ez 7z, a Mac 7z archiver that I recently discovered. The only downside is that it uses the Terminal outside of the app to do all of the work (visibly) instead of actually running the command inside the app. Still an excellent freeware pick, though.

Rating: 4.5/5. Amazing compression ratio, but uses Terminal outside of the app.

Developer site:
Is currently down. Here’s the MacUpdate page, though:
MacUpdate.com/Info.php/ID/19139

MainMenu is another essential Mac app for those of you who want to keep your Macs running like new. MainMenu sits in your menu bar, and lets you run many maintenance scripts or repair disk permissions. Many other maintenance tasks are included (rebuilding the Spotlight database, cleaning caches, etc), and Growl support is an added plus. Definitely a must-have.

Rating: 5/5. Useful, convenient, and packed with nice features.

Developer site:
SantaSW.com