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.

Rating: 5/5. Tons of fun, many levels of difficulty make for a great time.

Developer site:
WonderWarp.com/Otis

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

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.

Rating: 4.5/5. Feels nice, but it’d be excellent to make it menubar-based (like Twitterrific).

Developer site:
NatsuLion.org

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.

Rating: 5/5. Great UI, easy to use, functions well.

Developer site:
pfau-SoftwareDevelopment.de

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

I’m working on it. Really. I’ve just been bogged down with stuff to do. I’m currently finding more awesome apps (only the best for you guys, haha), and will be posting again soon. Hopefully by the end of the weekend I’ll have some posts accumulated. Also, thanks to mrjim for his comment on my “Sorry Folks” post a bit earlier. It made my efforts seem worthwhile, so I can’t thank you enough. But anyway, stay tuned. We’ll be back soon.

Edit: 10/28/08: I’m starting to build up several posts here, but I’d rather have a long wait then consistent posts than a short wait between every post. Stay tuned…

PackageAssistant is a very new, nice little app that Apple should have included with Leopard. Essentially it checks your package receipts to see what Installers (.pkg or .mpkg files) you have run in the past. From here, you can verify that they’re installed correctly (represented by a green dot) or have been altered (represented by a red dot). Then, if you want, you can uninstall straight from PackageAssistant. While this app is in its early stages, I can see a bright future for it.

Rating: 4.5/5. Window is non-resizable, but the app itself functions great.

Developer site:
Code.Google.com/P/SourApple/Wiki/PackageAssistant