SaudiMac

Collection of free applications for your mac...

I’ve long been interested in Open Source applications for proprietary Operating Systems like Microsoft Windows and, more recently, Mac OS X. I’ve only been a Mac user for less than 2 years. But, I’ve been learning a lot by collecting F/FOSS (and free web based services) information on my personal blog as a learning tool. I thought some MacDevCenter readers might find some of the Mac F/FOSS findings interesting too. So, I’ll be posting summaries from my blog here whenever I have an interesting list to contribute. And, if you know of interesting/useful F/FOSS for Mac OS X, please let me know!

• Nvu: WYSIWYG HTML Editor

We used to hand code HTML for web pages in the old days. Tools like Frontpage, Dreamweaver, and even good old Windows’ Notepad were commonly used by web developers in those dark days. These days most of us use some kind of Content Mangement System (CMS) or outsource it to a blogging or web management site (often for free). But, every now and then a WYSIWIG HTML editor comes in handy. For me, that now and then event is usually creating some kind of product information table for a product review (such as the ones I sometimes write for the O’Reilly Network. The…

• AppleJack Mac Troubleshooter

I haven’t found myself in the position to need this yet. But, the Open Source AppleJack sounds like something I should learn more about… just in case. It drops you into Mac OS X’s Single User Mode text interface (very familiar to UNIX related OS users) where you can access critical parts of the system to fix hard drive , permissions, caches, and swap file problems.

• jEdit Programmer’s Editor

Unlike many programmers who use a single text editor for nearly all tasks, I tend to use a couple of different ones: vi (vim) or nedit for quick edits on UNIX/Linux systems, notepad++ for quick edits on Windows systems, and TextEdit for quick edits on Mac boxes. However, if I know I will be working on something for an extended period, I often choose to us jEdit Programmer’s Text Editor. jEdit is a Java-based application with a rich feature set and a larger body of communinty contributed add-on plugin modules. This multi-platform Open Source editor runs on everything I use: Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. This means that I don’t have to adjust much in the way of muscle-memory-typing to get things done regardless of what platform I’m using at the time.

• CyberDuck 2.7 (Mac OS X)

The Mac OS X Open Source ftp/sftp client CyberDuck 2.7 was just updated. If you’re looking for a GUI ftp client to use on the Mac (or even old UNIX hacks like me who still mostly use ftp and scp from the terminal command line), you might want to take a look at the rich feature set in this Open Source app. In addition to ftp/sftp file transfers, it supports using an external editor for remote file editing and provides a Dashboard widget.

• The R Project for Statistical Computing

The R Project for Statistical Computing is an Open Source application with binary installation routines for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It is much much more than a simple statistical package. R provides an interpreted statistical programming language that looks a lot like S. The resemblance is so strong that I can use my old S language reference books to work with R.

R provides a graphing facility that goes far beyond what you might have used in spreadsheets like Excel.
R version 2.4.0 was just released last month (October 3).

• stikkit: Web Yellow Sticky Notes

stikkit describes their currently free beta-release web product as the digital equivalent of a sticky note: the easiest thing you can grab to jot down an idea or reminder. As you type, Stikkit watches for appointments, to-dos, people, bookmarks and more, magically extracting and organizing the important details.
I just started playing with it today. And, it does seem like something worth returning for some further testing. One of its interesting features is the ability to share a sticky note with other people.

• CoreDuoTemp

CoreDuoTemp is a freeware utility for Intel Macs that gives you information about the Mac’s internal temperature and CPU speed.
If you moved from an iBook G4 (which runs very cool) to a 2GHz MacBook (which tends to run hot) like me, you probably had this utility running a lot during this past summer.

(Via Mac DevCenter.)