Brian Boyko’s Personal Picks

Thanks for bringing OSX fanatics back, Chris! The only thing that I miss, however, is the reviews of shareware in the email itself. That said, I’m sure I picked up a a couple of Mac-centric programs over the past couple of months that are useful.

Handbrake - http://handbrake.m0k.org/ - OSX - Free (GPL) - Handbrake’s a DVD to MPEG-4 converter, useful for those people who care more about filesize than quality and don’t really feel like carrying tons of DVDs everywhere they go (like, say, laptop owners on long flights.)

VideoLan - http://www.videolan.org/ - OSX - Free (GPL) - Videolan is a video-playing software program. Let’s face it, DVD Player and Quick Time for Macintosh are good programs, but they don’t play everything. VideoLan is the closest thing on the Macintosh TO playing everything. It plays both file-based and streaming MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and DivX files, and television channels. It will also play DVDs, although you still need DVD player for Macintosh to decode DVDs. (Darn DMCA!) This has been ported to just about every platform there is, including windows and Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE and Debian linux, and there’s complilable source code for BSD based and Solaris systems.

X-Chat Aqua - http://sourceforge.net/projects/xchataqua/ - Free (GPL) - The waiting is over! IRC fanatics can now enjoy a free, full featured IRC chat client without having to boot up into the X11 platform, having to settle for less than full features, or paying shareware fees. X-Chat is free, newly native to Aqua, and about as full-featured as you can get. Functionally similar to the Linux and Windows version of the program, X-Chat is a robust chat client with tons of tools to make your chatting easy.

Colloquy - http://colloquy.info/ - Free (GPL) - Colloquy is a beta version of a free IRC client that adheres to the Aqua look and feel, with more than a passing resemblance to the iChat application (although a more standard text-based IRC view is available) Newbies familiar with iChat but new to IRC will find this progam worth a try. Even better looking than the commercial shareware application Snak, although I have found it to be a bit buggy. More development will soon be forthcoming.

Poisoned - http://gottsilla.net/ - Free (GPL) - Poisoned is a free peer to peer application for MacOSX which supports the Gnutella, and Fast Track networks.

Azureus Bit Torrent Client - http://azureus.sourceforge.net/ - Free (GPL) - This BitTorrent client for Macintosh is as full featured as they come. Easy to use and setup.

Furthernet - http://www.furthurnet.com/ - Free (GPL) - For those who like to tape-trade live concerts, Furthernet is one of the more interesting and more innovative uses of Peer to peer software. It’s designed to ONLY allow material that has been approved by the copyright holder to be traded - as such, most of the files on Furthernet are full-length concert recordings of live concerts. As such, all the files on Furthernet are legal to own and share. Even if you’re not into concerts, this “proof-of-concept” P2P program is with supporting for it’s implications of academic and scientific work.

iRate - http://irate.sourceforge.net/ - Free (GPL) - Speaking of free and legal, IRate radio is peer-to-peer in reverse. It sends music files directly to your computer for as long as you want to listen. You then get to rate the music files you liked well, and the music files you didn’t like poorly - then iRate will send you more of the type of music you do like. Like Furthernet, all the files on iRate are free to download and have been approved by the copyright holder.

AbiWord - http://www.abisource.com/download/development.phtml - Free (GPL) - AbiWord, the free multiplatform word processor, not to be confused with OpenOffice, the OTHER free multiplatform word processor, looks like it’s soon going to be available for the Macintosh as Aqua-native in it’s next build 2.1.2. Those who live dangerously might wish to download the development build. Those of us who have been waiting for a native word processor to replace the dependance on Microsoft Word (and the less-than-fully-featured AppleWorks) may soon rejoice.