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Four Free, Offbeat Apps for the Mac

July 11th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 8 Comments

While I use a PC more often than a Mac, I have a MacBook and often add useful applications to it from my sojourns through the worlds of open source software and free ware. Here are four free, useful applicaitons for your Mac.

Bean is a free, open source word processor for the Mac, and it’s designed to pop up and close quickly, with a very simple interface. Bean is really more of a text editor than a word processor, but it has a strong set of features, Take a look at the screenshots here especially noting how the Inspector feature works (shown above).

AppCleaner is a very thorough tool for uninstalling applications from your Mac. It gets rid of all files, widgets and any stray remnants that a particular application puts on your system.


ScreenCleaner Pro
Gammawork performs a very interesting function. If you’ve used a particular monitor with your Mac for a long time, then it’s likely the brightness and contrast have faded. This free little applet adjusts the gamma and a few other settings on the monitor, so that the display looks rich again, in one step. I’ve tried it and liked it, and it’s gotten a number of good reviews.

Do you work with PDFs a lot? Combine PDFs does exactly what it’s name implies. It lets you combine two or more PDF files, which can be especially useful when you’re doing a piece of writing for which you need to refer to several PDFs. When combined, you can search for specific information in one big document rather than flipping between many.

Do you know of any useful freeware or open source software for the Mac?

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8 Comments Post your own comment

Genie says: July 11th, 2008 8:34pm

The ScreenCleaner app is an April Fool’s joke…

Jesper says: July 12th, 2008 5:54am

@Genie a rather good one at that. Samuel Dean fell for it. That’s what you get when you don’t read the description :-)

Alex says: July 12th, 2008 6:46am

Take the shame

Foodfreak says: July 12th, 2008 7:51am

offbeat… CheckOff as ToDo list for the menu bar. NameMangler for quick multi-option renaming. punakea for the tagging experience.

not so offbeat: textwrangler, adium.

metroxing says: July 12th, 2008 2:09pm

BTW, Apple’s FREE and included PREVIEW app will let you combine PDF’s – just drag and drop.

Samuel says: July 12th, 2008 3:32pm

Actually, there are many of the gamma adjustment tools that are free for the Mac. Sorry for providing the wrong link. I wasn’t writing from my Mac. Try this:

http://www.gammawork.com/

Carolyn Pritchard says: July 14th, 2008 2:16pm

We’ve corrected the Gammawork error.

Apologies for the confusion.

best, Carolyn.

doingText: Getting Text Collaboration Done says: April 19th, 2009 6:01am

[...] on its existing formatting. The source document I used was an .rtfd file I originally created in Bean. I was pleasantly surprised to find that doingText recognized line breaks and new paragraphs [...]

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