Adapter is a free video converter for Mac & PC. It converts avi, saves flash .flv, crops video and more! It even works with audio and image files so you can convert wav to mp3 and transform jpg files! This tiny freeware program lets you quickly and easily change any file type to any other file type.

DOWNLOAD NOW (10.2 MB)

(Via MacUpdate – Mac OS X.)

Macsome Audio Editor: as a powerful audio editor freeware, it supports easily and quickly editing MP3 or AAC on Mac OS X. With Macsome AudioEditor, you can quickly cut and trim audio, as well as split files. It works with compressed MP3 and AAC formats to edit without the quality loss caused by other editors. Get perfect quality audio when editing natively in the MP3, AAC formats. You can also use it to make Ringtons for iPhone, or any other phone which support MP3 or AAC file as its ringtone. And you can also use it to remove any unwanted part or ads from audio files. You can add ID Tags for the audio file you saved to disk. ID Tags including Song Name, Artist, Album Name, etc. The most of all , it is a freeware, free to use software, free to upgrade.

DOWNLOAD NOW (1.9 MB)

(Via MacUpdate – Mac OS X.)

11 great Mac apps worth $5000. That is what’s waiting for you at the end of this post. But hey, what’s a great list without a spoiler?

The very first Mac article ever published by MakeUseOf was about Things. That was about 2 years ago. Since then we’ve continued to serve the Mac community well, publishing over 300 articles. While reviewing apps, part of the job description is testing them out.

After we’re done, we ask ourselves the golden question, ‘Is this app a keeper?’ That’s what this list is all about — those apps that eventually find a permanent place on our Macs to call Home. Everyone should have these installed, regardless of what you use your Mac for.

Dropbox

Everyone knows Dropbox for their amazing file-sharing service. Drag any file into the Dropbox folder and it automatically gets shared.

Sign up for a free account and you automatically get 2GB to share with your friends. Set up shared folders and anything you drop will be instantly downloaded by others.

Need mobile access to your files? There’s an iPhone app just for that.

AppFresh

Surely you must know how it feels to load an app, just to have it inform you that it’s outdated and there’s a newer version available? Don’t we always need the latest and greatest?

AppFresh is what you want. It will scan through all of your installed apps, plugins, preference panes, widgets and spew up the results in a matter of seconds. All the information you need to see will be laid out in front of you: latest version number, currently installed version, release date, release notes. It’s a geek’s all-you-can-eat buffet.

Adium

Adium is probably the most widely-used multi-protocol chat app on Macs. It’s oddly strange that it’s never been featured exclusively on MakeUseOf.

Adium supports a wide range of chat protocols from MSN to Facebook to ICQ to Gadu Gadu. If you use it, Adium supports it.

Adding to its list of features, Adium is also hugely customisable in both its theme and functionality. Check out the addons that the Adium community has to offer.

The Unarchiver

Emphasis on the ‘The’. This little app – that comes without a user interface – can probably unpack just about any file you throw at it. Once installed, it will replace Mac’s native unarchiving utility, BOMArchiveHelper.

To mention a few, it supports and unarchives RAR, ZIP, Tar, 7-Zip, Stuffit, CAB, MSI and even EXE files. The only format it cannot unpack is ACE. But that’s hardly a worry.

Besides being clever, The Unarchiver is also efficient. You can click on as many RAR or ZIP files for it to unpack but it will never overwork your system. Instead, it will queue the files and unpacks them individually.

Transmission

This little app is always being compared to uTorrent. Why? Transmission is fantastic BitTorrent client that was specifically designed to be integrated seamlessly on a Mac.

It’s simple and minimalistic, it’s lightweight, it’s fast and there are a lot of cool things you can do with it.

It will be a long time before I part with this trusty app.

AppCleaner

Macs have always boasted simple installation and uninstallation procedures. To install most Mac apps, all you need to do is drag it over to the Applications folder. To uninstall, drag the app to Trash. But the story doesn’t quite end there.

There will be a couple of mystery files left on your Mac. They won’t do much harm but since you’re uninstalling an app, chances are, you won’t need these files lingering on your Mac. AppCleaner solves this debacle.

Drag any file you want to uninstall into AppCleaner and it will display all the related files. Make sure that you agree and click Delete. Goodbye, remnants!

Skitch

We’ve written about Skitch more than once. Personally, I’ve used it for years. And there’s a good reason for that.

Skitch is one of the most basic yet impressive image editors for Mac. It is capable of saving images to JPG, PNG, PDF, BMP, TIF, GIF and SVG. That should cover most of your image-saving needs.

I mainly use Skitch for simple image manipulations like resizing, cropping, converting to other formats and annotations.

It’s quick and I love the fact that I know the output file size even before saving the file. Skitch also keeps a history of every file every edited. It may not sound like much but that’s what I love it for. I can turn the History viewer on and conveniently grab a file which I modified a week ago.

Perian & VLC

I find it awfully weird that Quicktime still doesn’t support Divx out of the box. Like every good marketing strategy — when there’s demand, there’s supply. Failing every good marketing strategy — Perian is free. Still, it’s considered the swiss-army knife of video codecs for Quicktime (why does that sound so familiar?).

I would probably be at the wrath of the Guillotine of Tech if I used the word ‘video’ and didn’t follow it quickly with ‘VLC’. For years, VLC has reigned cross-platform champion as the most capable video player. Macs are no exception.

iStat Menus

Keeping with the minimalistic mindset, Apple maintains that, ‘The less you know, the better.’ That’s why Activity Monitor is buried deep within the Utilities folder. Generally, a Mac user should focus on the task at hand and not worry about how much free memory is available.

iStat Menus makes this information easily attainable — on your menubar. At the cost of some menubar-estate, this preference pane will add vital information like CPU usage, temperature, memory usage, network activity and other goodies to the top of your screen where it’s visible at all times.

Sure, this may go against Apple’s teachings but hey, we’re geeks — we need to know everything that’s going on, all the time.

OnyX

OnyX was featured just once on MakeUseOf in the article Ten Tools To Keep Your Mac In Tip-Top Shape. But you know what? Once is more than enough to convince anyone that OnyX is a keeper.

Think of OnyX as a strict physician. It inspects and examines your Mac for anything that might seem wonky and straightens out all the kinks.

It can also clean out old log files and performs a series of automated maintenance to keep your Mac healthy.

Teamviewer

C’mon. This app doesn’t need an introduction!

Teamviewer is one of the best zero-configuration remote-support applications that’s available. Period. And since it’s also available for Mac, why not take advantage of it?

Even if you’re not on the receiving end, having Teamviewer installed is really convenient if you are your family’s tech-support team.

Quicksilver

Highly regarded by productivists as the definitive must-have application, Quicksilver has finally won me over. Sure, its highlight may have been the Tiger-Leopard era but it still has its place in Snow Leopard.

With a couple of quick keystrokes, sending an email or transferring files can be as simple as launching an application. But don’t be fooled, it’s not a simple app launcher. It can do so much more!

It definitely takes a bit of getting used to but it’s highly rewarding once you’ve honed the skill. In fact, you may feel slightly disabled if you’re on a Mac without Quicksilver.

Bean & TextWrangler

I bunched these 2 apps together, not only because they’re both text editors or because they’re free. Rather, it’s because I simply couldn’t make up my mind.

Bean is has slightly more features, supporting Word documents. Aside from that, it also launch amazingly fast!

Bean is an alternative to using Microsoft Word on my Mac. Since I don’t work with Word documents that often, there’s no point in forking the money over to buy a copy.

I use TextWrangler for different purposes, mainly for what lacks in TextEdit — a word counter. It also supports coding and HTML, which is helpful on occasion.

Carbon Copy Cloner

With all the reports of Time Machines crapping out after a year of use, I refused to take any chances and decided back up my data manually. Carbon Copy Cloner was such a helpful application that I just had to find a spot for it on my Mac.

With features like scheduled tasks and incremental backups, it’s almost a good as Time Machine (without the fancy interface). It allows you to make complete or selective backups of your Mac, backup to a networked Mac, backup to a disk image and even restore from one.

Using Carbon Copy Cloner means freeing yourself from the backup schedules of Time Machine and having complete control over your backups.

Burn

Not that I’m complaining but my fancy Mac does not allow me to burn DVD videos outside of iDVD. There’s just no native support outside of the iLife app suite. Want to burn a music CD but not with iTunes? Tough.

Burn is a simple application that slips right into place. In fact, it’s so simple, it’s crazy. I messed around with it a bit by dragging an AVI and told it to burn a video DVD. I thought it would produce an error of some kind because only MPG files can be used. You know what Burn returned? ‘Would you like me to convert it for you?’ I can’t believe this app is free.

So there you go. 15 apps worth having on every Mac. Have a favourite app that’s not on the list? Share it with us in the comments.

(Via MakeUseOf.com.)

Loginox is an application which lets you easily customize the login screen.

Use Loginox to change the login background image with a single Drag-and-Drop.

Why navigate through all the folders on your hard disk? Drag a JPG image from anywhere and drop it into the main window of Loginox. A simple click on the ’set new login image’ button will change the login background image.

The image size of the default image is 2560 x 1600 and has a ratio 8/5. You can prepare your images with Sizerox (www.sizerox.com) to have the right dimension and ratio for your customized login screen.

For switching back to the Leopard default login background image click on the ‘Reset to default’ button.

DOWNLOAD NOW (7.3 MB)

(Via MacUpdate – Mac OS X.)

FreeDMG is one of the most powerful and easy to use disk imaging program available for Mac OS X. With this software it is possible to quickly perform disk imaging on the fly. Both the program’s window, and the dock icon can be used for drag-and-drop imaging. There many image formats that that can be chosen (UDZO, UDCO, etc.). FreeDMG can make internet enabled disk images for distribution to Macs as well as ISO/Joliet hybrid images for cross-platform delivery. Verbose preferences, and a built-in log window help users hide/display additional information about the imaging process.

Gain easy access to the many options available for creating and manipulating disk images in Mac OS X with FreeDMG. From the hidden ‘resize’ function of hdiutil to the adjustable compresion levels available for the UDZO format, this software attempts to unveil it all. Users have the option to overwrite exising files, and can choose to quit the program automatically after creating an image on launch. It is possible to encrypt images (password protect) with the click of a button.

With FreeDMG you can attach beautiful html/rtf software license agreements to disk images. This software is currently the best way to add SLAs to disk images for multi-lingual distribution. The license creation process in FreeDMG prevents character loss for all 2-byte languages.

DOWNLOAD NOW (1.2 MB)

(Via MacUpdate – Mac OS X.)

Soundflower is a Mac OS X (10.2 and later) system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. Soundflower is easy to use, it simply presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio application to send and receive audio with no other support needed. Soundflower is free, open-source, and runs on Mac Intel and PPC computers.

Example: To send audio from iTunes to Max/MSP, open the System Preferences and select Soundflower (2ch) as the device for sound output inside the Sound panel. Then, inside Max/MSP’s DSP Status Window, select Core Soundflower (2ch) as the input device. All output of iTunes should now be sent to Max/MSP’s adc~ object.

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(Via MacUpdate – Mac OS X.)

An operating system update like this Friday’s release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard is a perfect time to clean up your computer and start fresh. Let’s prepare your Mac for this weekend’s 10.6 upgrade.

Before You Upgrade, Part 1: Clean Up Your Mac

You don’t want to take those applications you haven’t launched in months, giant log files, superfluous startup items, and even old documents you don’t need anymore into Snow Leopard, so the first thing you want to do is give your Mac the virtual hose-down. Audit your data, applications, and login items; run some maintenance, and give the old hard drive a checkup with Disk Utility. Here are detailed instructions on how to clean up and revive your bloated, sluggish Mac.

Before You Upgrade, Part 2: Back Up Your Data

Before you crack open that pretty Snow Leopard box, get yourself an external FireWire drive and run a full backup of all the important files on your Mac. If you’ve got Leopard now you should already be running Time Machine, so make sure you’ve got a fresh new backup completed. If you’re still on Tiger, here are a gaggle of free Mac backup utilities for you to use. (But seriously, if you don’t already: get a FireWire drive. Back up your Mac. Now.)

Before You Upgrade, Part 3 (The Extra-Paranoid Track): Make a Bootable Backup of Your Mac

Maybe you go through the entire Snow Leopard upgrade process only to realize that your one, essential, company VPN application isn’t yet compatible. Maybe you accidentally lose files or apps in the upgrade process, or you just decide you hate Snow Leopard and want to go back to Leopard stat. One great way to ensure you can go right back to your working Mac’s state before an upgrade is to mirror the current state of your Mac on a bootable external hard drive. Even if you’ve got a Time Machine backup, grab another external drive and clone your Mac’s internal hard drive. With a bootable clone on hand, if anything goes wrong or you just want to boot back up into your old Mac’s environment (settings, apps, data, and all), you can do so by holding down the T key Option key, restarting your Mac, and choosing the clone as your bootup disk.

The Upgrade Path to Snow Leopard

To install Snow Leopard on your Intel-based Mac, Apple recommends you go from Leopard using the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade disc, or go from Tiger using the $169 Mac Box Set. Here’s Apple’s full set of system requirements.

The important thing to know is that you can only install the $29 upgrade on top of an existing Leopard installation. That is, you can’t start with a formatted Mac hard drive and install Snow Leopard only, which is kind of a bummer for geeks who like to do totally fresh, from-scratch installations.

Correction and update: We have confirmed that the preview of Snow Leopard DOES offer a standalone installer that works on a freshly-formatted hard drive without an existing Leopard installation or DVD. While we can’t absolutely say before Friday whether or not the final release will work this way, it’s very possible it will. (Read: The full version of the new Mac OS X may be just $29.) My apologies for the mistake! Thanks to commenters RudolphDer and dark42 for asking!

Choose one of two methods for the upgrade.

Upgrade Method 1. Install Snow Leopard Directly on Top of Your Existing Leopard Setup (Easy)

If youre already running a relatively clean installation of Leopard, and you want to make this update as easy, fast, and painless as possible, youre just going to pop your Snow Leopard DVD into your Macs drive and go. I did this using the Dev Preview of Snow Leopard on a well-used and cluttered Mac, and things went just fine. This is the upgrade path Apple wants you to take and suits most folks—with a good backup, youve nothing to fear. The only possible disadvantage to this approach is that some old logs and system files you dont need might stick around.

Upgrade Method 2. Wipe Your Mac Clean and Start from Scratch (Advanced)

Serious nerds who want their Snow Leopard installation absolutely pristine (and come from the Windows school of wipe-and-reinstall) can go all-out and format their Mac’s hard drive, reinstall Leopard, upgrade to Snow Leopard,, install Snow Leopard and then restore their data from backup and reinstall all their essential apps.

The one advantage to this approach is that you can take the opportunity to repartition your Mac’s hard drive in the process (though if it’s Boot Camp you want, you can set that up any time, not just when wiping your drive). You’ll also know for sure your Mac is completely cruft-free. The disadvantage to this approach is that it’s tedious and time-consuming. The Snow Leopard installation can take 45 minutes to an hour, then you’ve got to restore your Time Machine backup (depending on how much data we’re talking, this can also take up to an hour) and then you’ve got to reinstall your applications.

If you do decide to go this route on Snow Leopard upgrade day, here are a few notes:

• Only start once you have your Leopard DVD and Snow Leopard DVD in hand, and your data backed up.
• Inventory your Mac’s application list. Command-line lovers can do a simple ls /Applications/ >> appsiuse.txt to get a textual listing of everything in the Applications folder. Otherwise you can just eye your Applications folder and note down its contents. Also check your System Preferences panes for any panels you’ve installed there.
• After you’ve inventoried your applications and backed up your data, insert your Leopard DVD and click on ‘Install Mac OS X.’
• Insert your Snow Leopard DVD and click on ‘Install Mac OS X.’ When you reach the Snow Leopard Installer’s ‘Welcome’ screen, from the Utilities menu, choose ‘Disk Utility…’ From there you can (say a little prayer) and format or repartition your Mac’s internal hard drive. Once that’s done, continue with the installation as usual.

You get a few opportunities to restore your Time Machine backup during the Snow Leopard installation. Even if you pass each time, once Snow Leopard is completely installed, you can get your data out of Time Machine by running the Migration Assistant (located in /Applications/Utilities/).

One important thing to know about restoring a Time Machine backup: you can’t be logged in as the same user name that you’re restoring. That is, if I’m logged in as gina, and my backed-up Time Machine user is also gina, the Migration Assistant either makes you rename the restored user or log in as another (admin) user to do the restore. The Migration Assistant also lets you decide what you restore: which data (in predetermined folders/categories, like Music, Pictures, Documents, etc), all of your Applications (or none), settings, and other files. Here’s what that looks like:

How are you planning to upgrade to Snow Leopard? Are you doing any special Mac prep beforehand? Tell us about it in the comments.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, can’t wait to get her paws on the Snow Leopard box. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

(Via Lifehacker.)

Soundboard is a Java based sound cueing program designed for theatrical use. It aims to be simple to use and maintain cross platform compatibility so that a sound designer who uses a Mac can build a show, and have it play back on the theatre’s Windows-based playback computer. Soundboard provides a cross platform and open source alternative to programs such as QLab and SFX. It is designed to be simple enough for high school students and community theatres to use, and yet robust enough to be a viable application at a regional theatre.

DOWNLOAD NOW (2.1 MB)“

(Via MacUpdate – Mac OS X.)

Camtasia Studio has long been the best solution for recording and editing screencasts. It is a wonderful tool for creating tutorials, among other things, by recording the activity on a computer screen. Camtasia users have long thumbed their noses at Mac users, as it has only been available for the Windows platform. Until now.

The folks at Techsmith, makers of Camtasia, have let it slip they are going to release a Mac version on August 25. I am one of the lucky folks who have been beta testing Camtasia for Mac for weeks and all I can tell you (due to NDA) is: get it. As soon as it’s available. It is a superb method to record screens and the editor makes it a breeze to pretty things up.

(Via jkOnTheRun.)

Modern Mac users have no excuses for losing data, and yet too many lose irreplaceable digital photographs, home movies, and personal and work documents, due to having a blasé attitude to backing up, or thinking hard drives are somehow immune from technical problems.

But the harsh reality is this: data you’re not backing-up at least once – and preferably twice – is data you don’t care about.

Although backing-up was perhaps once an arcane, laborious process, that’s far from the truth for today’s Mac user.

In Finder, you can burn any folder to disc via the relevant option in the File menu, or create a ‘burn folder’, drag content to it and within minutes have a back-up of important data to file away in a drawer. (iTunes and iPhoto also have user-friendly back-up options for making disc-based copies of media: File > Library > Back Up to Disc… and Share > Burn, respectively.)

Back in time

Users of Leopard also have access to Time Machine. This application can back-up your documents in the background, even keeping multiple copies of your work, so you can retrieve accidentally deleted items.

To get started with Time Machine, all you need to do is plug in an external hard drive – preferably one that has 50% more storage than your Mac’s internal drive. (1TB drives are now available for as little as £70, and so if you can afford a Mac, you can afford a back-up drive.) A dialog box will appear and once you click ‘Use as Backup Disk’, Time Machine will get on with backing-up.

Be mindful, though, that Time Machine is not a solution that creates a bootable back-up. In the event of a hard-drive failure, you’ll need your Mac OS X installation disc along with the back-up drive to restore your system. If you feel that’s too slow for recovery, applications exist to create a clone of your Mac’s drive, enabling you to get up and running extremely quickly.

Send in the clones

A hard-drive clone is an exact copy of your Mac’s internal drive. Should your Mac’s drive keel over, you can restart, hold Option, select the clone and boot from it. Your down-time is however long that process takes – perhaps a minute or two – although you’ll of course lack files created or amended since the last back-up. If your data is critical, we recommend backing up with Time Machine to one drive and also creating a clone, for the best of both worlds.

One final note: Macs happily read to and write from various hard drive formats, but most drives initially arrive in a format intended for Windows, which may not result in a bootable Mac drive when cloned to. Therefore, when you buy your new external hard drive, reformat it. Connect it to your Mac, launch Disk Utility, click the ‘Partition’ tab, select ‘1 Partition’ from ‘Volume Scheme’, and from the ‘Options’ button, select ‘GUID Partition Table’ if you’ve an Intel Mac or ‘Apple Partition Map’ if you’ve a PowerPC Mac.

MAC FRIENDLY: Reformat new hard drives if they come with a partition scheme that’s more suitable for Windows

The Mac OS X back-up top five

1. Time Machine (part of Mac OS X, £83)

If you’ve got Leopard, you should be using Time Machine. The app costs nothing, works fairly well, and can provide access to previously deleted documents.

2. SuperDuper! ($27.95)

Utterly dependable, SuperDuper! is a first-rate cloning solution that works on any Tiger or Leopard Mac system.

Read TechRadar’s SuperDuper! review.

>

3. Carbon Copy Cloner (donationware)

A strong rival to SuperDuper!, Carbon Copy Cloner is actually superior for scheduling and partial drive copies (such as cloning folder to folder), and has versions that work on Mac OS X 10.2+.

Read TechRadar’s Carbon Copy Cloner review.

4. Twin (about £42)

Newcomer Twin offers plenty of flexibility, enabling you to copy a disk or folder to a local volume, FTP or Amazon S3.

Read TechRadar’s Twin review.

5. Carbonite ($55 per year)

For the truly cautious, off-site back-up provides an extra layer of security. Carbonite is a top offering in this field, providing an automated and Mac-like experience.

Read TechRadar’s Carbonite review.

(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)